If your Etsy shop has taken less than $10,000 in the last 365 days, you can switch Offsite Ads off in four clicks. The day you cross $10,000, Etsy switches it back on at 12% and the button disappears — “for the lifetime of your shop”, in Etsy’s own words.
Where these numbers come from
Everything below is Etsy’s own published policy, read on 15 September 2026: the Fees and Payments Policy for the rates and the threshold, and Etsy’s Offsite Ads help page for the settings path. Both are linked at the bottom. Nothing here is a guess about how the system behaves.
I should say plainly what I am not claiming. I do not sell on Etsy and I cannot — Etsy Payments does not operate in Bangladesh, where my silver shop is. So there is no screenshot of my own Offsite Ads dashboard in this post, and there never will be. What I can do is read the policy properly, and set one number beside it from my own advertising accounts, where I buy the same ad inventory directly and pay for it a different way.
The four clicks
Shop Manager → Settings → Offsite Ads → Opt out of Offsite Ads, then confirm.
That is the entire procedure and it takes about fifteen seconds. The reason it gets written up as something complicated is that for a large number of shops the button is simply not there.
Who is allowed to opt out
| Your sales, prior 365 days | Offsite Ads fee | Can you opt out? |
|---|---|---|
| Under $10,000 USD | 15% of the order | Yes |
| $10,000 USD or more | 12% of the order | No — required for the lifetime of your shop |
Two details in that table do more damage than the percentages do.
The first is “the lifetime of your shop”. This is not an annual test you can fall back under. Cross $10,000 once — in one good fourth quarter, on one listing that gets picked up — and the opt-out is gone permanently. A quiet year afterwards does not bring it back. It is a one-way door, and it is the single most important sentence in the policy.
The second is the measurement window. It is the prior 365 days, recalculated on the first day of each month — a rolling total, not a calendar year. There is no January reset to plan around, and no month in which the counter starts again.
The fee is charged on your shop, not on the listing that was advertised
This is the part that catches people, and it is written plainly. An order counts as an Attributed Order when a buyer clicks one of your Offsite Ads and then places “any orders from your shop within 30 days”.
Any order. Not the item that was in the ad.
| What happens | Amount |
|---|---|
| A buyer clicks an Offsite Ad for your $14 stacking ring | — |
| 22 days later she returns on her own and buys a necklace | $260 |
| Shipping she pays | $12 |
| Gift wrap | $4 |
| Total the fee is calculated on | $276 |
| Offsite Ads fee at 15% | $41.40 |
She would arguably have come back anyway. The policy has no view on that and there is no mechanism to argue it. The click bought a 30-day claim on everything she buys from you.
What the $100 cap actually does
| Order total | Fee at 15% | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| $38 | $5.70 | 15% |
| $120 | $18.00 | 15% |
| $400 | $60.00 | 15% |
| $667 | $100.00 | 15% |
| $1,200 | $100.00 | 8.3% |
| $2,500 | $100.00 | 4.0% |
The cap does something specific: it makes Offsite Ads progressively cheaper the higher your average order value climbs. Sell $38 pieces and you pay the full 15% on every attributed order. Sell $1,200 bridal sets and the ceiling quietly turns the same fee into 8%. Whether 15% is expensive depends far less on the percentage than on what you sell.
The exit that is not an opt-out
There is one carve-out inside the attribution rule. If a buyer clicked an Offsite Ad but an Etsy Ad — Etsy’s own on-site advertising, which you budget and control — was their final click before ordering, the order is not attributed to Offsite Ads.
That is not a loophole to build a shop on, and the on-site ad is not free either. It is worth knowing only because the two systems interact: running Etsy Ads is not simply a second fee stacked on top of the first one.
I cannot run an Etsy shop, so I buy the same inventory the other way round. Offsite Ads run on Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Bing and the Google Display Network; I advertise my own silver shop on Meta directly. My sales campaign has spent ৳1,852.67 and produced 22 adds to cart — ৳84.21 each, about $0.68 at 123.30 taka to the dollar, the rate on 14 September 2026. Twenty-two adds to cart, not twenty-two orders. Every one of those clicks was paid for whether it turned into anything or not.
So should you turn it off?
15% is a high price for advertising and a low price for risk, and those two sentences are both true at once. Offsite Ads charges you nothing unless an order actually arrives. My own ad spend charges me whether one arrives or not. That is the whole trade, and it is why the rate is set where it is: Etsy absorbs the loss on every click that goes nowhere and takes a large share of the ones that land.
The mistake is not choosing one or the other. The mistake is not knowing which one you are on, and finding out from an invoice.
Three things to do with this
- Check your status before you assume anything. Shop Manager → Settings → Offsite Ads. If the opt-out is there, you are under $10,000 and the choice is still yours. If it is not there, stop hunting for it — it is gone for good.
- Decide before you cross the threshold, not after. The decision has a deadline you cannot see on any screen, because the counter is a rolling 365-day total. Add up your last twelve months today, while opting out is still something you are allowed to do.
- Price for an attributed order, not an average one. An ordinary Etsy order loses about 10.7% to the rest of the fee stack; an attributed one loses roughly 25%. Run the worse number through your pricing formula and see whether the piece still works. If it only works at 10.7%, Offsite Ads is not your real problem — your margin is.
Sources: Etsy’s Fees and Payments Policy and How Etsy’s Offsite Ads Work, both read 15 September 2026. Exchange rate from exchange-rates.org, 14 September 2026.
Questions people ask about this
Can you turn off Etsy Offsite Ads?
Yes, but only if your shop has made under $10,000 USD in the prior 365 days. Above that Etsy requires participation at 12% and removes the opt-out permanently.
How do I turn off Offsite Ads?
Shop Manager → Settings → Offsite Ads → Opt out of Offsite Ads, then confirm. It takes about fifteen seconds.
Why is there no opt-out button in my shop?
Because your shop has reached $10,000 in sales in some rolling 365-day period since February 2019. Etsy’s policy says participation is then required “for the lifetime of your shop”.
If my sales drop back below $10,000, can I opt out again?
No. The policy wording is lifetime, not annual. Falling back under the threshold does not restore the opt-out.
Does the Offsite Ads fee apply to shipping?
Yes. Etsy calculates it on the total order amount, which it defines as the listing price plus shipping and gift wrapping.
Is the fee only charged on the item that was advertised?
No. Once a buyer clicks one of your Offsite Ads, any order they place from your shop within 30 days is an attributed order, whatever they end up buying.
Leave a Reply