Three places will take a digital file and put it in front of a buyer. Each charges you at a different point, and the only way to compare them honestly is to run one sale through all three.
Etsy charges a listing fee of $0.20, a 6.5% transaction fee on top of your price, and payment processing of 3% plus $0.25 on every sale. eBay skips the listing fee for your first 250 items a month, then charges an insertion fee, and takes 13.6% of the sale plus $0.40 per order on most categories. We charge 10¢ to list, and on a sale, the actual cost of running your buyer’s card, passed through at cost, plus 3% — nothing else.
None of those numbers tell you anything on their own. What matters is what each one does to one real sale.
Sell a $6 printable on Etsy and the 6.5% transaction fee takes $0.39, processing takes 3% plus $0.25 ($0.43), and you are left with $5.18 before the listing fee is even counted. On eBay, 13.6% takes $0.82 and the $0.40 per-order fee brings the total down to $4.78. Run the same $6 through our fee calculator at /tools/fees and you can see exactly what the card cost plus 3% comes to for your own price, because the card cost is not ours to round — it is whatever the card actually charged.
The gap between $5.18 and $4.78 on the same file, same price, same buyer, is the whole argument for comparing before you list.
A listing is not a one-time charge anywhere. Etsy’s listing “expires after 4 months” and renews for another $0.20 automatically, whether or not it has sold a single copy. Leave one listing up for a year and you have paid $0.60 in renewals for a product that may have earned nothing. We renew on the same four-month clock, at 10¢ — $0.30 a year for the same shelf space. It is a small number multiplied by however many files you have listed, which is exactly why it is worth knowing before you list fifty of them.
A single sale is one data point; a realistic year is more telling. Sell the same $6 printable twice a month on Etsy and the 6.5%-plus-processing fee of $0.82 per sale adds up to $19.68 across 24 sales, plus the $0.60 listing renewal — just over $20 in fees against $144 in revenue. The 3% we add across the same 24 sales comes to $4.32 before the card’s own processing cost is added on top, which is the part that is never rounded here because it depends on what the card actually charged that month.
The percentages do not change at $4 or at $20 — only the dollar amounts do. Etsy and eBay both take their cut off the sale price itself, not off what is left after the other platform’s fee, and the listing fee runs on its own four-month clock no matter the price of the item sitting underneath it. Change the number in the calculator at /tools/fees and watch which parts of the total move and which stay fixed.
Yes, and that is the real reason to list there despite the fees - reach is worth paying for. The point of comparing is deciding where else to also list, not whether to leave.
No. Nothing stops you listing the same file on Etsy, on eBay and with us at the same time; the only cost of listing in more than one place is the listing fee itself, which on our side is 10 cents, renewed every four months.
From /tools/fees, which runs your price through the real fee formulas above rather than a rounded example.
Part of our guide to Selling digital downloads.