Etsy or Handsome: an honest comparison on fees

If you sell handmade pieces, here is the difference in two lines: on Etsy you pay a listing fee of roughly 0.20 dollars per item and a transaction fee of about 6.5% on the order total, shipping included, plus payment processing fees; on Handsome the platform withholds no commission on products at all. In exchange Etsy puts you in front of people already looking for handmade work, Handsome asks for an Italian VAT number and a connected Stripe account.

One thing first, because we rewrote this page. Until September 2026 it carried a simple piece of advice: keep Etsy for products and Handsome for experiences. That was true, because products could not be sold on Handsome. Since 18 September 2026 they can, so that advice no longer holds.

What changed on 18 September 2026

From that date, every eligible Maker can open a product shop on Handsome. Three things are required: a verified VAT number, a connected Stripe account and acceptance of the selling terms. Apprentices, meaning members without a VAT number, run workshops but cannot sell objects. The pieces live inside the Maker's public profile: there is one link, and you send it in a chat, put it in your bio or print it on a card for the parcel. And since late September 2026, product pages with a complete listing can also appear on Google.

The free plan holds 5 published pieces, while drafts are unlimited: you build the catalogue calmly and publish the five you want on display. With Handsome Pro the cap disappears. If you are writing your first product page, the full path is in what you actually need to start selling: VAT number, Stripe and five free pieces.

The fees, side by side

On Etsy you pay in layers, and each layer is reasonable on its own. There is the listing fee, around 0.20 dollars per item, which you pay even if nobody buys that item. There is the transaction fee, about 6.5%, calculated on the order total, so it also lands on the shipping the customer pays you. Then there are payment processing fees. Amounts change over time: before doing your own math, check the official Etsy fees page.

On Handsome there is one line, and the line is empty. The platform withholds no commission on products. Technically the customer's payment is a Direct Charge on the Maker's Stripe account with no application fee: the money is yours and it starts on your own Stripe account, it never passes through us. The only cost is the standard fee Stripe applies to the payment, the same one you would pay on any other online payment, listed on the Stripe pricing page.

• Etsy: roughly 0.20 dollars listing fee per item, owed even with no sale
• Etsy: about 6.5% transaction fee on the order total, shipping included
• Etsy: payment processing fees on top of the two lines above
• Handsome: no commission withheld by the platform on products
• Handsome: only the standard Stripe fee on the payment remains
• Handsome: 5 published pieces for free, no cap with Pro at 9.90 euros a month

It is not a scoreboard: they are two cost structures, one paying for traffic and one not. The math on a real object, four channels down to what stays in your pocket, is in what it really costs to sell a 40-euro piece.

Where Etsy is stronger, and pretending otherwise is pointless

Etsy has something Handsome does not have and does not pretend to have: an audience that opens the site already meaning to buy something handmade, from half the world over. That traffic is the product Etsy sells to its sellers, and it is why the fees exist. If you make objects that ship well, that shop puts you in front of people who do not know you.

You already know the other side. Next to you sit sellers doing something close to what you do, and prices drift down on their own. The customer remembers buying on Etsy, not from you.

Where Handsome is stronger

The advantage is not just the zero on the commission line. It is that products sit on the same profile as your workshops: someone who spent three hours at your bench is not a stranger, they are already a customer, and when they come back the pieces are right there. We wrote a whole piece about it: the people who take the class are the people who buy the piece.

• You set shipping yourself: cost and free-shipping threshold
• Handsome collects the customer's address, so the order reaches you complete
• The payment starts on your own Stripe account, minus the Stripe fee alone
• The shop sits under your name, not in a category catalogue: one link, to send or to print
• The Maker's public profile and the workshop pages are indexed, and product pages with a complete listing can be too, with price and availability that Google can show in its results

Nothing changed on the experience side: the workshop commission is 0%. On group workshops the deposit is 10 euros per seat, it reaches the Maker in full, the balance is collected on site and the customer can cancel free of charge up to 3 days before; on private sessions the deposit is 25 euros and free cancellation runs up to 7 days before. You can look through the tools in the management tool for artisans, and the complete list of cost lines is in how selling your products without commissions works.

How to actually choose

The right question is not which platform is better, but what you are short of today. If you are short of an audience and you make shippable objects with an international market, Etsy puts that audience in front of you and the fees are the price of the ticket. If you already have the audience, because you teach or because people in town know you, paying a percentage on people who would have come anyway makes little sense.

Keeping both is legitimate, and plenty of people do. Use Etsy to catch people who do not know you, and your Handsome shop for those who already do: workshop customers, followers, people you met at a market. You see the difference in the price you manage to hold, and on that number there is what handmade work is really worth.

One last point, the tax one: on products the VAT number is genuinely required, it is not a rule we invented. If you are considering opening one, the starting point is the Italian Revenue Agency site; the tax regime is a choice for your accountant, not for an article.