What percentage does Etsy charge for offsite ads?

15% of the order total, including shipping, for most sellers. It drops to 12% once trailing 365-day sales reach $10,000, and it is capped at $100 per order. Rates checked 2026-11-02.

Do I pay the offsite ads fee on every order?

No. It applies only to orders Etsy attributes to its offsite channels, such as external search and social placements. Orders from buyers who arrive through Etsy search, a direct link or a return visit are not covered.

Is the 12% rate something I can choose?

No. The 12% rate applies when your trailing 365-day sales are $10,000 or more; you cannot opt into it order by order, and it does not replace the 15% on any particular sale.

Are offsite ads the same as Etsy Ads?

No. Etsy Ads is the on-site program where you set a daily budget and pay per click for placements inside Etsy search. Offsite ads are a commission on orders from external channels, with no budget, bid or campaign for you to manage.

Does the offsite ads fee apply to discounted orders?

The fee is calculated on the order total the buyer actually pays, so a discounted offsite-attributed order is charged on the discounted amount. The percentage does not change; the base it is applied to shrinks with your discount.

Are Etsy Offsite Ads Worth It?

Offsite ads are the most argued-about line item in Etsy fees, and the argument usually starts from two different facts. The fee is real: 15% of any order that arrives through an external channel, 12% once your trailing 365-day sales pass $10,000, capped at $100 per order. The annoyance is real too: you cannot pick which orders are covered, and the fee applies after any discount you have offered. But the missing piece in most debates is that the fee is commission, not budget — you are not buying an ad, you are paying for an order that landed. This guide works the fee through a real order, identifies which sales are covered, and lays out the seller situations where the math tips each way.

What offsite ads actually are

Etsy runs placements for your shop on channels outside its own site, without asking you for an ad budget. You do not set a daily spend, bid on keywords or design the creative. Etsy decides when to show your listing on external search and social channels, and when a buyer who saw one of those placements purchases, the order is attributed to the channel and the offsite ads fee applies.

That attribution model is the reason sellers feel ambivalent about the program. The fee is not a line you switch on or off in the normal flow of a sale: it is attached to the order, not to a campaign. What you can do is understand exactly which orders it touches and what it costs on each of them, which is what the rest of this guide does.

It is also worth separating offsite ads from Etsy Ads, the on-site program where you pay per click for placements inside Etsy search. Those are two different products with two different fee structures, and they are often confused. This guide covers only the offsite commission.

The fee structure: 15%, 12%, and a $100 cap

The standard rate is 15% of the order total, and the order total includes the item price, the shipping you charged and gift wrap — not just the item. If your trailing 365-day sales are $10,000 or more, the rate drops to 12%. Either way, the fee is capped at $100 per order, so a single large order never pays more than that.

Three properties of the fee matter more than the headline percentage. First, it is charged on shipping as well as the item, the same base as the 6.5% transaction fee. Second, it is applied after any discount you offered, so a heavy sale plus an offsite-attributed order compounds: the 15% is taken from the discounted total. Third, the 12% tier is not a choice or a plan you sign up for — it follows from your sales history over the previous 365 days.

The rates in this section are checked 2026-11-02 and match the configuration our calculators use.

Worked example: what 15% does to a real order

Take a $25 item with $4 shipping sold to a US buyer, a typical small-sale order. Without an offsite ad, the fees are $0.20 listing, $1.89 transaction (6.5% of $29), $1.12 payment processing (3% of $29 plus $0.25), for $3.21 in total and $25.79 net — about 89 cents kept per dollar.

The same order, attributed to an offsite ad, adds 15% of $29: $4.35. Total fees become $7.56 and the net drops to $21.44, or about 74 cents per dollar. The single ad line item is worth more than the listing, transaction and payment fees combined.

At the 12% high-volume rate the same order pays $3.48 in offsite fees instead of $4.35, total fees are $6.69 and the net is $22.31. The three-point saving is real, but it is the difference between $22.31 and $21.44 on a $29 order — meaningful at scale, not a transformation on a single sale.

Which orders are covered

The fee applies to orders that arrive through Etsy's offsite channels: placements on external search engines and on social channels. It does not apply to a buyer who finds your shop inside Etsy — through Etsy search, a direct link, a bookmark or a return visit.

You cannot see, in advance, which of your orders will be attributed. The attribution is decided by the channel the buyer came through, and some orders that look organic to you — a buyer who typed your shop name into an external search engine, for instance — are still offsite. That is the part that makes the fee feel arbitrary: it is not random, but it is not visible line by line, so the honest way to budget for it is as a rate on a share of your orders, not as a per-order choice.

Practically, check the breakdown in your Etsy financials: offsite ad orders are itemised, so over 30 to 60 days you can measure what share of your orders actually carry the fee. The share varies a lot by category and by how search-driven your traffic is; the share you measure is the one your price should be built on.

Is the fee buying you something?

The honest framing is that the fee is not buying an impression — it is commission on an order that happened. The question is not whether the fee is worth the ad spend, but whether you would have made these orders anyway. If a buyer would have typed your shop name into an external search engine and come back regardless, the 15% is a pure cost on revenue you already owned.

The counter-case is just as real: for many sellers, a meaningful share of external-search traffic goes to whichever seller's listings Etsy chooses to show. Accepting offsite ads means Etsy can still show your listing in that traffic; a seller who is absent from the channel cedes it to competitors. For products that buyers search for by category rather than by shop name, that traffic is often the difference between steady orders and slow ones.

Neither case settles from the fee schedule alone. It settles from your own data: how many orders arrive via offsite channels, and what your conversion looks like when you compare periods or products. The calculator linked below makes the arithmetic of any scenario explicit for your own prices.

The $100 cap, and who it actually helps

Because the fee is capped at $100 per order, the effective rate falls as order size grows: a flat 15% up to about $667 of order total, and less above it. A $1,000 offsite order pays $100 — 10% — not $150. A $2,000 order pays the same $100, which is 5%.

That makes the cap the quiet friend of high-average-order sellers. If your typical order is $300, the standard rate is $45; at $500 it is $75; beyond about $667 it never grows again. Low-ticket sellers get no such mercy: on a $20 order the fee is $3, and the fixed $0.25 payment fee alone is another 1.25% of the order. The cap is a structural advantage that only shows up in the math for larger orders.

Three situations, three answers

Use the share of your orders that carry the fee, and your average order value, to find which of these you are:

High average order value, $150 and above: the cap starts doing work and the effective rate can sit well below 15%. The fee is often an acceptable cost of search visibility.
Strong margins, steady external search traffic, a product buyers search for by category: the orders tend to be incremental, and the 15% is the price of a channel you cannot run yourself.
Low average order value under about $30, thin margins, or heavy discounting: the fee lands on an already-thin base, and stacking discounts on top makes covered orders the least profitable sales in your shop. Model this before assuming it is fine.
Buyers who already know you: if your traffic arrives through direct channels, social profiles you control or a mailing list, the offsite channel is doing little for you, and the orders that do get attributed are closer to a tax on revenue you earned yourself.

How to decide with your own numbers

Pull 30 to 60 days of order data and measure two things: the share of orders with an offsite ad line item, and your average order value. Then run the same order through the calculator three ways — without the fee, at 15%, and at 12% — and compare the net you keep.

The decision that follows is rarely whether to keep or drop the program, because that is not usually a decision you make. It is a pricing question: if offsite orders are 20% of your volume, your sustainable price is the one where 15% on that quarter still leaves the margin you need. If they are 50%, the sharper question is whether the channel is actually incremental for you at all. The fee is fixed by Etsy; the only variable you control is the number the fee is applied to.