The short version: You cannot take your Etsy customers with you, and messaging them to say you are leaving is against Etsy's rules and risks your shop. The legitimate route is package inserts and your own channels, which reach the same people without going through Etsy's messaging. Before you go anywhere, run one number: what share of your orders came from Etsy search? Etsy costs about 11.3% of a $25 order against roughly 4.5% on your own storefront, and that 6.8-point premium is the price of traffic. If Etsy is genuinely finding you customers, leaving is a downgrade dressed as a saving.
Discovery, and nothing else.
On a $25 order a US seller pays $0.20 to list, 6.5% of the item price including shipping, and 3% plus $0.25 in Etsy Payments processing. That is $2.83, or 11.3%. Our full breakdown of Etsy's fees works every charge through.
Your own storefront on a $120-a-year platform with 2.9% plus 30¢ costs about $1.13 on the same order, or 4.5%.
So Etsy's premium is roughly 6.8 percentage points. At $12,000 a year that is about $816. The only question that matters is whether Etsy earns it, and Etsy tells you: your shop stats break traffic down by source.
Run that check before anything else. Our comparison of Square Online against Etsy works the payback arithmetic through in detail.
If the check shows your buyers are mostly repeat customers, the move is not complicated: a flat-fee storefront keeps the 6.5% and the listing fees, and the rest of this guide covers the migration itself.
No, and this is the constraint that shapes the whole migration.
Etsy's policies restrict using its messaging to direct buyers off the platform. Sending your customers a message announcing a new site is the kind of thing that gets shops suspended, and a suspended shop cannot fulfil the orders you still have.
What you can legitimately do:
What you should not do: message buyers through Etsy to announce a move, put a redirect notice in your Etsy listings, or use order confirmations to advertise leaving.
The practical implication is that this migration takes months rather than a weekend, because the only compliant channel is a card in a box and boxes go out one at a time.
Give a reason to visit that is not "we are leaving."
The version that works offers something:
> "Thanks for ordering. New flavours go up first at [yoursite.com], and there's a bit more choice there."
The version that gets you in trouble:
> "Order direct next time and save us both the Etsy fees."
The difference matters. The first is you marketing your own business, which is allowed. The second is explicitly directing a buyer away from the platform they bought on, and it is also slightly insulting to the customer, who is being asked to do you a favour.
Other things that work on an insert:
One practical note on production: print the inserts once, in bulk, and put them next to your packing area. A card you have to remember to print is a card that goes in half the boxes. This is the entire compliant channel for reaching your existing Etsy customers, so a 50% hit rate halves your migration.
Usually not immediately, and often not at all.
The strongest position for most food sellers is both, with the roles separated:
Neither charges a base subscription at the entry tier, so running both costs nothing beyond fees on real orders. The one thing to manage is stock: if the same forty jars are listed in both places, a good week can oversell you. The usual fix is to keep the catalogs genuinely separate, with shipped shelf-stable items on Etsy and fresh batch-made items on your own storefront, so the two never compete for the same tray.
Close the Etsy shop if: almost none of your orders come from Etsy search, your state restricts shipping cottage food so most of Etsy's audience cannot buy from you anyway, or the admin of running two catalogs genuinely costs more than the channel earns.
Keep it if: listings rank, strangers find you, and you ship. Ranking is an asset you cannot move, it took years of sales and reviews to build, and closing the shop destroys it permanently rather than pausing it.
Our look at Etsy alternatives for home bakers covers who genuinely outgrows it, and Etsy versus your own website covers the discovery trade-off.
Five things, and the first two are the expensive ones.
Your reviews. Years of accumulated ratings stay on Etsy. Copy the best ones into a document before you do anything else, and ask your regulars for fresh reviews on the new storefront once they have ordered there. Starting from zero reviews is the single biggest conversion difference between a marketplace listing and a new site.
Your search ranking. A listing that ranks on Etsy ranks on Etsy. Your new store starts from nothing on Google, which is a different search engine and a different race.
Saved payment details. Customers will re-enter card information, which is a small amount of friction at exactly the wrong moment.
Buyer protection framing. Some customers are more comfortable buying through a marketplace they recognise, with a dispute process they have used before. Your own storefront has to earn that trust through clear policies, real photographs, and a visible way to reach a human.
Etsy's traffic. Obviously, and it is the whole point. The Census Bureau's e-commerce retail sales figures show online retail continuing to take share, but none of that traffic arrives at a new storefront by itself.
Eight steps, spread over months rather than a weekend.
Step seven is the one to be disciplined about. Vendors who decide in advance that they are leaving will read any data as confirming it, and a shop that was quietly bringing in new customers gets closed on principle.
Step five is the one people under-do. A single post announcing a new storefront reaches a fraction of your followers and is forgotten within a day. The vendors who move successfully post about it weekly for a season: the new listing, what is available this week, a photograph with the link in the caption. Not as an announcement, as a habit. The announcement is a moment; the habit is what actually shifts where people order.
And do not stop selling on Etsy while you build. A shop with no recent sales loses placement, so if you do decide to keep it, the worst thing you can do during the transition is neglect it into irrelevance and then conclude that Etsy stopped working.
While you are settling your own brand, check the name is genuinely yours to use. The USPTO's trademark basics covers how to search existing marks, and it is a much cheaper check now than after you have printed a thousand inserts.
This is the real work, and it is what the 6.8 points were buying.
A marketplace lends you credibility. Your own storefront has to build it, which means:
Vendors who move and see conversion drop usually skipped that list rather than needing Etsy. A well-built storefront converts your own audience considerably better than a marketplace listing does, because there is nothing else on the page competing for the click.
Worth settling before you invest in either channel, because it can eliminate the whole question.
Many state cottage food laws restrict or prohibit shipping, and most exclude anything requiring refrigeration. If your state permits sales only in person or only within the state, then Etsy's national audience is largely unusable to you: the traffic arrives and the orders cannot legally be fulfilled.
That is the single most common reason a food seller's Etsy shop underperforms, and it has nothing to do with fees or photography. It is also the strongest argument for moving to a local storefront, because a platform built around collection is serving the customers you can actually sell to.
Check three things with your state agency before deciding:
If the answer to the first is no, this stops being a migration decision and becomes an obvious one. Running a week of local orders through a storefront built for collection will tell you quickly whether the customers you can legally serve are already there.
If your orders are mostly local collection rather than shipping, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: it does not ship nationally and it brings you no traffic. If Etsy's search is genuinely finding you customers, nothing here replaces that and you should keep the shop. If your Etsy orders are mostly people you sent there yourself, you can run a week of those orders through a storefront instead and compare the per-order cost directly.
Every platform below shows the same four commercial facts, because a table that lists one platform's transaction fee and not another's is not a comparison. "Not published" means exactly that: the company does not state it publicly.
| Platform | What moving off Etsy costs you | Subscription (annual) | Free trial | Platform fee | Card processing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Etsy | You lose marketplace traffic, keep no messaging route to buyers | No subscription | n/a | $0.20 listing + 6.5% commission | 3.0% + $0.25 processing |
| Homegrown | You gain the customer list, you bring your own traffic | $10/mo billed annually | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee (0% commission) | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Big Cartel | Simple store, your own processor | Platinum $12/mo ($144/yr) | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee | Your own provider, so 2.9% + $0.30 typical |
| Square Online | Free tier to test before committing | Free tier; paid from $29/mo per location | 30-day trial on paid plans | $0 platform fee | 3.3% + $0.30 free tier, 2.9% + $0.30 paid |
| Shopify | Most capable, most expensive | $29/mo Basic | 3-day trial, then $1/mo for 3 | 2% platform fee if not on Shopify Payments | from 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Wix | Cheaper entry, Amex costs more to accept | Light $17/mo, Core $29/mo | No free trial | $0 platform fee | 2.9% + $0.30 processing (Amex 3.7%) |
No. Etsy's policies restrict using its messaging to direct buyers off the platform, and doing so risks suspension. Package inserts and your own social channels are the legitimate routes.
About 6.8 percentage points on a typical order. Etsy costs roughly $2.83 on a $25 sale, or 11.3%, against about $1.13 on a $120-a-year storefront with 2.9% plus 30¢ processing.
Usually not straight away. Keep it if listings rank and strangers find you, since ranking cannot be moved and closing destroys it. Close it if almost all your traffic is direct or your state restricts shipping cottage food.
Give a reason to visit rather than announcing a move: earlier access, more choice, or products you do not list on Etsy. Avoid anything framed as saving you fees, which breaks the rules and reads badly.
Your reviews, your search ranking, saved payment details, and the traffic itself. Copy your best reviews into a document first, since they stay behind and cannot be transferred.
Months rather than a weekend, because the only compliant way to reach existing customers is a card in each box. Build the storefront in a weekend; expect the audience shift to take a season.
Yes, and for many food sellers it is the right answer. Use Etsy for shipped products where its search introduces you to strangers, and your own storefront for local orders you generated yourself.
Start with the number, not the decision. Open your Etsy stats and find out what share of orders came from Etsy search. That single figure decides whether the 6.8-point premium is buying you customers or processing your own.
Then accept the constraint: you cannot message your buyers to tell them you are leaving. The compliant route is a card in every box offering a reason to visit, which means this takes a season rather than a weekend.
And do not close the shop out of principle. Ranking is an asset you cannot rebuild elsewhere, neither channel charges a base subscription at the entry tier, and the strongest position for most food sellers is Etsy for shipped orders it finds you, your own storefront for everything you found yourself.
