Etsy Offsite Ads fees, and the $100 cap nobody applies

Updated September 14, 2026 · 5 min read · Sources checked on publication

Offsite Ads is the largest fee Etsy charges and the only one you cannot predict from the listing. It applies to a minority of orders, at a rate more than double everything else combined, and it is capped — a detail that matters enormously if you sell anything expensive, and that most fee calculators leave out entirely.

How the fee works

Etsy advertises listings on Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and elsewhere, and pays for those ads itself. You are charged only when one of them works: a buyer clicks an ad and then orders from your shop within 30 days. The click does not have to be on the item they eventually buy.

• 15% of the order total if your shop has made under $10,000 in the last 365 days.
• 12% once you pass $10,000 — and at that point participation becomes mandatory and the off switch disappears.
• $100 maximum per order, whatever the order was worth.

The trade the threshold represents is worth naming plainly: you lose the ability to opt out, and you get a 3-point discount on a fee you can no longer refuse.

What it costs on an ordinary order

An attributed order costs roughly two and a half times what an organic one costs. Whether that is a good deal depends on a question the fee itself cannot answer: would that buyer have found you anyway? For a shop whose traffic is mostly Etsy search, many attributed orders are ones you would likely have received regardless. For a shop with no search visibility, the same fee is the cost of the only customers it gets.

The $100 cap, which is where calculators go wrong

Above roughly $667 in order value, 15% would exceed $100, and Etsy charges $100 instead. The cap applies per order, so a single large order is treated generously while several smaller ones adding to the same total are not.

A calculator that applies a flat 15% reports $135 here and overstates your total fees by $35 on one order. If you sell furniture, wedding dresses, commissioned artwork or anything else routinely above $667, that error compounds into a genuinely wrong picture of your business.

What to actually do about it

The fee is not negotiable, so the useful responses are all measurements rather than settings.

• Find your real rate, not the headline one. If 18% of your orders are attributed at 15%, your shop’s advertising cost is about 2.7% of revenue — a very different planning number, and one you can only get by counting orders.
• Check it per product. Attribution is not spread evenly. A product that photographs well and gets advertised heavily can carry a much higher effective rate than your shop average, and it is often the one you believed was your best seller.
• Decide the opt-out before you cross $10,000, because afterwards there is no decision to make. That is the one window in which the choice is yours.

MakerMargin reads the Offsite Ads fee from the order file Etsy exports and applies the cap correctly, so the per-product profit you see is the one your statement will agree with. You can also check a single sale with the free fee calculator, or read the full fee breakdown for the rest of the stack.

The 15% and 12% rates, the $10,000 trailing-365-day threshold, the lifetime 12% rule and the $100 per-order cap are all stated in Etsy’s Fees & Payments Policy, read 14 September 2026. Worked examples are computed by the same fee engine MakerMargin bills against. The cap is $100 for USD shops; other currencies have local caps.