Are Etsy Offsite Ads worth it?

Offsite Ads are worth it when an order still pays you properly after the fee comes off, and the only honest way to know is to do the maths on a real order, all the way down. For some shops the answer is genuinely yes. For plenty of handmade shops it's no, and you tend to find out through the notification rather than a spreadsheet.

Because you know that feeling. The sale notification lands and for about 10 seconds it's the best sound in the world, and then you open the order and there's a fee sitting on it that you didn't put there, and the money that actually reaches you is smaller than the number you'd already spent in your head. I sold quilts and bags on Etsy for years, and the gap between those two numbers, the sale I celebrated and the sale I got paid for, is the whole of this question.

What are Etsy Offsite Ads and how does the fee work?

Etsy takes your listings and advertises them off Etsy, on search engines and social media and shopping sites, places most of us could never afford to advertise on our own. When a shopper clicks one of those ads and then buys from you, Etsy takes a percentage of that order as an advertising fee, on top of the transaction and payment fees you're already paying. If the sale didn't come through one of those ads, the fee never appears, which is genuinely a fairer setup than paying for clicks that go nowhere.

The 2 details that matter are these. Smaller shops can turn Offsite Ads off, but once your revenue passes a certain threshold you're enrolled whether you like it or not, and you stay enrolled. And the percentage you pay depends on which side of that threshold you sit, with the bigger shops paying the lower rate.

I'm deliberately not putting the exact percentages or the threshold figure in this post, because Etsy changes these things, and a blog post with an out-of-date number in it is worse than no number at all. The current rates are on Etsy's own fees page and they're worth 5 minutes of your time. While you're there, check how long after the click a sale still counts as an ad sale, because that window catches people out, and it means an order can carry the fee days after the ad was clicked.

Your payment account shows you exactly which orders carried the fee, so none of this is hidden. It's just rarely looked at properly.

How do I work out if Offsite Ads are worth it for my shop?

You take a real order that came through an ad and you do the maths on it like you mean it.

Start with what the customer paid. Take off the Offsite Ads fee, then the transaction fee, the payment processing fee, the listing fee, the postage if you subsidise it. Then take off your materials. Then, and this is the step almost everyone skips, take off your time at an hourly rate you could say out loud without wincing. Whatever is left is what that sale actually paid you for making the thing and running the shop.

Do it across a handful of ad orders from different parts of your range, because the answer is rarely the same shop-wide, and 1 order proves nothing either way. A £60 quilt might swallow the fee and still pay you decently. A £4.50 pair of earrings with 40 minutes of work in them might go underwater the moment the fee lands.

If a whole category of your products stops working once an ad fee touches it, that is real information about your pricing as much as about the ads. A price with no room in it for the cost of being found was always too tight, and the ad fee just made it visible. Working backwards from what the market actually pays is how you build that room in from the beginning, and I've written up how to price handmade products that way if your maths keeps coming out ugly.

Should I opt out of Offsite Ads if I can?

If the maths says an ad sale still pays you fairly, keep them running. Real orders from people who would never have found you otherwise are nothing to sniff at, and Etsy carrying the risk of the ad spend is a better arrangement than you carrying it yourself.

But I think the opt-out argument is quietly about something bigger than the fee.

Every sale to a stranger costs something to acquire. When it's an Offsite Ad the cost is printed on the order, which is exactly why it stings. The Etsy search sale has an acquisition cost too, it's just spread out where you can't see it, across all the other fees and the hours you pour into titles and tags hoping the algorithm looks your way that week. Somebody always pays for the introduction. The only real difference is whether the bill is visible.

And once I saw that, the fee itself bothered me less than the arrangement underneath it. A platform can decide, on my behalf, to spend a slice of my sale finding me a stranger, and above a certain size I don't even get a say in it. That's the actual thing being argued about in every forum thread on opting out, how you get in front of people and who controls it.

But have you considered which of your sales cost nothing to acquire? The customer who bought before and came back. The person on your email list who opened your email because she already knew you and wanted to know what was next. No ad fee and no algorithm sitting in the middle, because the introduction already happened.

How do I get sales with no ad fee attached at all?

The best weekend I ever had as a maker was a Christmas launch that did £12,000, and there was no advertising fee on a single one of those orders. Not through cleverness, just because nobody buying needed finding. They were already on my list and already waiting.

I'll give you the cost that came with it, because a number like that without one is guru-bait. I took far more orders than I could physically pack. I ended up with everyone I could find packing boxes alongside my staff to get them out of the door, and the ceiling I hit that weekend was never how much I could make, it was how much I could make, photograph, pack and post while the rest of my life carried on happening. Which is its own argument for knowing your numbers before the volume arrives.

That weekend cost me plenty, mind. 6 weeks of showing up, photographing fabric when I would rather have been sewing it, writing to my list even on the days nothing much had happened. Acquisition is never free. I'd just paid the cost in work, up front, to people who already cared, instead of paying it as a percentage to a platform for introducing me to someone who will have forgotten my shop name by Tuesday.

If you want sales like that, the starting point is smaller than you'd think, and it's the Handmade Launch List, free, which leaves you with a way for the people who already like your work to say so. Every buyer who arrives through it turned up without a finder's fee attached.

Every sale to a stranger has a finder's fee on it somewhere. The only sales that don't are the ones where the buyer already knew the way back to you