Moving from Etsy to your own store
On a $50 order the visible fees are about 10%. Once Offsite Ads becomes mandatory, the same order can cost you over 22%. Both numbers matter, and they lead to different decisions.
Sellers usually start this conversation with a number they half-remember from a forum. It is worth replacing it with the actual stack, because the decision changes depending on which fees apply to you. Etsy charges $0.20 per listing, 6.5% on the transaction, and roughly 3% plus $0.25 for payment processing in the US. That is the part everyone knows. The part that reshapes the arithmetic is Offsite Ads, which stops being optional once your shop passes $10,000 in a rolling twelve months — and at that point you are enrolled permanently, with no opt-out.
The fee stack on a $50 order, itemized
Take a $50 sale and count what leaves. The listing fee is $0.20. The transaction fee at 6.5% is $3.25. Payment processing at roughly 3% plus $0.25 comes to $1.75. That totals $5.20, or 10.4% of the order — high, but survivable, and roughly what a seller expects. Now add an Offsite Ads attribution at the 12% rate: another $6.00, taking the total to $11.20 and the effective rate to 22.4%. Your own blended rate depends on how many orders carry that attribution, so calculate it from the fee report rather than applying 22.4% to every sale.
- Listing: $0.20 per listing
- Transaction: 6.5%
- Payment processing (US): about 3% + $0.25
- Offsite Ads: 12% if you passed $10,000 in twelve months, 15% if you have not
Offsite Ads becomes compulsory, and that is the real trigger
Below $10,000 in rolling twelve-month revenue the Offsite Ads rate is 15% and you can opt out. Cross $10,000 and enrolment becomes automatic and permanent, at 12%. Etsy caps this advertising fee at $100 per attributed order, so the percentage stops scaling once the fee reaches that amount. Read that ordering carefully — growing past the threshold buys a lower rate on a fee you can no longer decline, which is why the sellers who most want to leave are usually the ones doing well.
Pattern is not the exit people think it is
Pattern costs $15 a month after a 30-day trial. It adds no extra listing fee, and sales through the site still carry Etsy Payments processing. You can connect a domain you already own, or register one through Etsy's partner, so the domain itself is not the limitation. The tighter dependency is operational: inventory stays synced through Shop Manager, Pattern orders remain in Etsy's order system, and the site does not appear in Etsy search. If your goal is a separate branded site for traffic you already own, Pattern is a cheaper answer than a migration. If your goal is to move commerce operations and customer acquisition outside Etsy, it does not do that.
The 30-day window nobody reads carefully
The Offsite Ads fee attaches when a shopper clicks an Etsy ad on Google, Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest and buys from you within thirty days. That window is longer than sellers assume, so the fee lands on orders that felt entirely organic — someone who saw an ad three weeks ago, forgot it, then came back through search. Which makes your own effective rate impossible to estimate from memory. Pull the twelve-month fee report and calculate the real blended percentage; sellers are wrong about this number in both directions.
Search is the capability you are actually replacing
The fees buy something, and it is not the storefront software. It is that Etsy shoppers arrive already intending to buy handmade or vintage goods, and Etsy's internal search puts your listing in front of them. Replacing that is the whole project and it is not a technical task. A new store with no traffic converts nothing regardless of how fast it loads. Before migrating, you need a plausible answer to where the first thousand visitors come from — an email list, an Instagram following, existing repeat customers, or a budget for paid acquisition. If the honest answer is "Etsy search", the migration is premature and no storefront will fix it.
Closing the shop is the expensive mistake
The version of this that fails is the seller who launches a store and shuts the Etsy shop the same month. The version that works keeps both open for at least two quarters, uses Etsy for discovery and the owned store for repeat purchases, and moves the highest-margin products across first. Include a card in every Etsy shipment pointing to your own site — not a discount code that violates Etsy's terms about diverting sales, but your brand, your domain, and a reason to come back directly. Repeat customers are the ones you can move; first-time buyers who found you through Etsy search generally cannot be moved, and trying is how sellers lose the marketplace listing they depended on.
What actually transfers out of an Etsy shop
Less than sellers expect, and this shapes the timeline. Listings export as CSV covering titles, descriptions, prices and tags, so the catalog moves acceptably. Photographs have to be downloaded separately and are often at Etsy's display resolution rather than the original. Reviews do not transfer at all, which is the single largest loss for an established shop — a five-year review history is social proof that cannot be recreated, and the new store starts at zero. Customer email addresses are available in your order records for legitimate order-related purposes, and marketing to them requires consent you have to collect properly rather than assume.
- Transfers: listing text, prices, tags, order records
- Needs manual work: product photography at original resolution
- Never transfers: reviews, shop rating, Etsy search ranking
- Needs consent collected properly: email marketing to past buyers
When you should stay on Etsy
Under $10,000 in twelve months you can still opt out of Offsite Ads, which puts your effective rate near 10%. That is competitive with what you would pay to acquire the same customers yourself, so leaving buys you very little. If Etsy search is your only meaningful traffic source with no email list and no social following, building a store first and an audience second gets the order wrong. And if you sell fewer than about twenty orders a month, the fixed operating cost of your own store — hosting, payment gateway, maintenance — will consume most of the fee saving. Grow the audience on Etsy's traffic, then leave with it.
Frequently asked questions
What does Etsy actually take per sale?
On a $50 order: $0.20 listing, 6.5% transaction ($3.25), and about 3% + $0.25 processing ($1.75) — around 10.4%. Add an Offsite Ads attribution at 12% and the same order costs 22.4%.
Can we opt out of Offsite Ads?
Only below $10,000 in rolling twelve-month revenue, where the rate is 15%. Once you cross $10,000, enrolment is automatic and permanent at 12%, with no opt-out available.
Is Etsy Pattern a substitute for our own store?
It can be, if you only need a branded site for traffic you already own. Pattern costs $15 a month after its trial, accepts a custom domain and adds no extra listing fee, but inventory and orders still run through Etsy's systems and the site gets no Etsy search exposure.
Do our reviews come with us?
No, and for an established shop this is the largest single loss. A years-long review history cannot be recreated, so the new store starts at zero — which is a strong argument for running both in parallel rather than closing the Etsy shop.
Marketplace to your own store
Honest arithmetic of leaving Etsy or Amazon: what marketplace fees really buy, what your own traffic costs, and how to move without losing the sales you have.
Cost to build a store
Three honest routes to a first online store, the line items nobody quotes you, and the running costs that decide whether year two is affordable.
Email and retention
Turn first orders into repeat ones: the email flows worth building, list building that is not a popup, segmentation by behaviour, and deliverability basics.
See how many sales your store is losing
Start with a free speed audit. You'll get your store's real numbers and an honest recommendation — even if it's "you don't need us".