How to Sell Digital Downloads on Etsy (Fees Included)

Here is how to sell digital downloads on Etsy in one paragraph, and then the part the guides skip. You open a shop, add a listing, pick "Digital files" as the item type, upload up to five files of 20 MB each, pay $0.20 to publish, and the buyer gets the files the moment they pay. On each sale Etsy takes 6.5% of the price plus a 3% and 25 cent processing fee for US sellers, and a further 15% if the buyer arrived through one of Etsy's own ads. A $10 file keeps you $8.60 without the ad and $7.10 with it.

The part the guides skip is that once your shop has made $10,000 in any 365-day window, the ad fee stops being optional, permanently. And that five files at 20 MB is a hard ceiling that some of the most popular digital products don't fit under.

Every figure below is from Etsy's own help and seller pages, loaded 15 September 2026. Where an Etsy page wouldn't load for my tooling, I've said so rather than borrowed a number from a blog.

The Listing, In Four Paragraphs

Etsy splits digital items into two kinds. Instant downloads are ready-made files the buyer gets immediately. Made-to-order downloads are custom files you send after the sale. Both have to be, in Etsy's words, "made and/or designed by you, the seller".

For an instant download you choose "Digital files" when the listing form asks what type of item it is, then upload the files as part of creating the listing. Up to five, each 20 MB or under. The file names buyers see are the names you upload, up to 70 characters of letters, numbers, periods, underscores or hyphens, and you can't rename them afterwards, so name them before you upload. You can add one note that shows on the Downloads page for every digital purchase from your shop, which is where the "how to open this" instructions go.

For made-to-order, you set "When did you make it?" to "Made To Order", take the sale, and complete it from the Orders page by uploading the finished files, same five-file, 20 MB limit. The buyer gets an email when it's ready.

Two rules with consequences. You can't offer variations on a digital item, so a planner in A4 and Letter is either one listing with both files inside or two listings. And per Etsy, "Canceling an order is the only way to revoke a buyer's access to a file after it has been purchased", which means there's no partial refund that also takes the file back.

That's the whole mechanical process, and every guide ranking for this term spends two thousand words on it. The rest of this piece is about what it costs.

The Fees, And What Each Is A Percentage Of

Etsy publishes its fees clearly enough. What it doesn't do is put them in one table with the base each one applies to, which is the thing you need to price a file.

The set-up fee is the one I can't give you a number for. Etsy's sell page says you may be charged it and that you'll see the amount before your final setup step. Third-party posts quote a range, but none of them is Etsy, so I'd budget for something and be pleased if it's nothing.

Processing fees vary by country. The 3% and 25 cents is the US row of Etsy's table. If you're elsewhere, find your row before you use any of the maths below.

What Etsy Keeps At Six Prices

This is the table I wanted and couldn't find. One unit per order, US seller, no shipping because there's nothing to ship. The listing fee is counted once per sale, since a multi-quantity digital listing renews at $0.20 each time it sells.

Two things fall out of this. The fixed parts, 20 cents to list and 25 cents to process, are what punish the cheap end. At $3 you keep three quarters and at $100 you keep nine tenths, and the difference is almost entirely those two fixed charges. A $3 printable isn't a bad product, but it's a product whose economics are set by 45 cents of fixed cost, and the guides that push volume at low prices never say that.

The other thing is the ad column. Offsite Ads turn an 86% keep into a 71% keep on a $10 file, and you don't choose which orders get attributed. Etsy does, on a 30-day click window, and one click can attribute several orders.

So the honest answer to how much Etsy takes from a $100 sale is either $9.95 or $24.95, and which one depends on where the buyer's last click came from.

The $10,000 Line

Offsite Ads is where new sellers get the rules wrong, because the page describing it has two columns and people read one.

If your shop has always made less than $10,000 in any consecutive 365-day period, you're enrolled automatically, charged 15% on attributed orders, and you can opt out from your settings. If your shop has ever made $10,000 or more in any consecutive 365 days, the rate drops to 12%, and, in Etsy's words, you're "required to participate for the lifetime of your shop".

Lifetime. Not for the year you crossed it, and not until you drop back under. A shop that has one strong December and clears $10,000 is in the program for good, at 12%, on every order Etsy attributes to an ad from then on.

I think that's a reasonable trade for a lot of shops, since the ads bring buyers you didn't have and 12% of a sale you wouldn't have made is better than nothing. But it's a decision that gets made for you at a threshold most people don't notice they're approaching, and it should be in your pricing before it happens rather than after. On the $100 file at the 12% rate the ad fee is $12 and you keep $78.05, which is fine. On the $3 printable it's 36 cents off a product that was already keeping $2.26.

If you'd rather not be in the program at all, opting out is a settings change, and it's only available while you're under the line. Whether you get a warning as you approach it, the page doesn't say.

The Hundred Megabyte Ceiling

Five files at 20 MB each is 100 MB per listing, and nothing on Etsy's page hints at how small that is for some products.

A hyperlinked digital planner exported with flattened pages can weigh hundreds of megabytes. One I read on the Goodnotes Marketplace this week was 389 MB for 134 pages, and I've gone through why in GoodNotes planner. A video course, a font family with every weight, a photo preset pack with sample images, or a large SVG bundle all clear 100 MB without trying.

The workaround every seller uses is to upload a PDF containing a link to the real files on a cloud drive. It works, and it has three costs the guides don't list. The buyer now has two steps and a link to lose, which shows up as "where's my file" messages. Your cloud storage becomes a dependency, so a moved folder breaks every past order at once. And the one revocation Etsy gives you, cancelling the order, no longer takes the file away, because the file was never on Etsy.

I'd treat the ceiling as a design constraint rather than a wall. A planner exported as vector pages rather than images fits comfortably. A preset pack shipped without the sample photos fits. A font family split across two listings fits, and costs an extra 20 cents. The products that genuinely can't be made to fit are the ones where a link-in-a-PDF is the honest delivery model, and for those the Etsy Canva templates piece covers what that model does to refund rates.

Where No Variations Sends Your Money

The no-variations rule looks like a footnote and behaves like a fee.

A physical seller lists one mug and offers three colours as variations on one listing. A digital seller with a planner in three colours and two page sizes either bundles all six files into one listing, which is fine if the buyer wants all six, or lists them separately, which is six listings at 20 cents each and six renewals every four months if they don't sell.

Sixty cents a year per unsold listing is nothing. Fifty unsold listings is $30 a year, which is still nothing, and that's the point. The cost of a wide catalogue on Etsy is close to zero, so sellers build wide catalogues, and the search results fill with near-identical listings from the same shops. The fee structure is why the category looks the way it does.

For a first shop I'd go the other way. One listing per product, all the sizes inside it, five files or fewer, and the note on the Downloads page telling the buyer which file is which. It's cheaper to maintain and easier to review.

What Sells, And What The $93K Post Doesn't Say

The ninth result for this search is a seller's account of $93,534.21 in gross revenue from a planner shop in 2020, opened in late 2018, with $45 in its first month. I've no reason to doubt her and no way to check, and the post contains no fees, no costs, no listing count and no ad spend, so the number that ranks it is the one number that tells you least about whether to do this.

What I can say from her own account is the shape. Roughly two years from opening to that year, a first month in the tens of dollars, and a product category, planners, that is among the most crowded on the platform. That's the useful information, and it's the same shape I've seen on my own products, where the first $29.99 sale on one of them arrived about two months after launch.

On what sells, one of the ranking guides lists printables, planners, templates, e-books, invitations, checklists, wall art, patterns, colouring pages, calendars, fonts and presets, which is to say everything. My own read is that the easiest digital product to sell on Etsy is the one a buyer needs this week and can't be bothered to make, such as an invitation for a date on their calendar or a form a landlord asked for, because the need is dated and the search is specific. The hardest is the beautiful general-purpose planner, because the buyer has more of them to choose from than they'll ever scroll through, and no deadline. The wider question of which digital products net what is in digital products to sell.

Questions

Is it worth selling digital downloads on Etsy? At the fee levels above, and with no shipping and no stock, the margin is fine from about $10 upward. Whether it's worth it is a question about your time and the category's crowding rather than about Etsy's cut, which is the smallest of the three problems.

How much can you make selling digital downloads on Etsy? I don't have a number and I'd distrust anyone who gives you one without their fees and listing count attached. The one seller ranking here reports $93K gross in a year, two years in, on planners. The realistic first-year picture for a new shop with a handful of listings is a first sale in weeks to months and a total that wouldn't cover a phone bill, and it grows from there or it doesn't.

Can you make $10,000 a month on Etsy? Some shops do, and at that level you're well past the $10,000-a-year line, so Offsite Ads at 12% are part of your cost base for life. At $12.99 a file that's around 770 sales a month, which is a catalogue and a marketing operation rather than a side project.

What digital downloads sell well on Etsy? Dated, specific, needed-now files outperform general ones in my judgment. Invitations, forms, worksheets tied to a curriculum, a template for a particular occasion. Planners sell in volume but into the deepest competition on the site.

What's the easiest digital product to sell on Etsy? The one you already made for yourself and would have paid $5 to skip. It's specific, it's tested, and it took you no extra time.

How much does Etsy take from a $100 sale? $9.95 without an ad attribution, $24.95 with one at 15%, $21.95 with one at 12%. For a US seller, one unit, no shipping.

Is there a physical-goods version of this maths? Yes, and the shipping line changes everything, which is why a $19.99 print on demand shirt on Etsy keeps 44 cents. That's in merch on demand.

What I'd Do

List one product, all its formats in one listing, priced at $10 or above so the fixed fees stop mattering. Write the Downloads note before the listing goes live. Export the files small enough to live on Etsy rather than behind a link.

Decide about Offsite Ads now, while you still can, and write the 12% into your price so that crossing the line one December doesn't surprise you the following spring.

Then stop reading revenue posts. The fee arithmetic on this page is the only part of the business that's the same for everyone, and it takes an afternoon. Everything after that is whether anyone searches for the thing you made.