Etsy's dashboard shows you sales. It does not show you profit. So a lot of sellers do the sensible thing and build a spreadsheet — one row per sale, subtract the fees and costs, and finally see what's actually left. Done right, it's the cheapest profit tracker there is. Here's how to build one that's genuinely accurate in 2026, and — just as important — where a spreadsheet quietly gets it wrong.
The columns you actually need
Open a new sheet and make one row per order. You want these columns, left to right:
- Date — so you can total by month.
- Product — the listing name, so you can group and find your real bestsellers.
- Sale price — the item price the buyer paid.
- Shipping charged — what the buyer paid you for shipping.
- Listing fee, Transaction fee, Payment processing — the three fees on every sale.
- Offsite Ads fee — usually blank, occasionally large.
- Your product cost — materials, and your time if you value it.
- Actual shipping cost — what the label really cost you (not what the buyer paid).
- Real profit — the one formula that matters.
The fee formulas (2026 rates)
Etsy's core rates are stable in 2026, so you can compute the mandatory fees directly. For a US seller, in your fee columns:
- Listing fee: a flat
0.20. Remember it renews every time an item sells, so it's per sale, not once. - Transaction fee — 6.5%:
= (Sale price + Shipping charged) * 0.065. The 6.5% applies to the item and the shipping the buyer paid, plus gift wrap and personalization if you charge for them. - Payment processing — 3% + $0.25 (US):
= (Sale price + Shipping charged) * 0.03 + 0.25. This rate changes by country: it's 4% + £0.20 in the UK and 4% + €0.30 across much of the EU, so use your own bank's rate.
Then your profit column is simply: = Sale price + Shipping charged − Listing − Transaction − Processing − Offsite − Product cost − Actual shipping cost. Copy it down, and you finally have profit per sale — and, with a pivot table, profit per product.
Sanity-check it against one real order
Before you trust the sheet, take one finished sale and compare your calculated fees against your Etsy Payment account (Shop Manager → Finances → Payment account). If your row says $2.10 in fees and Etsy's ledger says $2.10, your formulas are sound. If they don't match, one of the three things below is the reason.
The three things a spreadsheet quietly gets wrong
A formula computes fees from the published rates. Your real ledger often differs, and these gaps are exactly where a manual sheet leaks money:
- Refunds. When you refund a buyer, Etsy returns the transaction and processing fees proportionally — but not the $0.20 listing fee, and if Etsy covered the refund (Purchase Protection), the fees don't come back at all. Almost nobody adjusts their spreadsheet rows for this, so refunded orders keep overstating profit.
- VAT on the fees. If you're a UK, EU or Türkiye seller, Etsy charges VAT on top of every fee above — often 20%. Your formula computes the pre-VAT fee; your bank statement is bigger. A "6.5%" transaction fee is effectively more once VAT is added, and no rate-based formula captures it.
- Currency and fixed-fee rounding. If you list in one currency and get paid in another, there's a 2.5% conversion fee and rounding differences the sheet never sees. Small per order, real over a month.
None of these are exotic — they hit ordinary sellers every month. They're just tedious to reconcile by hand, which is why manual profit sheets tend to drift a few percent too optimistic over time.
Estimate first, then check the real thing
If you just want the profit on a single sale before you build anything, our free Etsy fee calculator runs the exact formulas above — including the regulatory fee and currency conversion most calculators skip — so you can price a product or seed your spreadsheet's first row.
And when the manual upkeep gets old — or you want the fees Etsy actually charged instead of the ones a formula predicts — that's the gap Seller Profit Lens fills. It connects to your Etsy shop read-only, reads the real per-product fees to the cent (refunds, VAT-on-fees and currency included), subtracts your own costs, and reconciles to Etsy's own totals so the number is right, not just close. It's the spreadsheet you'd build, kept accurate automatically. It's in free beta now. Join the waitlist →