"Should I sell on Etsy or Amazon Handmade?" is one of the most common crossroads for handmade sellers — and fees are usually the first thing people compare. On paper the two look very different: Etsy stacks up several small fees, while Amazon Handmade charges one big one. But "one fee" doesn't automatically mean "cheaper." Here are the real 2026 numbers, side by side, so you can see which marketplace actually keeps more of your money.
How Etsy charges in 2026
Etsy's model is lots of small fees that add up. On each sale you pay:
- Listing fee — $0.20 per item, renewed every time it sells.
- Transaction fee — 6.5% of the total order (item + shipping + gift wrap).
- Payment processing — a percentage plus a fixed fee, based on your bank's country: 3% + $0.25 in the US, 4% + £0.20 in the UK, 4% + €0.30 across much of the EU.
- Sometimes: Offsite Ads (12–15% when a sale is attributed), a regulatory operating fee in some countries, currency conversion (2.5%), and — for UK/EU/Türkiye sellers — VAT charged on the fees themselves.
For a typical US seller the baseline bite is roughly 10–11% of the order before Offsite Ads. Abroad, once the higher processing rate and VAT-on-fees stack, a small order can lose a lot more.
How Amazon Handmade charges in 2026
Amazon Handmade goes the other way — one headline fee that covers almost everything:
- Referral fee — 15% of the total sale price (item + shipping + gift wrap), or $0.30, whichever is greater.
- No listing fee. You can list as many products as you like for free.
- No separate payment processing fee. It's baked into the 15%.
- Professional selling plan ($39.99/month) is waived for approved Handmade artisans — so there's no monthly subscription to pay.
So Handmade's structure is simple: nothing until you sell, then a flat 15% off the top. No per-listing charge, no processing line, no monthly fee.
The head-to-head: same order, both platforms
Take a $25 item with $5 shipping — a $30 order — for a US seller.
Etsy: $0.20 listing + 6.5% of $30 ($1.95) + 3% of $30 + $0.25 processing ($1.15) ≈ $3.30, about 11%.
Amazon Handmade: 15% of $30 = $4.50, a flat 15%.
On this order, Etsy is cheaper — and for most standard, unattributed sales, Etsy's ~10–11% baseline beats Handmade's flat 15%. The math flips only in specific cases: if an Etsy sale gets hit with 15% Offsite Ads on top of everything, that single order can cost more on Etsy than it would on Handmade.
Where each one wins
Etsy tends to be cheaper on fees for the everyday sale, because its combined cut usually lands below 15% unless Offsite Ads are attributed. Amazon Handmade's flat 15% is predictable — no country-based processing surprises, no VAT-on-fees, no listing renewals to track — which some sellers value even if the headline rate is higher. And Handmade never charges you a thing until something sells, with no monthly plan to cover.
But fees aren't the real question — traffic is
Here's the honest part most fee comparisons skip: the marketplace fee is really the cost of the buyers it brings you. Etsy is a dedicated handmade-and-vintage destination, so its shoppers arrive already looking for exactly what you make. Amazon has vastly more total traffic, but Handmade is a small niche inside a giant general store, and handmade buyers can be harder to reach among millions of mass-produced listings. A slightly higher or lower fee matters far less than which platform actually puts your product in front of people who'll buy it — and that depends on your category, your photos, and your SEO more than on the fee table.
The number that actually decides it
Whichever marketplace you choose, the fee percentage isn't your real question — your profit per product is. An 11% Etsy cut is fine on a 40%-margin product and fatal on an 8%-margin one; the same is true of Handmade's 15%. You can pressure-test a single Etsy product with our free Etsy fee calculator: enter your price, country and costs and see exactly what's left after every fee.
And to see it across your whole Etsy shop — with the fees Etsy actually charged rather than an estimate — that's what Seller Profit Lens does. It connects to your Etsy shop read-only, reads the real per-product fees to the cent, subtracts your costs, and reconciles to Etsy's own totals so you know which products truly make money — the fact you need before deciding whether another marketplace is even worth the move. It's in free beta now. Join the waitlist →