Offsite Ads is the one Etsy fee that appears only on some orders and that many sellers cannot switch off. Etsy advertises listings across the marketplace on Google, Meta, Pinterest, Bing and partner sites, pays for the clicks itself, and charges the seller a share of any order the ad produces. Whether that is a good deal depends entirely on the shop’s margin, and the decision to opt out — where it is still available — is a numbers question. This guide sets out the 2026 rules, the arithmetic and a rule of thumb. Fee terms are from Etsy’s Fees & Payments Policy, verified 2026-09-20 (data sources).
The rules
| Under $10,000 in trailing 365-day sales | $10,000 and above | |
|---|---|---|
| Fee on attributed orders | 15% of the order total (item + shipping + gift wrap) | 12% |
| Participation | Optional — opt out in Shop Manager › Settings › Offsite Ads | Mandatory for the life of the shop |
| Cap | $100 per order | $100 per order |
| Attribution window | 30 days after the ad click | 30 days |
Etsy does not publish what share of orders is attributed on average, and sellers report anything from a few percent to a third of orders depending on category and how much of their traffic comes from search engines. That share is the missing number in any calculation, so the practical approach is to make sure an attributed order does not lose money — then the share does not matter.
What an attributed order nets
$25 item with $5 shipping charged, US seller, materials $7.50, postage $4.50, 8% sales tax collected:
| Ordinary order | Attributed order (15%) | Attributed order (12%) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Listing + transaction + processing | $3.37 | $3.37 | $3.37 |
| Offsite Ads fee on $30.00 | — | $4.50 | $3.60 |
| Total Etsy fees | $3.37 (11.2%) | $7.87 (26.2%) | $6.97 (23.2%) |
| Payout | $26.63 | $22.13 | $23.03 |
| Materials + postage | $12.00 | $12.00 | $12.00 |
| Net profit | $14.63 | $10.13 | $11.03 |
With materials and postage at 40% of the order total the attributed order still nets $10, so Offsite Ads simply costs $4.50 to acquire a customer the shop would not otherwise have had. At a 70% cost basis — materials $17.50 — the same order nets $4.63 normally and only $0.13 when attributed: the ad brought a sale worth nothing.
The break-even condition
For an attributed order to net zero, the price must cover materials, postage, the fixed fees and the percentages:
price + shipping ≥ (materials + postage + $0.45) ÷ (1 − 0.065 − 0.03 − 0.15) = (materials + postage + $0.45) ÷ 0.755
For materials and postage of $12: $16.49. At $30 charged, the shop is safe by a wide margin. For materials and postage of $22: $29.74 — an order at $30 barely breaks even if attributed, and any return makes it a loss. At 12% the divisor is 0.785.
The Etsy fee calculator shows the ordinary and attributed cases side by side for any price and cost, with the break-even item price.
Decision rule for shops that can still opt out
- Compute the attributed net profit at your typical order value and cost. If it is positive, stay in: every attributed order is incremental profit and the fee is a customer-acquisition cost you only pay on success — cheaper than most paid advertising, where clicks are billed whether or not they convert.
- If it is near zero or negative, raise prices or cut costs until it is positive, then stay in. Opting out does not remove the underlying problem — a product that cannot absorb a 15% acquisition cost also cannot absorb Etsy Ads, a sale event or a return.
- Opt out only if the margin genuinely cannot reach that level (commodity supplies, print-on-demand with thin margins) and organic Etsy search already brings enough traffic. Remember that opting out is temporary: at $10,000 in trailing sales the shop is enrolled permanently at 12%.
- Approaching $10,000: the mandatory 12% rate is lower than the optional 15%, so a shop that was happy at 15% has nothing to fear from the threshold. A shop that had opted out should reprice before crossing it, not after.
Two details that change the arithmetic
- Shipping inside the fee base. Offering free shipping and raising the item price does not change the Offsite Ads fee — the base is item + shipping either way — but Etsy has said it gives free-shipping listings priority in US search, and the ads promote the same listings.
- Multi-item orders. Attribution covers the whole order for 30 days after the click. A shopper who clicks an ad for a $6 sticker and later buys a $120 art print pays the 15% on $126 — which is also why the $100 cap exists.
For the full picture of Etsy’s fees, see the Etsy fees guide; to test what a 15% acquisition cost does to monthly profit, use the profit margin calculator with the ad field at 15% on the share of orders you expect to be attributed.