Where 100 USD of Etsy Sales Goes: A Worked Example With Made-Up Orders
Each fee looks small on its own line. The total only shows up when you add every row and compare it with what buyers paid. So we built a made-up shop, fed its files through the same steps a real seller would, and followed the money.
The example data
All numbers below are Example data. We generated it ourselves: 5 listings, 40 orders over September and October, 58 units sold, laid out like Etsy’s Order Items file and monthly statements. Examples are in US dollars. The same calculation works in euros, pounds or any other currency, because it only uses the numbers in your export. The fee amounts in this data are our own assumptions, so check your own statement before you copy any percentage from this article.
Buyers paid 1,188.13 in total: 1,053.13 for items and 135.00 for shipping. The statement rows for fees, ads, shipping labels and refunds add up to 336.41. What is left is 851.72, or 71.7%. That is before cost of goods and before your own income tax.
What remains of 100 USD
Take the same data and scale it to 100 USD paid by buyers. Here is where the rest goes (Example data, recalculated from the statement rows):
Refunds are the biggest single line. Three of the 40 orders were refunded, two in full and one in part, and together they took 110.50. Without them the same shop would keep 80.99 of every 100 USD.
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Taxes need a short note. Sales tax that a buyer pays does not count as your revenue, so the example leaves it out (those rows show 0.00). The only tax-like line is VAT on fees, which is the 0.10 above. Your income tax comes after all of this and depends on where you live, so it is not in the table.
The listing that sells most has the lowest margin
Here are the five listings, sorted by item revenue (Example data, per-listing table from the same data):
The margin here is net divided by item revenue plus the shipping buyers paid.
The beanie brings in the most revenue and has the lowest margin. It carries 97.41 of the 110.50 in refunds, which is 88%, and 24.80 of the 40.18 in Offsite Ads, which is 62%. The candle sold less than half as many units, yet it earns 31.83 per unit sold after fees against 17.71 for the beanie. If you only look at the shop total, the 71.7% hides that spread. Per listing, the range runs from 63.5% to 84.2%.
Three checks for your own statement
- Add every fee, ad, label and refund row for one month, divide the total by what buyers paid, and multiply by 100. That is your own version of the 28.31 above, per 100 USD paid. To scale a line of the table to your shop, multiply it by your buyer payments divided by 100. In the example, 1,188.13 divided by 100 is about 11.88, and 11.88 times 28.31 is about 336, which matches the 336.41 up to rounding.
- Split those rows by listing. Refunds and ads tend to pile up on a few items, as they did on the beanie.
- Compare the per-unit net of your top seller with your second one. A gap like 17.71 against 31.83 changes which listing deserves the next round of photos.
Limits
The data above is made up and the fee amounts in it are assumptions of ours, so treat the numbers as a method, not as Etsy’s rates. We have not yet run the method on a real export with many sales. There is no currency conversion, and none of this is tax or accounting advice.
If you would rather keep this in a workbook
We built an Etsy seller bookkeeping workbook for this. It works out the Etsy fees for every order, then net after fees, profit and margin by order and by month, and it has a paste-in area for the monthly statement CSV. It runs in Excel and Google Sheets. The page: Etsy Seller Bookkeeping workbook
Size Run Studio. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Etsy, Inc.
