Etsy Or Website: My Personal Experience
Time is money they always say. In my case, boy is that true. One of the things an entrepreneur focuses on is money-making activities. That has been one of my focuses over the past five years and it hasn’t gotten me far.
So one day, I was creating products for this sale I received on Etsy Whoop! I made $45 dollars and I thought it was great. Times have been tough between the Canada Post strikes and the tariff situation between Canada and the USA. So Monday rolled around, and Etsy dropped $4.50 into my bank account. I thought, this can’t be right. I looked into it, and sure enough, Etsy took $40.00 from me as fees.
So first, a little background…
Etsy charges fees for various things. First, you are charged a fee per item listed. (The more items you have on the site, the more you pay). Technically, the more you have listed, the more you have available and the more you should sell. But, if you don’t sell, the Etsy fees come out of your regular income.
Since I live in Canada, I’m charged 0.27 cents per item. This refreshes every few months, so if I had 400 items on my Etsy site, I pay around $300-$430 for these charges. Then, you are also charged every time you make a sale. I believe it was 20-30% the last time I checked. However, if you’re not making sales, you don’t pay anything. The last thing I (used) to pay for was Etsy marketing. Etsy will place your items in ads so you can get more people onto your page. I did stop this two years ago.
So on top of being on Etsy, I also have a website that I pay $765.00 per year. At the beginning, a person who wants to sell handmade items, I recommend you start on Etsy because you have instant access to a much larger market than you would if on a website. You also don’t have to do any extra work. (i.e. building a website). So when I started, I built a website first and Etsy came after. This is because I wanted a landing site where people could go to see all of my work - my portfolio, my highlighted videos, my affiliated companies and my blog. Etsy doesn’t offer any of that.
I did have a blog that highlighted the differences between websites and Etsy. I’ll link it here. This was written three years ago, and I think my mindset is very near where it was at the time of writing that blog. However, I was willing to give Etsy the old college try. It was also written at a time when people didn’t know who I was yet, or what type of products I offered.
When I say time is money, I have also been double listing since opening Etsy. If you make 20 items at once, it’s already a lot of work just listing to Etsy. However, I’m also listing to my website and updating both when items sell from one or the other at different times. It’s truly a lot to keep up with. When I compare all of the money I’ve made between the two (which is not overly much), to the time that I’ve spent on both sites, one of them has got to go. It makes sense to keep the one open that offers me the most benefits across my entire business - not just may sticker shop; so Etsy has got to go.
At the same time, I’m not 100% happy with my current website. I am going to do a lot of research in the next few upcoming weeks to see what platform is best for myself and my products. At the time of this posting (Dec. 22, 2025), I think it’s the perfect time to start thinking about this goal. So, I’m going to aim for the end of the first quarter to have my new site set up. When it’s ready to launch, I will be closing down my Etsy shop at that time.
Thank you so much for reading today’s blog. I hope you will continue to support me by reading my blogs here on my website, and on Medium, watching me on Youtube and visiting my new website!
Take care,
Sandra Dahl
