The fee stack takes its cut before anything else does — a $5 Etsy sale is really a $4.275 sale once the 6.5% transaction fee and processing are gone. Price from that number, not from what sounds fair.
Work backward from the amount you actually want to keep per sale, not forward from a price that merely sounds right. On Etsy, a $5 listing loses $0.725 to the 6.5% transaction fee and 3% plus $0.25 processing, leaving $4.275 — if that was not the target, $5 was the wrong number, not a reasonable-sounding one that happened to miss.
Etsy's $0.25 processing fee and eBay's $0.40 per-order fee do not shrink as the price drops, which is why a $2 printable loses a much larger share of itself than a $10 one does to the exact same flat fee. Pricing low to look competitive can quietly cost more as a percentage of the sale than pricing a little higher would — the arithmetic, not the instinct, should decide where the floor is.
This is the same reason bundling several printables into one higher-priced listing often nets more than selling each one separately at a lower price — the flat $0.25 or $0.40 component is paid once per sale, not once per file, so fewer, larger sales spend less of the total on fees that do not scale down with price.
The same logic runs through the listing fee too - one bundled listing renews once every four months, where three separate listings for the same three files renew three times.
A listing fee renewed every four months is a cost the price should eventually cover too, even though it is paid separately from any single sale. At $0.60 a year on Etsy or $0.30 a year with us, one sale a year already covers it many times over — but a listing that has never sold is still accumulating that charge, which is the argument for pricing to actually move rather than pricing to sit. Run your own price through the full fee stack, not a flat estimate, at /tools/fees before deciding.
The same $5 printable listed with us instead costs 10¢ to list (30¢ a year if it never sells) and, on the sale, 3% of $5 ($0.15) plus whatever the card itself charged — a lower floor under the same pricing decision, even though the card’s own cost is not ours to round into one number here. The decision of what to charge does not change; what each fee stack leaves you after that charge does.
None of this is an argument for picking the lowest fee stack over the biggest audience — a lower fee on a file nobody sees keeps more of nothing. It is an argument for pricing the same way on every platform you list on, using each one’s own real fee formula, rather than picking one round number and assuming it behaves the same everywhere it is posted.
Not literally - it is a recurring cost independent of any one sale, but it is still a real cost the price should cover across however many copies actually sell.
Not inherently - the mistake is picking a round number without checking what it survives being taxed down to after the fee stack, not the roundness itself.
Only up to the point buyers are still willing to pay it - this page covers what the fee stack does to a given price, not what the market will bear at a higher one.
Part of our guide to Selling digital downloads.