Offsite Ads

Offsite Ads is Etsy's program that advertises your listings on Google, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms. You only pay when someone clicks such an ad and buys from your shop within 30 days — but then the fee is a steep 15% of the order (12% for shops that have made over $10,000 USD in the last 365 days).

Shops under the $10,000 threshold can opt out; above it, the program is mandatory. The fee can turn a healthy POD margin negative on a single sale, so sellers factor a worst-case Offsite Ads scenario into their pricing.

How the fee works

When a buyer reaches your listing through Etsy's advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest, Etsy charges a fee on that order: 15% for shops under $10,000 USD in sales over a rolling 365 days, and 12% for shops above it. Above that threshold the programme is mandatory and cannot be switched off.

A worked example

A $25 tee with an $11 blank nets about $11.17 on an organic sale. The same sale through Offsite Ads nets $7.42, a third less, for a customer you did not choose to buy. If one in five of your sales arrives this way, your effective fee load is roughly 10.5% rather than 6.5%, and that is the number your pricing should assume.

The mistake nearly everyone makes

Judging Offsite Ads by the fee alone. The relevant comparison is not "15% versus 0%", it is "15% versus not making the sale at all". For a product with 45% organic margin the ads are usually profitable; for one at 20% they are close to charity.

How ZEUS measures it

ZEUS models both cases side by side rather than showing one blended average, because the blended number hides exactly the products that stop being profitable when an ad drives the sale.