Sold $229.50, banked $203.20 — where did the rest go?

You sold $229.50 worth of candles in a month. Etsy deposited about $203. Somewhere, $26 went missing — and Etsy's screens make it genuinely hard to see where. This is one of the most common worries we hear from sellers, and most of the time the answer is boring: the payout was never supposed to equal the sales. It is your sales minus a stack of fees, adjusted for timing, refunds, and a few quiet charges that never appear next to the word "sale."

Here is the whole stack, and then a full month reconciled line by line so you can copy the method onto your own numbers.

Reason 1: The fee stack comes out before you see a cent

Every order is charged, on the total the buyer paid (item price plus the shipping you charged):

• Transaction fee: 6.5%
• Payment processing: 3% + $0.25 per order
• Listing fee: $0.20 per unit sold
• Offsite Ads fee: 15% (shops under $10,000 in the last 365 days) or 12% (over $10,000), capped at $100 per order — only on sales that came through Etsy's off-Etsy ads

Worked on one candle — price $18, shipping charged $4.95, buyer pays $22.95: transaction $1.49 + processing $0.94 + listing $0.20 = $2.63 in fees, 11.5% of what the buyer paid, gone before the money is ever yours. Sellers who estimate "Etsy takes about 6.5%" are missing almost half the stack.

Reason 2: Some of the money was never yours

When a buyer pays sales tax, Etsy collects it and remits it to the state itself. It passes through your sales figures but it is not your income and it does not arrive in your payout. Depending on how you're adding up "my sales," tax alone can explain a gap that looks like a missing payment but isn't.

Reason 3: Timing — sales and deposits run on different clocks

A sale is recorded the moment it happens. A deposit is not. Your balance has to settle, fees are netted against it, and deposits go out on the schedule set in your payment settings — so money from late-month sales routinely lands in the next month's deposits. Comparing "this month's sales" with "this month's deposits" compares two different sets of orders, every single month, forever.

Two related traps:

• Reserves and holds. Etsy can hold back a portion of a shop's funds for a period — this happens to many newer shops and after certain account changes. Held money isn't gone; it arrives later. But while it's held, your deposits run below your balance and the difference looks exactly like missing money.
• Negative balances roll forward. If refunds or fees in a slow week exceed your sales, Etsy carries the amount owed into the next period and nets it against future deposits.

Reason 4: Refunds come back out of the same pot

Refund a buyer and Etsy reverses the money out of your payment account — the item price and shipping you charged go back, and the processing fee is not fully returned to you. A month with two refunds can show deposits noticeably below what the (final, kept) sales suggest, especially if the refunds were for last month's orders: the sale counted in one month, the clawback in the next.

Listing renewals nibble too: every active listing renews at $0.20 every four months whether it sells or not, and those charges are paid from the same balance.

Reason 5: Your own records are two weeks behind

Since July 2025, Etsy's downloadable orders file has run about two weeks behind, permanently. If you reconcile your month using the CSV you downloaded from Etsy — or any tool that reads it, including ours — the last two weeks of orders simply aren't in your file yet. Your payout, meanwhile, is real-time. The mismatch isn't an error in either place; it's a lag in one of them. For reconciliation, Etsy's monthly statement (Shop Manager → Finances) is the authoritative record; treat the orders file as the month-end picture once it has caught up.

A worked month, reconciled

A candle shop sells 10 identical orders in a month: the $18 candle, $4.95 shipping charged, buyer pays $22.95 each. No refunds, no Offsite Ads sales — the clean version first.

What the shop sold

• Item sales: 10 × $18.00 = $180.00
• Shipping charged: 10 × $4.95 = $49.50
• Total buyers paid: $229.50

What Etsy took

• Transaction fees: 6.5% × $229.50 = $14.92
• Payment processing: 3% × $229.50 + (10 × $0.25) = $6.89 + $2.50 = $9.39
• Listing fees: 10 × $0.20 = $2.00
• Total fees: $26.30

What the shop should receive

• $229.50 − $26.30 = $203.20

That's the whole mystery: $229.50 of "sales," $203.20 of money — a $26.30 gap, every cent of it fees. (And the shop's actual profit is lower still: each candle costs $14.64 in materials, packaging, labour and its shipping label, so true profit on the month is $203.20 − $146.40 = $56.80. Payout, revenue, and profit are three different numbers, and only the last one is yours to spend.)

Now layer the real world back on: if two of those orders had been Offsite Ads sales, another $3.44 per such order disappears. If one deposit landed on the 2nd of next month, this month's deposits would read about $20 lower than $203.20 even though nothing is wrong. If you checked the orders file mid-month, two weeks of sales would be missing from it. Each effect is small and explainable — stacked together, they look like a leak.

Reconcile your own month in five steps

1. Pull the month's statement from Shop Manager → Finances — not the orders CSV.
2. Total what buyers paid (price + shipping charged). Don't include tax Etsy remitted.
3. Subtract the fee lines as the statement lists them: transaction, processing, listing, Offsite Ads, renewals.
4. Note refunds separately — match each clawback to the month the sale happened.
5. The remainder should match the balance Etsy owed you for the month; deposits may straddle the month boundary, so reconcile the balance, not the bank arrivals.

Where TrueCost fits

TrueCost's free calculator reproduces the fee stack on a single sale so you can check any one order against its statement line. The workspace reads your orders file and shows real profit per product — with the two-week lag labelled on the page, so you never mistake a not-yet-complete file for a finished month.

Keep reading

• The ad fee Etsy charges without asking — how Offsite Ads work, when the $100 cap saves you real money, and the opt-out rules.
• A 20% sale is not a 20% pay cut — it's worse — the fee-by-fee math on our sample candle.

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