Selling physical goods on Etsy

The claim

“I made this Steam Punk light to go over our kitchen table. Cost was $365 and a few hours of my time in the evening. They sell on Etsy for $865. Could you sell 10 of these per month and make an extra $5k? Would an extra $60k per year change your life? Opportunity surrounds us.”

@ShannonJean, September 2024, 25,063 views¹

This page judges the scheme, not the people who tweeted. The tweet is a question: the poster reports making one lamp, not selling ten a month¹.

The sums

Etsy charges a US seller $0.20 to list an item, 6.5% of the price and shipping, and 3% plus $0.25 to process the payment: 9.5% of the order plus $0.45 (our sum)⁶⁷⁸⁹. If a buyer clicks an ad Etsy places on another site and orders within 30 days, the seller pays another 15% (24.5% in all, our sum), or 12% once the shop has sold $10,000 in a year, capped at $100 an order⁶¹⁰.

The tweet’s sum takes off only materials¹. After Etsy’s basic fees each lamp leaves $417.37, so ten make about $4,174, not $5,000¹⁶. At that volume the shop passes $10,000 in its second month and can no longer opt out of those ads; a lamp ordered through one leaves $317.37¹⁶¹⁰. Both are our estimates, before shipping, packaging, tax and the maker’s time. We did not check the lamp’s price or cost, or whether such lamps sell.

Most handmade items cost far less. A $30 item with 40% going on materials and postage, no ads and no pay for hours, leaves $14.70 an order. Then $5,000 a month takes about 340 orders (our estimates)⁶.

Etsy’s 2025 sales, divided among its 5.6 million active sellers, come to about $1,868 per seller a year, about $156 a month, before fees and costs (our estimate)². A few very large shops pull that average up, and it counts hobby shops, sellers of digital goods and shops that paid one listing fee and sold nothing². The lamp claim needs $103,800 a year in sales, about 56 times that average (our division)¹².

What happens to most people who try

Etsy publishes no table of what sellers earn.

A tool company’s snapshot of 3,168,606 shops in July 2026 found that 26.2% had any recorded sale in about 30 days; the middle shop had none³⁵. Its method is not described, and it includes abandoned shops³⁵.

A 2018 study of bank records covered online selling platforms without naming them, so Etsy may not be among them³⁶. In money received, not profit, “over half of active sellers consistently generate less than $60 per month”, while the top tenth got $800 a month or more in early 2018³⁶.

The upside

Some shops do pay well. In these two a news outlet reviewed the sales records; profit, costs and hours are the seller’s own figures.

• Hand-welded fire pits. $50,000 in sales in the first five months, then $169,000 the next year⁵⁸. The seller reports margins of 35% to 40% and at least 40 hours a week beside a full-time job⁵⁸.
• Handmade wall decor. More than $121,400 in sales in a year³⁸. The seller estimates about $60,000 profit in nine months of 2024 on 12 to 24 hours a week³⁸. Her shop dated from 2009³⁸.

A realistic good result is smaller (our estimate; no source measures first-year results). A good first year, with a product people search for, is a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in sales. A good established shop sells $10,000 to $50,000 a year, which at most about 18% of sellers reach (one survey)³⁷. Such a shop keeps about $3,000 to $25,000 before pay for the maker’s time (our multiplication)^39414258.

What it takes to compete

No study compares shops that succeed with the rest. The documented cases had:

• A product that already sold, and a trade. The fire pits sold locally at $400 each before the shop opened; the seller had taken welding classes⁵⁹.
• Their own designs. Etsy closed 26,754 shops in 2024 for repeatedly copying protected names, logos, designs or characters, or for counterfeiting¹⁹.

Trying costs $0.20 a listing, possibly a one-time set-up fee, and materials⁶.

To tell early (our judgement): check that strangers already pay your full price. Do the sum for one order with fees, materials and postage, then again with the ad fee. If a fully listed shop sells nothing within a few months, the product or the price is the likelier reason, not the lack of a tool.

Who else makes money from it

Etsy is paid when an item is listed, when it sells, when the payment is processed and when an ad is clicked, profit or not⁶.

Our 27 tweets’ offers are small. Eleven are one account’s referral code for 40 free listings, worth $8 to the new seller (our multiplication; the 40 is from the tweets)¹⁶. The referrer gets listing credits, not cash³⁴. The lamp tweet’s text offers nothing for sale¹.

Costly coaching exists, but none of our tweets leads to it. One programme starts at “a couple hundred dollars monthly”, and says payments are non-refundable and its shown results not typical⁵².