What it costs to sell a 40-euro piece online: Etsy, Shopify, Instagram and Handsome compared

You sell a piece for 40 euros, with 6 euros of shipping paid by the customer: the order is 46 euros. On Handsome you keep 39.06 euros, because the platform takes no commission on products: the only cost is the Stripe fee on the payment. On Etsy you keep less, around 37 euros. In the Instagram DMs nobody takes a percentage, but you pay that bill in time. And with a shop of your own the cost does not depend on the order: it depends on the month.

The assumptions behind the math

Below is the full math, on the same order down four roads. If your assumptions are different, swap the numbers.

• Price of the piece: 40 euros, VAT left out (the tax regime differs from Maker to Maker).
• Shipping: 6 euros paid by the customer on top. Order total: 46 euros.
• Real cost of shipping: 6 euros, which leaves your pocket anyway.
• Materials and hours of work stay out: I only look at what the channel takes.
• Payment processing fees change by country and by card. Where I do not know them, I say so.

Handsome: you keep about 39 euros

Handsome takes no commission on products. The customer's payment is created straight on your own Stripe account: it does not pass through a platform account. The money is yours. The only cost is Stripe's own fee: on standard European Economic Area cards, about 1.5% plus 25 cents. International and premium cards cost more, so the price list is worth opening. The detail is in how to sell your products on Handsome.

• Order collected: 46.00 euros (40 the piece, 6 the shipping)
• Platform commission: 0.00 euros
• Stripe fee: about 0.94 euros (1.5% of 46, plus the 0.25 fixed part)
• Shipping paid to the courier: 6.00 euros
• You keep 39.06 euros

There is one condition, and it is about how many pieces sit in your shop window, not about how much you sell. The free plan keeps 5 published pieces online at a time, with unlimited drafts, and you can sell those 5 as many times as you like: no cap on orders. If you need more than 5 pieces online together you move to Handsome Pro: 9.90 euros a month, with a 30-day trial and no card, or 95 euros a year. It is the only fixed line in the math, and it is about the shop window, not the order.

Etsy: you keep about 37 euros, before payment processing

Etsy charges in layers. A listing fee of about 0.20 dollars per item, a few cents, which you pay even without selling. A transaction fee of about 6.5% on the order total, shipping included. Then the payment processing fees, which depend on your country. The current terms live on Etsy's official fees page.

• Order collected: 46.00 euros
• Listing fee: about 0.20 dollars per item, a few cents
• Transaction fee: about 2.99 euros (6.5% of 46, shipping included)
• Payment processing: varies by country, not included in this total
• Shipping paid to the courier: 6.00 euros
• You keep about 37 euros, and less once payment processing is taken out

One detail weighs more than it looks: the 6.5% is charged on the shipping too, so the farther the parcel travels the bigger the slice. The full comparison is in Etsy or Handsome for selling your pieces.

A shop of your own: the cost does not depend on the order

A shop of your own, Shopify or another subscription platform, does not work as a percentage of the order. It works by the month: you pay the same amount whether you sell twenty pieces or none, plus the fees on checkout. That changes the shape of the cost, and it is the most important thing in the article. How much depends on the plan and the country: take that number from the official price list, not from here.

• The subscription is charged in the months when you sell nothing too
• The checkout fees stay, on top of the subscription
• Domain, theme and apps for things that elsewhere are already inside
• The time to set it up and to keep it updated
• Traffic: a shop of your own has nobody inside until you bring them there

The full reasoning is in opening an e-commerce or using a ready-made shop window. The alternative is a shop window that already exists: your products sit inside your public Handsome profile, next to your workshops. The profile and the workshop pages are public pages that search engines read, and the shop window has a single link: you send it in a chat, you print it on a card inside the parcel, you hand it over at the end of a class. Whoever walks out of your workshop finds the pieces already there, as I tell in workshops and products together. Opening the profile takes about fifteen minutes and has no subscription.

Instagram: no commission, but you pay in time

Selling in the DMs looks like the cheapest channel: nobody takes a percentage. The cost is written somewhere else. Every order goes through a conversation: replying, sending your bank details, checking the transfer, asking for the address and then the house number. A quarter of an hour per order is an honest estimate. And a post is not a product page: no price, no availability, no cart, no payment, and after two days it has scrolled away in the feed.

• Order collected: 46.00 euros
• Platform commission: 0.00 euros, because there is no checkout at all
• Getting paid: a bank transfer costs nothing, or a payment service with its own fee
• Shipping paid to the courier: 6.00 euros
• Your time: about 5.00 euros, assuming 15 minutes per order valued at 20 euros an hour
• You keep about 35.00 euros

Five euros per order is more than Etsy takes on the same order, where the transaction fee is about three. And one line never enters the math: when you do not reply, the conversation stops there. A page with a price and a button stays reachable while you are at the wheel. I did that math in full in selling on Instagram without a website.

What actually changes in the math

On the same 46-euro order, where the number can be worked out all the way down, it comes out like this:

1. Handsome: 39.06 euros net, with only the Stripe fee on the payment
2. Etsy: about 37 euros, before payment processing
3. Instagram in the DMs: about 35.00 euros, counting your time
4. A shop of your own: not in this ranking, because its cost depends on the month, not on the order

The gap between first and last is about 4 euros on a single piece. But the number matters less than the shape of the cost. A percentage grows with you. A subscription asks the same amount in the empty months too. Time in the DMs does not scale.

To publish products you need a verified VAT number, a connected Stripe account and the selling terms accepted. The steps in order are in VAT number, Stripe and your first five pieces, the payment side in how to connect Stripe.