Etsy, Fiverr and Gumroad Fees vs Owning Your Store

Every seller who has ever opened a payout report has asked the same question: where did the rest of my money go. Marketplaces take a cut, and the cut is rarely just the one number on the homepage. This article walks through what Etsy, Fiverr and Gumroad charge, and then asks the harder question: when does it make sense to route sales through your own store instead.

The short answer is that it depends on where your buyers come from. That is not a dodge. It is the variable that decides whether a marketplace fee is a good deal or a tax on traffic you already own. This article gives you the numbers to work it out for yourself rather than a verdict to accept on faith.

One note before the numbers: fee structures change. Platforms adjust rates, add mandatory programs, and change how processing is bundled, sometimes with a few weeks’ notice and sometimes with none. Each platform section below links to the platform’s own fee page. Read it before you make a decision based on any number here.

What marketplace fees actually buy you

Start with the case for marketplaces, because it is a real case and it deserves to go first, not as a token concession before the “but actually” section.

When you list on Etsy, Fiverr or Gumroad’s Discover marketplace, you are not just renting shelf space. You are buying four things that are hard to build yourself:

• Discovery. Buyers who have never heard of you are searching the marketplace itself, not your name. That search traffic is the product.
• Trust. A buyer who does not know you will hand a card number to Etsy or Fiverr more readily than to an unfamiliar domain, because the marketplace absorbs the risk of a bad actor.
• Payment infrastructure. Checkout, fraud screening, dispute handling and payout logistics are built and maintained for you.
• In Gumroad’s case, tax compliance. Since January 2025, Gumroad acts as Merchant of Record and calculates, collects and remits sales tax, VAT and GST worldwide on the seller’s behalf. That is a hard problem to solve on your own, and it is worth its own section below.

If you have zero audience and a marketplace is the only reason a stranger finds your product, a 20 percent or even 30 percent cut of a sale you would never have made without them is not a bad deal. It is close to the best deal available, because the alternative is not “keep 100 percent,” it is “make zero sales.”

Keep that sentence in mind. The rest of this article is about the point at which it stops being true.

The three platforms, fee by fee

Here is what each platform charges, broken into every component, not just the headline rate marketing copy leads with.

Etsy

• $0.20 listing fee, charged when an item is listed and again when the listing auto-renews after four months, whether or not it sells. Selling extra quantities from one listing adds $0.20 for each additional unit sold.
• 6.5% transaction fee on the total order amount, and that total includes shipping and gift wrapping if you charge for them, not just the item price.
• Payment processing on top of that, and the rate depends on the country of the seller’s bank account: 3% + $0.25 in the US, 4% + £0.20 in the UK, and 4% + EUR 0.30 in Germany and France.
• Offsite Ads fees of 15% of the order total on any sale that arrives through one of those ads, dropping to 12% once a shop has made $10,000 or more in sales over the past 365 days. The fee never exceeds $100 on a single order. Shops that reach $10,000 are required to take part in the program.

A worked example, using those published rates: a $20 item with $5 shipping is a $25 order. The 6.5% transaction fee is about $1.63 and the US processing fee is $1.00, so roughly $2.63 comes off before any listing or advertising fee. That is already about 10.5% of the order, well north of the 6.5% headline, before Offsite Ads enter the picture at all. Etsy’s own breakdown is in its fees and taxes help article.

Fiverr

• Sellers earn 80% of the purchase amount on every completed order, which makes Fiverr’s cut 20%.
• The 20% applies to the full order value, including gig extras and any tip the buyer adds, not just the base gig price.
• Buyers pay a separate service fee on their side: 5.5% of the purchase amount, plus $3.50 on orders under $200. Sellers do not pay this directly, but it affects what a buyer is willing to spend, which indirectly affects the seller.

Fiverr’s structure is the simplest of the three to reason about because the seller’s cut is one number. Whether you have sold one gig or ten thousand, Fiverr’s earnings page describes the same 80% share per order. There is no volume discount to count on, which matters for the break-even math later in this article. The details are on Fiverr’s earnings page help article, and the buyer fee is in its payments article.

Gumroad

• Direct sales (your profile or a link you share yourself): 10% + $0.50 per sale.
• Card processing is not included in that figure. Add 2.9% + $0.30, which gives an effective rate of roughly 12.9% + $0.80 on a card transaction. PayPal fees are separate too.
• Sales that come through Gumroad’s own Discover marketplace: a flat 30% per transaction, and that 30% includes processing, so there is no second fee stacked on top.
• No monthly subscription and no annual contract on either path. Once your paid sales in a calendar month reach $20,000, new direct sales that month drop to 5% + $0.50, and the rate resets on the first of the month.
• On a refund, Gumroad returns its own fee on the refunded amount and keeps only the payment-processing portion, because payment processors do not return it. A refunded $100 card sale therefore costs the seller roughly $3.20 in processing fees, even though the buyer got their money back.
• Since January 2025, Gumroad is Merchant of Record: it calculates, collects and remits sales tax, VAT and GST worldwide on the seller’s behalf.

The Gumroad split is worth sitting with for a second. Direct sales at roughly 13% all-in are meaningfully cheaper than Etsy’s stacked total or Fiverr’s flat 20%. Discover sales at a flat 30% are the most expensive line on this whole page. Same platform, same seller, two very different economics depending on whether the buyer found you or found Gumroad. The rates are on Gumroad’s pricing page and in its fees help article.

That gap, inside a single platform, is the entire argument of this article in miniature. The fee is not really for “using Gumroad.” It is for whichever service Gumroad performed on that specific sale, discovery or processing, and the price differs enormously depending on which one it was.

Where the fees stack

Headline rates undersell what a seller actually pays, because processing, listing fees and ad programs stack on top of the number in the platform’s marketing. Here is the same $100 card sale run through each path.

Platform	Headline rate	What gets added on top	Realistic all-in on a $100 card sale
Etsy	6.5% transaction fee	$0.20 listing fee + 3% + $0.25 processing (US) + 12-15% if Offsite Ads applies	About 10% without ads; roughly 22-25% if the sale arrives via Offsite Ads
Fiverr	20% of the order	Nothing extra on the seller side; the buyer pays their own service fee	20%, one rate on every order
Gumroad (direct)	10% + $0.50	2.9% + $0.30 card processing (not bundled)	Roughly 12.9% + $0.80, so around $13.70 on $100
Gumroad (Discover)	30% flat	Nothing; processing is bundled into the 30%	30%, flat
Your own store	Payment gateway’s own rate	About 2.9% + $0.30 on a US card with Stripe, plus hosting, theme and add-on cost, and your own time on setup, maintenance and traffic	Roughly 3% in direct fees, plus fixed costs and the time cost of owning discovery

Look at the last row closely, because it is where sellers talk themselves into a number that is not honest. The processing fee on your own store is low, comparable to what any marketplace pays its own processor. Stripe publishes its current rates on its pricing page, and they vary by country and payment method.

What the table cannot show in a percentage is the cost of the thing marketplaces bundle in: someone has to bring the buyer to the page. On a marketplace, that is included. On your own store, it is a job, and it is the job this whole article is really about.

Where the economics invert

Go back to the sentence from earlier: a 20-30% cut of a sale you would never have made is a good deal. Now flip the condition. If a customer already knows who you are, found you through your newsletter, your community, a referral, or your own search ranking, and you still route that sale through a marketplace, you are paying a discovery fee for discovery that already happened.

That is the insight underneath every marketplace-versus-owned-store comparison, and it is easy to miss inside the noise of percentage arguments:

• Marketplace fees are, functionally, a customer acquisition cost.
• If the marketplace did the acquiring, the fee is earned.
• If you did the acquiring and the marketplace only processed the payment, the fee is a tax on a sale that was already yours.

This is the same math that applies to teaching a course through a platform versus your own site. The piece on what online course platforms charge and what owning that flow looks like walks through the identical trade-off for instructors, and the conclusion lands in the same place: audience ownership is the variable, not the platform’s reputation.

The inversion point is not a fixed percentage or a fixed revenue number. It is the moment your repeat-buyer and referral traffic starts outweighing your stranger-discovery traffic. Below that point, marketplace fees are doing real work. Above it, a growing share of every fee you pay is for a service you no longer need.

What owning your store actually costs

This section exists because the honest version of this article has to say plainly: your own store is not free, and anyone who tells you it is has not run one.

Here is what you are paying for, itemised rather than hand-waved:

1. Hosting. A real cost, ongoing, regardless of sales volume. It varies by provider and grows with traffic, so budget for it as a fixed monthly line, not a rounding error.
2. A theme and any commerce or marketplace add-on you run on it. Also a real, ongoing cost. Our own products are self-hosted, with no per-member fee and no commission on your sales, and the pricing page has the current licence terms.
3. Payment gateway processing. You do not escape this by leaving a marketplace. Most gateways charge a percentage plus a fixed fee per transaction, which is close to what Etsy and Gumroad pay their own processors. You are not eliminating this cost, only removing the platform’s markup on top of it.
4. Your own time on setup and maintenance. Configuring checkout, keeping plugins updated, handling the occasional broken update. Real hours, and hours are not free even when no invoice arrives for them.
5. Discovery, which you now own entirely. This is the big one and the one sellers underestimate most. Nobody sends you traffic. No algorithm surfaces your product to a stranger browsing a category page. Every visitor to your own store either came because you brought them, or they did not come.

That last point deserves its own sentence, stated without softening: an owned store trades a percentage fee for a traffic problem. If you do not already have a way to get people to your site, moving off a marketplace does not save you money, it just removes the mechanism that was finding your customers.

This is why the comparison is not “marketplace bad, own store good.” It is a question of which cost you are better equipped to pay: a percentage of revenue, or hours spent building and maintaining an audience.

The strongest argument for staying: Merchant of Record

Gumroad’s Merchant of Record status deserves more attention than it usually gets in these comparisons, because it is the one marketplace benefit that a small seller struggles to replicate alone.

Selling digital goods across borders means potentially owing sales tax, VAT or GST in dozens of jurisdictions, each with different registration thresholds, filing schedules and rate tables.

Doing that correctly, without a Merchant of Record absorbing the obligation, usually means one of two things: an accountant who specialises in cross-border digital tax, which costs real money on an ongoing basis, or a compliance gap that quietly grows as your buyer base internationalises.

When Gumroad calculates, collects and remits that tax for you, it is not a nice-to-have. It is a function that a solo seller or small team would otherwise have to build, staff or outsource, and none of those options are cheap or simple. A seller selling globally at meaningful volume can reasonably decide that this single feature is worth the fee on its own, independent of discovery or trust.

If you move to your own store, that obligation does not disappear. You or your accountant now own it. For a seller with buyers concentrated in one or two tax jurisdictions, that is manageable. For a seller with buyers in forty countries, it is a real operational lift, and it should be weighed against the fee saved, not waved away as a minor detail.

Working out your own break-even

Rather than asserting a universal number, here is how to work out where your own break-even sits. The calculation has three inputs.

• Your marketplace fee rate, all-in. Use the fee-stacking table above and be honest about which row applies to you, including whether ad programs or Discover-style discovery fees apply.
• The share of your sales that come from people who already knew about you before they hit the marketplace listing, versus people who found you through the marketplace’s own search or browse.
• Your fixed costs of running an owned store: hosting, theme and add-on cost, and a realistic hourly value on the time you will spend on setup, maintenance and driving traffic.

The rough logic: take your all-in marketplace fee rate, multiply it by the revenue that comes from buyers who already knew you (not total revenue, only that slice), and compare the result to your fixed owned-store costs plus the processing fee you would still pay there.

If the fee you are saving on already-warm buyers exceeds your fixed costs, an owned store, or a hybrid where warm traffic goes direct and cold traffic still goes through the marketplace, is worth building. The community cost calculator can run a version of this math with your own figures.

If most of your revenue still comes from marketplace search and browse, and you have no channel of your own yet, the marketplace fee is doing its job and the math does not favour a move, at least not yet.

Which model fits you

Different situations point to different answers. This table is not a ranking of marketplaces versus owned stores in the abstract, it is a map of situation to fit.

Your situation	Better fit	Why
No audience yet, first products or gigs	Marketplace	You are paying for discovery you do not yet have any other way to buy. The fee is the cost of your first customers finding you at all.
Growing audience, still low sales volume	Hybrid, marketplace primary	An owned store’s fixed costs (hosting, theme, your time) are hard to justify against a small number of sales; keep building the list while the marketplace still carries most volume.
Established audience with repeat buyers	Owned store	Repeat buyers already know and trust you. Routing them through a marketplace pays a discovery fee for discovery that is no longer happening.
Selling digital goods cross-border at scale	Marketplace, or an owned store with a Merchant of Record processor	Global VAT, GST and sales tax compliance is a real operational burden; a Merchant of Record like Gumroad absorbs it, and that is worth real money at volume.
Selling services rather than products	Depends on referral share	Service sellers often build direct client relationships fast; once a client is a repeat booking, moving that relationship off a platform fee can pay for itself quickly.

Notice that “selling services rather than products” does not get a clean answer. That is deliberate. A freelancer whose bookings are still mostly new clients discovered on the platform is in a different position from one whose calendar is full of repeat clients who would happily pay through a direct invoice instead.

What the owned-store side looks like

If the math above points you toward building your own storefront, the mechanics are not exotic. A common setup looks like this:

• A WordPress site running Reign, the theme for building a complete community site, which handles the member-facing side: profiles, activity, and the parts of a store that behave more like a community than a checkout page.
• A marketplace or vendor plugin layered on top if you plan to let multiple sellers, instructors or vendors operate under one roof rather than selling only your own products. WP Sell Services is our own option for service listings, with orders through Stripe and PayPal checkout and commissions you set as the operator.
• Your own payment gateway, carrying its own processing fee, but with no platform markup stacked on top of it and no commission on your sales.
• A customer list you own: email addresses, purchase history, and the ability to message past buyers directly instead of hoping an algorithm resurfaces you.

If you are specifically weighing a multi-vendor setup, where you are not the only seller but the operator of the marketplace itself, that is a different build than a single-seller store and it is covered in the piece on running a community marketplace with member vendors. The marketplace build guide walks through the service-marketplace version. That scenario changes the calculus again: you are now the platform charging the fee rather than the seller paying one, and the trade-offs on discovery, trust and payment infrastructure move to your side of the table.

For sellers building out the full feature set an owned store eventually needs, the add-ons directory is a useful map of what can be layered on as the store grows, rather than something you need to install all at once on day one.

And because the owned-store argument depends on you already having, or being able to build, an audience that does not need a marketplace to find you, it is worth reading alongside two pieces that focus on audience ownership: building an association or alumni network you control, and the broader comparison of WordPress against Mighty Networks and Circle for community ownership. Both are about the same asset this article keeps returning to: a list of people who know how to find you without a marketplace’s search bar in between.

The bottom line

Marketplace fees are not a scam and they are not a bargain either. They are a price for a bundle of services: discovery, trust, payment processing, and in Gumroad’s case, tax compliance. For a seller with no audience, that bundle is worth far more than its cost. For a seller with a growing list of people who already know them, an increasing share of every fee paid is for a service that is no longer being delivered.

The practical move is not to close your marketplace listings the day you get an email list. It is to watch the ratio: how much of your revenue is coming from strangers the marketplace found for you, versus people who would have bought from you directly if you had asked. As that ratio shifts, so should where the sale happens.

Run your own numbers before acting on anyone else’s. Fee structures on Etsy, Fiverr and Gumroad, and the processing rates on any gateway you would use for your own store, all change over time. Read each platform’s current fee page, linked above, and rebuild the break-even math with your own actual figures rather than the ones used here as illustration.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Etsy take from each sale?

Etsy charges a 6.5% transaction fee on the order total, a $0.20 listing fee, and payment processing that depends on your bank country (3% + $0.25 in the US). Sales that arrive through Offsite Ads add 15%, or 12% once a shop has made $10,000 in the past 365 days.

How much does Fiverr take from sellers?

Fiverr takes 20% of each order, so sellers earn 80% of the purchase amount, including gig extras and tips. Buyers pay a separate service fee of 5.5%, plus $3.50 on orders under $200.

What are Gumroad’s fees?

Direct sales cost 10% + $0.50 plus card processing of 2.9% + $0.30, and Discover marketplace sales cost a flat 30% that includes processing. Gumroad is also the Merchant of Record and handles sales tax, VAT and GST for you.

Is selling on your own store cheaper than a marketplace?

Per sale, usually yes, because you pay only the payment processor. Overall it depends on whether you can bring buyers to the store yourself, since hosting, tools and your time are fixed costs a marketplace spreads across all sellers.

Do your products take a cut of my sales?

No. Our products are self-hosted, with no per-member fee and no commission on your sales. Payments go through your own gateway, and the theme is a licence per site.

When should I move off a marketplace?

Move when most of your revenue comes from buyers who already know you, such as repeat customers, newsletter readers and referrals. Until then the marketplace fee is paying for discovery you still need, and a hybrid setup is a safe middle step.

Next step

Open the live demos to see what an owned storefront and community look like on Reign, then follow the marketplace build guide if you plan to run sellers under one roof.