A ceramicist sells a piece for €50 plus €5 shipping on Etsy. When the payout lands, nearly €8 has vanished in fees. On a piece that takes hours of work and raw materials, these deductions sometimes decide whether the business is profitable at all.
This isn't a scandal: the marketplace brings in customers, and that service has a price. The real question lies elsewhere: should this channel stay the only one?
For a maker, a small brand or an artist-maker, the answer comes down to three things: your margin, your customer relationship and how resilient your business is. Let's look at the numbers, then the strategy.
What marketplaces really take
Let's start with the fee schedules the platforms publish themselves.
On Etsy, for a French seller, several fees stack up on every sale: a 6.5% transaction fee, 4% plus €0.30 for payment processing, and a 0.47% regulatory fee specific to France. On top come around $0.20 per listing, renewed every four months.
On our €55 order, the total comes close to €8, roughly 14% once VAT on the fees is included. And if the sale comes from Etsy's external advertising (Offsite Ads, which you can only turn off below $10,000 in annual sales), another 12 to 15% is added on that order.
On Amazon Handmade, the schedule is simpler: a 12.37% referral fee on every order. The €39-a-month professional subscription is waived for approved makers, after the first month.
On Faire, which is for makers who also sell to physical shops (wholesale), expect around 25% on a retailer's first order when the platform brings them in, then 15% on the following ones. Retailers you bring in yourself generate no commission.
Add in the internal advertising that is all but essential to stand out, depending on the platform, and the real bill often exceeds the headline commission. On handmade products, where materials and labour already cost a lot, that 12 to 15% comes straight out of your margin.
What the marketplace also keeps: your customers
The biggest cost never shows up on the invoice.
On Etsy, Amazon or Faire, the platform owns the customer relationship. You aren't allowed to divert a sale to your own site, or to reuse buyers' details for your own marketing. In practice, after years of sales, you can end up with no customer list of your own at all.
Then there's your dependence on the algorithm. Etsy now ranks shops partly on what happens after the click: adds to basket, completed sales, reviews, shipping times. A shop can slip down the results without changing anything about what it offers. And account suspensions, however long it takes to clear up a misunderstanding, come up regularly in what sellers report. When the platform is your only channel, its algorithm is your boss.
Finally, the marketplace flattens everything out. Photos on a plain background, titles crammed with keywords, your one-of-a-kind piece shown between two competing products. It's hard to tell the story of your workshop, your materials, what justifies your prices.
What a store in your own name changes
Margin, first. Let's be thorough about what a store of your own actually costs. Modest fixed costs: a subscription of around €36 a month for a solution like Shopify, or a few euros a month of hosting for WooCommerce, plus roughly €12 a year for a domain name. And on the commission side, only the payment provider: around 1.5% + €0.25 per transaction with Stripe, up to about 3.5% with PayPal.
Against the 12 to 15% of the marketplaces, that's a gap of around ten points that goes back into your pocket on every direct sale, before your acquisition costs (more on that below).
A rough figure to anchor things: on that commission gap alone, a store built for €2,970 pays for itself at around €25,000 to €30,000 in cumulative direct sales. Add the repeat purchases a customer list makes possible, and that horizon gets a lot closer. It isn't an automatic gain: it's an investment that pays off as your sales grow.
The customer list, next. Every order on your store gives you, with the customer's consent, an email address you're allowed to use: to announce a collection, follow up on an abandoned basket, invite people to a pre-sale. It's the most valuable asset a small brand has, the one that turns a passing buyer into a loyal customer. And it can only be built on your own turf. Your reviews and your standing on Etsy, on the other hand, don't transfer: all the more reason to start building your own body of proof (testimonials, customer photos) on your site early.
Image and pricing, finally. Your store tells the story the marketplace flattens: how things are made, the materials, the commitments, the scarcity. That world justifies your prices and draws in customers who are after something other than the cheapest option. This is exactly what Pixel Prisme builds for makers: an online store designed for direct-to-consumer brands, with your world, your catalogue and your customer list, in your own name.
And resilience as a bonus: if a platform changes its rules or suspends your account, your store keeps selling.
The right strategy: both, each with its role
So should you leave it all behind? No, and the figures say as much: according to the Fevad, marketplaces account for 31% of online product sales in France, and that share is growing. It's a stream of discovery your fledgling store won't replace overnight.
The costliest mistake makers make isn't staying on Etsy. It's leaving too early, or staying there alone for too long.
The split that works:
- The marketplace as your shopfront: your best-sellers, the products that draw people in, where new customers discover you.
- Your store as the home of your brand: the full collection, the one-of-a-kind pieces, the custom orders, the pre-sales, and the whole customer relationship.
- Bridges you control: packaging in your own name, a card in every parcel introducing your world, social media pointing to your site. You never divert a sale in progress (the platforms' terms forbid it), you make people want to come back for the next one.
A practical point for one-of-a-kind pieces: don't list the same item on both channels, or you risk selling it twice. Split your pieces by channel, or pull the listing on the other side as soon as a sale goes through.
On pricing, stay consistent from one channel to the next, and set them apart through the perks instead: exclusives, loyalty, content. Customers get it, and that's what gives them a real reason to buy direct.
Where to start, in practice
If you already sell on a marketplace, here's a realistic order to work in.
- Open your store with a tight catalogue: your best-sellers plus a few exclusives, photos that show the workshop as much as the product, and your essential pages (your story, shipping, contact).
- Set up email collection from day one: a visible newsletter form, a clear incentive (pre-sales, behind the scenes), and explicit, GDPR-compliant consent.
- Switch on the channels you already have: your store link in your Instagram and TikTok bio, regular behind-the-scenes content, the card in every parcel.
- Describe your products in your own words: materials, dimensions, how they're made. On specific searches, the likes of "silver jewellery made in Toulouse", a small brand can hold its own against the giants.
- Settle into a pace you can keep: one newsletter a month and a bit of regular content beat a burst followed by six months of silence.
And be patient at the start: direct-to-consumer brands most often report six to eighteen months to build real traction, driven by content and email. The potential is very much there: according to the Fevad, nearly three in four French people buy online, and the average buyer places more than one order a week. Your customers are already buying; the only question is from whom.
For the technical solution (usually Shopify or WooCommerce), it all depends on your catalogue and how much independence you want: we compared the two in Shopify or WooCommerce for your store. And if you'd rather hand over the whole build, Pixel Prisme delivers turnkey online stores from €2,970: catalogue, secure payment, email collection and a structure optimised for Google, delivered in 24 days once your content (photos, text) is ready.
The pitfalls of going direct
To finish honestly, the four mistakes that cost makers the most when they open their store.
Comparing commission to commission alone. Going from 14% in marketplace fees to 2% in payment fees doesn't automatically put 12 points of margin in your pocket: on your own store, you're the one bringing in the traffic, and that acquisition has a cost in time or in budget. The maths still strongly favours going direct over time, above all thanks to repeat purchases. But it's built up, it doesn't just fall into place.
Copying marketplace logic onto your own site. Keyword-stuffed titles and standardised photos serve an internal search engine, not a brand home. On your store, start from your story and your customer benefits, then optimise for Google without sacrificing readability.
Launching a shop-window store and then abandoning it. A site with no living content and no email becomes a business card that doesn't convert. A modest, steady pace beats a fanfare launch followed by silence.
Neglecting the legal side. Legal notice, terms and conditions of sale, privacy policy, information on timelines and returns: these pages are mandatory, and they're also pages that reassure. At Pixel Prisme, they're part of the delivery of every store, because a reassured customer is a paying customer.
In short
Marketplaces take 12 to 15% of every sale, keep your customer list and leave you exposed to their algorithms; in return, they bring you buyers, and that counts. Your own store flips the equation: payment fees of 1.5 to 3.5%, a customer list that's yours, your own brand world, and a business that no longer hangs on a single platform. The sensible path for a maker isn't to choose, but to combine: the marketplace brings discovery, your store builds loyalty and frees up the margin.
At Pixel Prisme, we support makers and small brands in Toulouse and beyond through this move to selling direct: a store in your own image, built to convert and to last. Let's talk about your project for 30 minutes, no strings attached.