Half the "Etsy's advertising fees are destroying me" threads are actually about Etsy Ads. The other half are about Offsite Ads. They are entirely different mechanisms, you control them in entirely different ways, and until you know which one your money is going to, you can't fix anything.
Etsy Ads (sometimes still called Promoted Listings) is onsite advertising: your listings appear in the sponsored slots of Etsy's own search results. You set a daily budget, Etsy spends it on clicks, and the charge arrives regardless of whether those clicks became orders. It is opt-in, capped by the budget you chose, and you can turn it off this afternoon in Shop Manager. If your ad spend is high in a month with poor sales, the money is already gone — that's the nature of paying per click.
Offsite Ads is the opposite shape. Etsy advertises listings on Google, Instagram, Pinterest and the rest at its own expense, and charges you nothing unless a buyer clicks one of those ads and orders within the attribution window. The fee is 15% of the order (item + shipping) for smaller shops, dropping to 12% once your trailing-12-month revenue passes the threshold (~£8k) — at which point participation also stops being optional. Individual fees are capped (about £75–80, from the $100 cap). You can't budget it and you can't time it: it arrives when an attributed order does.
Because the fixes point in opposite directions. If Etsy Ads is the drain, the lever is your budget and your click-through listings — tighten targeting, cut the budget, or stop. If Offsite Ads is the drain, cutting your ad budget does nothing, because there is no budget: the lever is pricing — an offsite-attributed sale needs prices that survive a 12–15% haircut, which for thin-margin items can mean the honest answer is that an offsite sale is barely worth having. Sellers regularly kill their (profitable) Etsy Ads campaign in response to (unrelated) Offsite Ads fees, and vice versa.
Your payment account CSV records the two differently: Etsy Ads charges appear as their own fee rows on their own schedule, while Offsite Ads fees attach to the specific orders that triggered them. The Etsy Fee Auditor splits them into separate categories — drop last month's CSV in and you get an "Etsy Ads" line and an "Offsite Ads" line side by side, along with every other fee type and your true effective rate. The file never leaves your browser.
Then the diagnosis is one comparison: whichever line is bigger is the one to think about, using its own lever — budget for one, pricing for the other.
Fee figures (15%/12%, the revenue threshold and the per-order cap) as verified for our fee calculator, August 2026 — Etsy changes fees, so treat its current fee policy page as the authority. Planning a price rise to survive offsite fees? The UK Etsy Fee Calculator's reverse mode solves for the price directly. Not tax or accounting advice. CAAC.