The fee stack Etsy does not put on the homepage
Etsy's published fees look small in isolation: $0.20 per listing renewal, 6.5% transaction fee, roughly 3% + $0.25 payment processing in the US, and an offsite-ads fee of 12–15% on orders Etsy attributes to its ads. A shop doing $24 items with 40 orders a month and 30 active listings can easily see $80–$120/month in platform take before you pay for materials or your time.
The offsite-ads fee catches sellers by surprise. Etsy runs ads that bring buyers back to Etsy — if the order is attributed to those ads, the fee applies even when the buyer already knew your shop. For shops under roughly $10k/year in Etsy revenue, the mandatory rate has been 15% on attributed sales.
Use the free Etsy fee calculator on designedbyanthony.online to plug in your real averages. The goal is not to shame Etsy — it is to see the shape of the math so you can decide whether a flat $12/mo store on your own domain makes sense at your volume.
Who owns the customer when you sell on Etsy
On Etsy, the buyer relationship is mediated by the platform. You can message buyers through Etsy, but you are not supposed to drive them off-platform for repeat orders. Your shop URL is a subdirectory of etsy.com. Your brand builds equity for Etsy's domain, not yours.
A Maker Store on your own domain flips that. Checkout can still run through Stripe (payment processing only — no platform skim from us). You collect emails for launches, restocks, and custom-order follow-ups. When a customer Googles your business name next year, they land on your site — not a marketplace search results page where competitors appear in the sidebar.
That does not mean you should leave Etsy tomorrow. Many makers run both: Etsy for discovery, owned store for repeat buyers and higher-margin custom work. The comparison is about where you want margin and loyalty to compound.
What the Maker Store actually includes (and what it does not)
The Maker Store is intentionally capped so it stays affordable: up to 50 products, a proven template layout in your palette, flat-rate shipping configured once, email support, SSL, and fast Cloudflare hosting for $12/mo after a $149 setup. We build it — you are not picking a Shopify theme at midnight.
What it is not: a full SEO retainer, paid-ads management, unlimited catalog, or bespoke design. Those are upgrade paths when revenue justifies them. The honest pitch is a clean little store that stops the fee bleed and starts your owned customer list.
If you outgrow 50 products or need content marketing, you upgrade to a full custom site — you keep the domain and the buyers you already earned.
