You open your payment account, and one order has a fee three times bigger than everything else on it. It's the Offsite Ads fee — 12% or 15% of the whole order, quietly the largest single charge Etsy ever takes. So the natural question is: can I just turn it off? The honest answer is "sometimes," and the rule for who gets to decide surprises a lot of sellers.
The one number that decides it: $10,000
Whether you can opt out comes down to a single threshold — $10,000 USD in sales over any rolling 365-day window:
- Under $10,000: Offsite Ads are optional. You were enrolled automatically when you opened the shop, but you can turn them off — and while you're in, your rate is 15% on attributed orders.
- $10,000 or more: participation becomes mandatory for the life of the shop. You cannot opt out — but your fee drops to 12%. And here's the sting: once you've ever crossed $10,000, you stay locked in even if your sales later fall back below it.
So the smaller you are, the more choice you have. The trap is that crossing $10,000 once is a one-way door. There's no penalty for growing — just know the option to leave disappears the moment you pass that line.
How to actually turn them off (if you're eligible)
If you're under the threshold and want out, it's a two-minute change: Shop Manager → Settings → Offsite Ads, then toggle off. That's it. If the toggle is greyed out or missing, it means your shop has already hit $10,000 at some point and the choice is no longer yours.
Should you turn them off? The honest trade-off
Turning Offsite Ads off isn't automatically the "cheaper" move. The fee only applies when Etsy's ad on Google, Instagram, Facebook, etc. actually leads to a sale — you never pay for clicks that don't convert. So the real question is whether those ad-driven sales would have happened anyway. For an established shop with steady organic traffic, Offsite Ads can mostly bill you 15% on buyers who'd have found you regardless. For a brand-new shop with almost no visibility, that same 15% can be the price of sales you'd never have gotten. We work through when it pays in is Etsy Offsite Ads worth it, and the difference between the two ad programs in Etsy Ads vs Offsite Ads.
The part that makes it unpredictable: the 30-day window
Here's what catches sellers off guard. An order counts as "Offsite-attributed" if the buyer clicked one of Etsy's ads and then bought within 30 days — even if, three weeks later, they came back through a normal Etsy search and you'd swear the ad had nothing to do with it. That's why the fee shows up on orders that feel random, and why you can't predict which sales will carry it. The one mercy: the fee is capped at $100 per order, so a single large sale can't be devoured entirely.
Why this quietly wrecks your own math
Say you sell a $40 item. Most orders cost you the usual ~$3.30 in Etsy fees. But the one that happens to be Offsite-attributed costs $3.30 plus $6.00 (15% of $40) — nearly triple. If you're averaging your fees in your head, or trusting a calculator that assumes standard rates, that order silently drags your real margin down and you never see why. Offsite fees also don't map neatly onto the product that sold; they land as a separate line, tied to an ad click days earlier. That's exactly the kind of gap that makes a fee calculator disagree with your bank deposit — see why your payout is lower than your sales and how to reconcile Etsy payments with your bank.
Selling from outside the US?
The $10,000 threshold and the 12%/15% split are the same worldwide, but for non-US sellers the Offsite fee lands on top of pricier payment processing, a regulatory fee, and — in many countries — VAT charged on the fees themselves. So an Offsite-attributed order abroad stings even harder than the headline 15% suggests. More on that in how to reduce your Etsy fees.
You can't manage a fee you can't see clearly
Deciding whether Offsite Ads earn their keep — or just quietly tax sales you'd have made anyway — needs one thing: knowing your real per-order profit, with the Offsite fee attributed to the sale that actually triggered it. Etsy's dashboard buries it in a running total. That's the job Seller Profit Lens does: it connects to your shop read-only, reads the exact fees Etsy charged to the cent, ties each Offsite charge to its order, and shows true profit per product. First, sanity-check a single sale with our free Etsy fee calculator. It's free in beta right now. Join the waitlist →