Amazon FBA vs. Etsy Fee Comparison

If you are looking to sell your products online, you may want to compare the fees at two different online selling venues. Amazon FBA is often cited as having high costs to sell. But you are also paying for access to the millions of shoppers on Amazon.com. Here is a direct comparison of the fees of selling the same item on Amazon FBA vs. Etsy.

Things to take note. Amazon FBA ships the order and the price of the item does not contain an addition collected shipping amount. There is also the time investment to consider when selling to customers direct you are packing and shipping the orders yourself and handling customer service on a marketplace like Etsy.

The products sold is small and weights in at 4oz so it has standard Amazon item fees. It is not oversized. To ship first class direct on Etsy, the price varies now with the most recent USPS fee increase in January of 2019 so the rate is between $2.70 and $2.76. I will use $2.70 for this comparison. I am collecting 2.99 for shipping to also cover shipping materials (bubble mailer).

Some things to note, Amazon will collect shipping from a buyer who is not enrolled in Prime, but this total does not get passed onto a seller so any shipping amount is not considered. Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and time investment is also a factor to consider. If you would sell the item at the same cost and offer FREE SHIPPING on Etsy, then you would actually come in at $4.83 with all else being equal. You would not pay the $0.15 shipping transaction fee on Etsy when offering free shipping.

However, the real issue is a seller will never do the volume on the Etsy marketplace that is possible on Amazon. Amazon has 10x the customers. If the item price was higher that is used for this comparison, then it’s true that Etsy fees would cut into profits at a lower percentage.