Running a sale or sending a coupon is one of the most common things an Etsy seller does — and one of the most common questions right after is: "Wait, do I still pay full fees on the original price, or on the discounted one?" It's a fair worry. If Etsy charged its cut on the pre-discount price, a sale could quietly cost you money. Here's exactly how it works in 2026, and the part that actually matters for your profit.
The short answer: fees are on what the buyer actually pays
Etsy calculates its percentage fees on the final amount the buyer pays after your discount is applied, not the original list price. That's true for both the 6.5% transaction fee and the percentage part of payment processing (3% in the US). A shop sale, a coupon code, and a "% off" promotion all lower the price the fee is based on.
Quick example. A $30 item on a 20% off sale sells for $24. The 6.5% transaction fee is 6.5% × $24 = $1.56, not 6.5% × $30. So the discount shrinks your fee along with your price. Good news — you are never charged a percentage fee on money you didn't collect.
The catch: the fixed fees don't shrink
Two of Etsy's charges are flat, not percentages: the $0.20 listing fee and the $0.25 fixed part of US payment processing. Those stay exactly the same whether the item sells for $30 or $24. So as your discount gets deeper, those fixed cents make up a bigger share of a smaller sale — and your effective fee percentage creeps up.
On our $24 sale: $0.20 listing + $1.56 transaction + ($0.25 + 3% of $24 = $0.97) processing = about $2.73, or roughly 11.4% of $24. At full $30 price it would be about $2.98, or 9.9%. Same product, but the discounted order carries a slightly higher fee rate because the flat fees don't move. It's the same reason small orders always cost a higher percentage — see how much Etsy takes from a $20 sale.
The part that really hurts: your cost doesn't discount itself
Here's what the "fees are lower, great!" reaction misses. A discount comes off your revenue, but your cost of goods — materials, the shipping label you pay, packaging — is exactly the same on a discounted order. And profit is what's left after both. So a 20% discount doesn't cut your profit by 20%; it can cut it far more, because it comes entirely out of the thin margin at the top.
Say that $30 item costs you $18 to make and ship. At full price your rough profit is $30 − $2.98 fees − $18 = $9.02. Discounted to $24 it's $24 − $2.73 fees − $18 = $3.27. A 20% price cut just erased 64% of your profit — even though your fee went down. That's the number that decides whether a sale is worth running, and it's nowhere on your Etsy dashboard.
Two more quiet interactions
- Free shipping doesn't remove a fee — it moves it. If you fold shipping into the item price and run a discount, the 6.5% still applies to the whole discounted total (item + any shipping the buyer pays). More on that in does Etsy charge fees on shipping.
- Sales can trigger Offsite Ads fees. A promotion that drives more traffic can mean more orders attributed to Etsy's ads — and those carry a 15% (or 12%) fee on top, capped at $100 per order. A "successful" sale can be less profitable than it looks once ad fees land. See is Etsy Offsite Ads worth it.
Know a discount's real cost before you run it
You can check the fees on any single price with our free Etsy fee calculator — run it at full price and at the sale price to see the fixed-fee effect for yourself. But a calculator can't tell you what a discount does to your actual profit across real orders, once your own costs, ad attribution and every fee Etsy truly charged are counted. That's what Seller Profit Lens does: it connects to your shop read-only, reads the exact fee Etsy charged on each discounted order to the cent, subtracts your costs, and shows real profit per product — so you know whether a sale actually made money before you run the next one. It's in free beta now. Join the waitlist →