The Etsy Ad Fee You Never Turned On
If you've opened your Etsy finances and found a charge for ads you never set up, that's Offsite Ads. You didn't miss a setting and you didn't get billed by mistake. Etsy runs it for every shop, and the money only leaves your account after a sale comes in through it.
Whether that's a good deal for you comes down to one number, and it's not the percentage.
What is Etsy Offsite Ads?
Offsite Ads is Etsy promoting your listings outside its own website. You don't pick the products, you don't set a budget, and you don't write the ad. Etsy takes your listing, puts it in front of people who aren't on Etsy, and if one of them clicks through and buys, that sale gets tagged as an Offsite Ads sale.
That tag is what you're seeing in your finances.
How do you pay for it?
By percentage, on the sale. Etsy takes 12% or 15% of the order, and which one you pay depends on your shop's sales.
That's the whole cost. No daily budget, no bill for the ad itself, nothing charged for being shown. If nobody buys through the ad, you pay nothing.
Is it worth keeping on?
For most shops, yes.
Look at what's actually happening. Etsy is promoting your products somewhere you weren't promoting them, and it only sends you the bill when a sale comes in. Those buyers weren't on Etsy searching for you. Without the ad, you don't get that order. With it, you get the order for a little less profit than a normal sale.
A sale you wouldn't have had, minus a cut, is still a sale you wouldn't have had.
Etsy only sends the bill when the ad actually sold something.
When is it not worth it?
Why most shops and not all? Margins.
Some shops keep more of each sale than others. On a product where you're already only keeping a few dollars, handing 15% of the order to Etsy can be the difference between a small profit and none. That's the one number you have to know before you decide anything: what you actually keep on a sale, and whether it survives 15% coming off the top.
If it does, leave it on. If it doesn't, that's the shop where it's worth finding out whether Etsy will let you turn it off, because that depends on your shop too.
Why there's nothing to lose
Most ads charge you to be seen. You pay for the click whether the person buys or not, and every click that doesn't turn into an order is a small bill with nothing behind it.
Offsite Ads doesn't work like that. There's no click charge, so a listing that gets promoted and doesn't sell costs you nothing. The only time money goes out is when money came in first.
You're only ever paying out of a sale you just made.
And if the sales aren't coming in at all, ads on or off, the problem is somewhere else. Three ways to troubleshoot a listing that won't sell are here.
Everything I work out in my own shops goes out by email as it happens, so if you'd rather not check back, that's the easier way to follow along.
Keep building,
Nick T
