You set up a booth at a craft fair, a customer taps their card on your Square reader, and the sale syncs back to your Etsy shop. It feels seamless — but the fees behave nothing like an online Etsy order, and the money doesn't arrive the way you'd expect. If you track your Etsy profit by watching your Etsy deposits, in-person Square sales are one of the easiest ways to end up quietly wrong. Here's how it actually works in 2026.
How the Etsy + Square connection works
Etsy lets you connect a Square account so your in-person sales and your online shop share one inventory. You sync your listings to Square, sell face-to-face through Square's card reader, and the quantities update on both sides so you don't oversell. The key thing to understand: when a customer pays in person, that payment runs through Square, not Etsy Payments. So Square's fee rules apply to the sale, and Etsy's usual per-sale fees mostly don't.
The fees, honestly
For an in-person sale taken on the Square reader in 2026:
- No Etsy 6.5% transaction fee. Because the money didn't go through Etsy Payments, Etsy doesn't take its standard transaction cut on these sales.
- No Etsy payment processing fee either. The processing is Square's, not Etsy's.
- Square's processing fee instead: for a tap, dip, or swipe, Square charges 2.6% + $0.10 per transaction. That comes out of the money Square deposits to you.
- The $0.20 listing fee still exists. Synced items carry the same $0.20 listing (and auto-renewal) fee as any Etsy listing — see how Etsy auto-renew fees work.
- The "Square manual" fee. If you record an in-person sale for an item that isn't synced to your Etsy inventory, Etsy adds a $0.20 manual fee, which shows up on your monthly Etsy bill labeled "Square manual." Synced items skip this.
Net effect: in-person Square sales are usually cheaper on fees than the same sale online. The catch isn't the amount — it's where the money and the charges land.
A worked example
Say you sell a $40 handmade item at a market, and the buyer taps their card on your Square reader.
- Square takes 2.6% + $0.10 = $1.14, and deposits $38.86 to your Square (bank) account.
- Etsy charges you nothing extra if the item was synced — or a $0.20 "Square manual" fee if it wasn't — and that charge appears later on your Etsy bill, not netted out of the sale.
Compare that to selling the same $40 item online: Etsy would take roughly $2.60 (6.5% transaction) plus about $1.45 in US payment processing (3% + $0.25) — around $4.05 in Etsy fees, all deducted before your Etsy payout. So the in-person sale costs you about $1.14 in fees versus $4.05 online. Genuinely cheaper — but the profit is now split across two systems. For the online-fee side of this, see transaction fee vs payment processing fee and Etsy fees explained.
Why this is a reconciliation trap
Here's the part that quietly breaks your numbers. An online Etsy sale is self-contained: the fees come out, and one payout hits your bank. An in-person Square sale is two separate money flows. Square deposits $38.86 to your bank on its own schedule. Etsy, meanwhile, charges the $0.20 listing renewal and any "Square manual" fee to your Etsy account — a completely different ledger, billed monthly, that you might even pay by card. If you judge your Etsy profit by looking at Etsy deposits, the whole in-person sale is invisible on that side; if you look only at Square, you miss the Etsy fees. Add a market weekend of these and your "Etsy made X this month" number simply doesn't reflect reality. This is the same drift described in reconciling Etsy payments with your bank deposits — in-person sales just make it worse.
One more thing to watch: sales tax. For in-person sales, collecting and remitting sales tax is generally handled through Square and your own tax setup, not automatically remitted by Etsy the way online orders are. That's another line that has to be tracked separately, so don't assume it's taken care of.
See both sides in one profit number
Mixing online and in-person sales is exactly where a single-source dashboard falls short — Etsy's screen only knows the Etsy side. You can price any online order with our free Etsy fee calculator, and check whether your shop is actually in the black with how to know if your Etsy shop is profitable. And Seller Profit Lens connects to your shop read-only, reads the exact fees Etsy charged to the cent, and lines up the true cost of every sale — so the fees you're billed and the money you actually keep finally agree. It's free in beta right now. Join the waitlist →