Etsy sale calculator: can you afford that discount?
A 25% sale doesn't cut your profit by 25%. It cuts it by much more, because your costs stay the same. Enter a listing and a discount to see profit at full price and on sale, how many extra orders the sale needs to pay for itself, and the deepest discount before every sale loses money.
Edit fee rates
Get the Seller Profit Sheet, $14 one-time. Launch price: 50% off with FIRST10, first 10 buyers.
US Etsy rates as of October 2026: 6.5% transaction fee and 3% + $0.25 processing on what the buyer actually pays (discounted item + shipping), $0.20 listing fee per item sold. Etsy sales and coupons in Shop Manager discount the item price; this calculator leaves shipping at full price. Offsite Ads and sales tax are left out.
That's one product. Which of yours lose money?
The Seller Profit Sheet does this math for every product at once. Paste your Etsy or Shopify sales export (or type in Amazon and eBay sales) and it shows net profit per product after fees, labels, discounts, returns and ad spend, with a red LOSING MONEY flag on anything underwater. Excel and Google Sheets, one-time $14, no subscription.
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Why a discount costs more than it looks
Your materials, label and Etsy's flat fees don't go on sale. The whole discount comes out of your profit, and your profit is only a slice of the price. Etsy does charge its percentage fees on the discounted price, so you save a little there, but only 9.5 cents of every dollar you give away.
Profit on sale = (sale price + shipping) × (1 − 9.5%) − $0.45 − materials − label
Sales needed = full-price sales × full-price profit ÷ sale profit
Worked example
A $40 item with free shipping, $12 in materials and a $5 label. At full price you keep $18.75. At 25% off the buyer pays $30.00 and you keep $9.70, which is 48% less profit from a 25% discount.
If you'd normally sell 20 in a month ($375.00 profit), the sale has to sell 39 to earn the same. A 10% discount leaves $15.13 per sale and needs 25 sales. The deepest discount this item can take before each sale loses money is 51.8%, a price of $19.28. At 60% off, every sale loses $2.97.
When a sale is still worth it
Clearing old stock. If the materials are already paid for and the item isn't selling, profit at a lower price beats none. Treat the materials as spent and judge the sale on fees and the label alone.
Targeted coupons. Etsy lets you send coupons to buyers who favorited an item or abandoned a cart. Those go to people already close to buying, so you give away the discount on fewer orders than a shop-wide sale.
Big sale events. When Etsy runs a site-wide event, the extra traffic may supply the extra orders. Use the "sales needed" number as the target and compare it to last year's event if you have one.
A sale is easy to judge on one listing. Across a whole shop with mixed prices it's harder, which is where a per-product breakdown of your sales export helps.
Questions
Does Etsy charge fees on the original price or the sale price?
On the sale price. The 6.5% transaction fee and 3% processing are charged on what the buyer actually pays. On a $40 item at 25% off, the fees are on $30.00.
How many more sales do I need to make up for a discount?
Divide your full-price profit by your sale profit. For the $40 example at 25% off that is $18.75 ÷ $9.70, so 20 normal sales become 39 needed on sale.
What's the biggest discount I can offer on Etsy without losing money?
Your break-even price is (materials + label + $0.45) ÷ 0.905, minus any shipping you charge. For $17 of costs that is $19.28, so a $40 item can go to 51.8% off before it loses money, and that leaves you nothing at all.
Is a coupon better than a sale on Etsy?
The math per order is the same. The difference is who gets the discount: a sale goes to every buyer, including people who would have paid full price, while a targeted coupon only reaches the shoppers you choose.