Most Etsy fees are on every sale. The Offsite Ads fee only lands on some sales — but when it lands, it is the biggest fee of all, and can turn a good sale into a thin one.
Offsite Ads are ads Etsy places for your products on other sites, like search engines and social media. You do not write them and you do not choose the budget. You pay only when a sale follows from one of those ads.
The two rates, and the $10,000 rule
There are two rates. Which one you pay depends on how much your shop took in the last 365 days — that is, the last year of selling, counted back from today.
- If your shop took under $10,000 in the last 365 days, the fee is 15%, and you can opt out of Offsite Ads.
- If your shop took $10,000 or more in the last 365 days, the fee is 12%, and you cannot opt out.
Read that again, because it surprises people: the bigger shops pay the lower rate, but they lose the choice. Smaller shops pay more per sale, but they can leave.
The fee is charged on the order total including shipping. Not just the item. Shipping counts here too.
The 30-day window
You do not pay this fee just because a buyer saw an ad once. The rule is about clicking and timing.
If a buyer clicks an Offsite Ad for your product and then buys from your shop within 30 days of that click, the sale counts as an ad sale, and the fee is charged. The buyer does not have to buy the exact item from the ad, and they do not have to buy on the same day. A click near the start of the month can still bring a fee on a sale near the end of it.
That is why the fee can feel random. A sale looks ordinary, but behind it there was a click weeks earlier that you never saw.
A worked example
Say a buyer buys an item for $40 and pays $5 shipping. The order total is $45.
- For a shop under the $10,000 line: 15% of $45 is $6.75.
- For a shop at $10,000 or more: 12% of $45 is $5.40.
That fee is on top of all the normal fees — the transaction fee, payment processing, and the listing fee still apply to the same sale. An ad sale is not a sale with one fee swapped for another. It is a sale with an extra, large fee added.
This is why pricing only for the ordinary sale is risky. A price that keeps you comfortable on a normal sale can leave you with very little on the same item when it sells through an ad.
The $100 cap
There is a limit: the Offsite Ads fee is capped at $100 per order. No matter how large the order, this one fee will not go above $100.
The cap only starts to matter on large orders. At the 15% rate, 15% reaches $100 on an order of about $667. At the 12% rate, 12% reaches $100 on an order of about $833. Below those amounts, you simply pay the percentage. For most solo makers selling items in the $20 to $100 range, the cap will never touch you — the full percentage is what you pay.
The honest math of opting out
If your shop is under $10,000, you can opt out. Should you?
Opting out stops the fee. It also stops the ads. Those are the same decision, and you cannot have one without the other.
Think of it in plain numbers. Say, for example, that in a month, 10 of your sales came through Offsite Ads, and you paid an average of $6 in ads fees on each. Opting out saves you about $60 in fees. But if those buyers would not have found you otherwise, you also lose those 10 sales entirely — not just the fees, the whole sales, including the money you would have kept from them after fees.
Opting out makes the most sense when the fee is wiping out nearly everything you keep on a product, so the ad sales were barely worth having. It makes the least sense when you still keep a fair amount on ad sales and those sales would not happen any other way.
If you are at $10,000 or more, there is no opt-out to weigh. Your only lever is price: your prices have to be set so that a sale still works for you after a 12% ads fee, because some of your sales will carry it and you cannot stop them.
What to do with this
Work out what you keep on your main products twice: once as an ordinary sale, and once as an ad sale. If the ad-sale number is near zero or below it, that product has a problem no amount of hoping will fix. Either the price rises, the costs come down, or — if you are under the line — you make a clear-eyed choice about opting out.
If you want to run both versions of that math quickly, the free pricing calculator on mykeptmoney.com shows what you keep on the same price with and without an Offsite Ads fee.