Etsy vs Folksy: which is cheaper for UK makers?
Folksy's 6% commission looks cheaper than Etsy's stack of fees — and usually is — but payment processing and postage change the picture. A side-by-side comparison for UK makers.
Folksy is the UK's home-grown handmade marketplace, and its headline 6% commission looks far friendlier than Etsy's pile of percentages. Mostly, it is — but the comparison is less obvious than the headlines suggest, because the two platforms charge on different amounts and Folksy leaves payment processing to someone else.
How Etsy charges
Etsy takes a 6.5% transaction fee, 4% + 20p payment processing, and a 0.48% regulatory operating fee — all three calculated on the total the buyer pays, postage included — plus roughly 15p per listing. Add the 20% VAT that non-VAT-registered UK sellers pay on fees, and a typical sale loses about 13–16% of the order total.
How Folksy charges
Folksy takes 6% commission plus VAT — but only on the item price, not on your postage charge — and 15p + VAT per listing (free listings on the £7.50/month Folksy Plus plan). Crucially, Folksy doesn't process payments: your buyer pays through PayPal or Stripe, which charge their own fee on the whole amount — a standard PayPal UK rate is around 2.9% + 30p.
Side by side on a real sale
For a £25 item with £3.50 postage, a non-VAT-registered seller pays roughly:
- Etsy: about £4.18 in fees — around 15% of the order.
- Folksy (with standard PayPal): about £3.11 — around 11% of the order.
Folksy wins on cost here, mainly because its commission ignores postage and there's no regulatory fee. The gap narrows on item-only sales and widens on postage-heavy ones.
The part fees don't capture
Cost per sale isn't the whole decision. Etsy's traffic is vastly larger — a dearer sale that actually happens beats a cheaper sale that doesn't. Folksy's buyers are UK-based and specifically looking for handmade, which suits some products perfectly and others not at all. Many UK makers list on both and let the numbers decide: if a product sells steadily on Folksy, it earns more per sale there; if it only moves on Etsy, that's where it lives.
Check your own numbers
Every product is different — price point, postage weight and your PayPal rate all shift the answer. The free marketplace comparison tool on this site takes one product's costs and price and shows the fees and profit on Etsy, Folksy, eBay, Amazon, TikTok Shop and Shopify side by side, so you can see where each item actually earns most. Both platforms' rates are verified against their official fee pages, and if anything doesn't match your real statement there's a "report a wrong fee" link on every calculator.