The ad fee Etsy charges without asking

Offsite Ads are the fee Etsy sellers fear most, and the fear is understandable: a sale you did nothing to promote arrives, and Etsy takes an extra 12–15% of it. Sellers call it a profit vampire, and on a thin-margin product they are not wrong.

But there is one part of the fee almost nobody includes when they do the math by hand or in a spreadsheet: the Offsite Ads fee is capped at $100 per order. Price a big order without the cap and you will overstate the fee — sometimes by enough to talk yourself out of a good product. This guide walks through how the fee really works, with the numbers done in the open.

How an Offsite Ads fee happens

Etsy advertises listings off Etsy — on search engines, social media, and partner sites. If a buyer clicks one of those ads and then buys from your shop within 30 days, that order carries an Offsite Ads fee. You don't choose which listings get advertised, and you can't tell in advance which sales will be charged. The fee is charged per order, on everything the buyer paid — the item price plus the shipping you charged.

The two rates, and who can opt out

• 15% — if your shop made under $10,000 in the previous 365 days. At this level you can opt out of Offsite Ads entirely in your shop settings.
• 12% — if your shop made $10,000 or more in the previous 365 days. At this level participation is mandatory; there is no opt-out.

The rate is set by your shop's last-365-days revenue, not by the size of the order in front of you.

The fee on an ordinary sale

Take a vanilla soy candle: price $18, shipping charged $4.95, so the buyer pays $22.95. Its ordinary fees are $2.63 (6.5% transaction $1.49 + 3% + $0.25 processing $0.94 + $0.20 listing). With materials, packaging, labour and the shipping label counted, it makes $5.68 profit on a normal sale.

If that same order came through an Offsite Ad at 15%:

• Offsite Ads fee: 15% × $22.95 = $3.44
• Profit: $5.68 − $3.44 = $2.24

One checkbox you never ticked took more than half the profit. That is the version of this fee sellers know, and on small orders the cap changes nothing — which is exactly why most sellers forget the cap exists.

The cap: where it kicks in

The fee stops growing at $100 per order. The order size where that starts to matter:

• At 15%: $100 ÷ 0.15 = $666.67. Above a ~$667 order total, you pay $100, not 15%.
• At 12%: $100 ÷ 0.12 = $833.33. Above a ~$833 order total, you pay $100, not 12%.

In between, the cap quietly trims the fee. An $800 order at 15% calculates to $120 — but the fee charged is $100, a $20 saving your spreadsheet probably didn't give you. (At 12%, an $800 order is $96, still under the cap, so nothing changes.)

A big-ticket order, worked in full

Say you sell furniture or large artwork: an item at $900 with $100 shipping charged — a $1,000 order. It cost you $400 in materials and labour, and the shipping label actually costs you $120. Your shop is on the 15% rate.

Ordinary Etsy fees:

• Transaction fee: 6.5% × $1,000 = $65.00
• Payment processing: 3% × $1,000 + $0.25 = $30.25
• Listing fee: $0.20
• Total ordinary fees: $95.45

Offsite Ads fee:

• Uncapped math: 15% × $1,000 = $150.00
• With the $100 cap applied: $100.00 — the cap just saved you $50

What you actually keep:

• $1,000 − $95.45 − $100 (Offsite Ads) − $400 (costs) − $120 (label) = $284.55 profit

Without applying the cap you would have forecast $234.55 — $50 of fear that was never real. Without any Offsite Ads fee the same order makes $384.55, so the fee still hurts; it just hurts $50 less than the raw percentage says.

How to tell if an order was an Offsite Ads sale

You can't know in advance, but you can always know afterwards:

• In Shop Manager → Finances, your payment account activity and your monthly statement show an Offsite Ads fee line tied to the specific order when one was charged. Search the statement for the order and look for that line next to the usual transaction and processing fees.
• If an order's fees look mysteriously larger than your normal 6.5% + 3% + $0.25 + $0.20, an Offsite Ads fee is the first thing to check.
• When you reconcile a month, separate your Offsite Ads orders from your ordinary ones. Averaging them together hides which products survive an ad fee and which don't — and that is a per-product question, as the candle above shows ($5.68 becomes $2.24).

What this means for your prices

• Small orders: price as if the fee can happen, because it can, at any time, with no warning. If a product only works when no Offsite Ads fee lands, it doesn't work.
• Large orders: apply the cap in your math. Above ~$667 (at 15%) every extra dollar of price is not losing another 15 cents to this fee — big-ticket items are less exposed, dollar for dollar, than the headline rate suggests.
• Opting out (under $10k): it's a real choice, not an obvious one. Opting out removes the fee and also removes the ad traffic. The honest test is per product: if most of your range keeps a healthy margin after a 15% fee, the ads may be buying you sales you'd never have had. If one ad fee erases a product's profit, that product — not the whole programme — is the problem.

Check your own numbers

Our free Etsy fee calculator counts the full fee stack — transaction, processing, listing, and Offsite Ads at either rate — on any price you type in, no sign-up needed. In the TrueCost workspace, the same engine grades every product in your orders file, so you can see which products still make money on the sales where Etsy charged you for the ad.

Keep reading

• Sold $229.50, banked $203.20 — where the rest of your Etsy money went: the fee stack, timing and refunds behind the gap, reconciled line by line.
• A 20% sale is not a 20% pay cut — it's worse — why a 20% discount took 57% of our sample candle's profit.

Fee rates checked against Etsy's published schedule, October 29, 2026. US rates; always confirm against Etsy's own Fees & Payments Policy.