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Etsy fees for 3D print sellers: what Etsy takes from a sale

By an Etsy seller with 3,000+ sales

On a US Etsy sale there are four fees: a 6.5% transaction fee on the item and its shipping, 3% plus $0.25 for payment processing, a $0.20 listing fee, and a 12% or 15% Offsite Ads fee on orders Etsy’s ads brought in. A $24 print with $4.50 shipping pays $3.16 in fees, or $7.44 with an ad.

By Sean, who runs Opus Design Company on Etsy: five years, 3,000+ sales. Last revised October 2, 2026.

To know your real profit on an Etsy sale, take what the buyer paid, subtract those fees as they appear in your payment account (not as a calculator predicts them), subtract the shipping label, and subtract what the print cost to make. This page walks through each fee, an order with shipping, and why the ledger and a calculator often disagree.

What fees does Etsy charge on a sale?

Etsy charges four fees on a US sale: transaction, payment processing, listing and, on some orders, Offsite Ads. The percentages below are the ones Etsy publishes for US sellers, as of the last revision of this page. Etsy changes them from time to time, so treat the numbers as an example and check Etsy’s fee policy before relying on them.

Transaction fee

6.5% of the order total, and the total includes what the buyer paid for shipping and gift wrap, not just the item. The transaction fee is the one 3D print sellers most often understate, because a heavy print with $6 of shipping pays the fee on the $6 too.

Payment processing

3% of the total plus $0.25 per order for US sellers, charged for taking the buyer’s payment. The rate differs by country, which matters if your shop is not in the US.

Listing fee

$0.20 to list an item, charged again when it sells (the listing renews), and again if it sits unsold for four months. For a made-to-order product that sells steadily it is $0.20 per sale; for a slow one it is $0.20 every four months whether it sold or not.

Offsite Ads

Etsy advertises listings on outside platforms and charges 12% or 15% of the order, depending on the shop’s revenue, on orders it attributes to those ads, with a cap per order. Small shops can opt out; above a revenue level it is mandatory. The Offsite Ads fee only lands on some orders, which is exactly why estimating it is hard: a calculator either applies it to everything or to nothing, and the ledger applies it to the specific orders that came through an ad.

Is buyer-paid shipping income?

No. When a buyer pays $4.50 for shipping, that $4.50 shows up in your revenue and the transaction and processing fees are charged on it. Then you buy a label. If the label is $4.95, shipping was a small loss on that order; if you offer free shipping, the whole label comes out of the item price. Shipping charged to the buyer is at best a pass-through. Keep it out of “profit” and keep the label cost in “costs.”

One order, all the way through

A $24 print, $4.50 buyer-paid shipping, $28.50 paid.

Subtract the $4.95 label and a $3.40 cost to make and pack, and this $24 order nets $16.99 without the ad and $12.71 with it. Same listing, same buyer, a $4.28 difference you cannot see from the dashboard total. The profit page builds this order line by line from the cost side.

Why does a fee calculator differ from what Etsy actually takes?

Because a fee calculator, including the free one on this site, applies the published rates to a price, and the ledger diverges from the rate card in ways no formula captures: Offsite Ads lands on some orders and not others, coupons change the base the percentage is taken on, processing rates vary by country, regulatory operating fees appear in some regions, and refunds reverse fees partially. A calculator is the right tool for deciding what to charge and the wrong one for knowing what you made. Why Etsy takes more than the rate card says goes through five of these with examples and a ten-minute check you can run on your own shop.

Where do you find the fees Etsy actually charged?

In Shop Manager, under Finances, then Payment account: each order shows its fee lines, and a monthly statement can be downloaded as a CSV. For one order it is a minute. For a month of orders it is the chore that makes sellers give up and go back to guessing, which is why this app exists.

SpoolPilot connects to an Etsy shop read-only and reads the fee entries Etsy actually charged on each synced order (transaction, processing, listing, Offsite Ads) directly from the payment ledger, through Etsy’s API (the ledger entries it documents). Nothing on that screen is computed from a rate card. Each order shows its fees itemized against what the buyer paid, with buyer-paid shipping treated as a pass-through and your label and cost of goods subtracted. When an order’s money doesn’t reconcile to Etsy’s total, the app labels the figure an estimate instead of pretending. The free tier reads real fees on up to ten orders a month; Pro reads them on every order.

Reading a shop’s payment ledger through the Etsy API requires Etsy’s approval, which Etsy grants after reviewing what an app does and how it handles a seller’s data. SpoolPilot went through that review and holds commercial API access. That is the difference between reading the fee lines Etsy posted for an order and estimating them from the published rate card, which is what most tools that promise “real profit” actually do. (The approval covers API access; Etsy does not endorse or certify the app.)

Common mistakes

• Applying the transaction fee to the item only and forgetting the shipping.
• Assuming Offsite Ads never applies, or applying it to every order.
• Counting shipping charged to the buyer as revenue you keep.
• Pricing from the rate card and never checking the ledger, then wondering why the deposit is smaller than the spreadsheet.
• Forgetting the listing renews on every sale and on unsold listings every four months.

Can you track Etsy fees by hand?

Yes, with a handful of orders a month: open the payment account, copy the fee lines into a sheet next to each order’s cost, and you have real profit. Do it at least once regardless; it is the fastest education in what Etsy actually costs. Copying fees by hand stops being sustainable when the copying takes longer than the printing, which for most shops is somewhere around twenty or thirty orders a month. Past that, either the spreadsheet drifts back to estimates or something reads the ledger for you. What a 3D printing business needs to track lays out the software options and puts fees in context with the other costs.

More: why Etsy takes more than the rate card says · real profit on a print · how to price your prints · free Etsy fee calculator · what software a 3D printing business needs