Amazon Handmade vs. Etsy: A Seller’s Guide (2026)

Amazon Handmade is Amazon’s application-only storefront for handcrafted items; Etsy is an open marketplace for handmade and vintage goods.

When choosing between the two, you’re often comparing Amazon’s high traffic volume and Etsy’s clear buyer intent. Trade-offs also show up in the fee structures as well as in how much of the customer relationship you get to keep. Neither provides a storefront you own. 

This guide compares fees, eligibility, audience, and seller tools across both online marketplaces. It also covers when it makes more sense to start your own ecommerce store.

Amazon Handmade vs. Etsy: A quick overview

Amazon Handmade is a gated category inside a larger store (Amazon) built to sell everything else. Etsy, on the other hand, is a marketplace where handmade goods are the entire premise. Amazon audits applicants because they have to prove the category is genuine, while Etsy admits anyone and enforces scope after listing. 

The buyer intent stems from that too. Amazon shoppers arrive looking for a product; Etsy shoppers arrive looking for a specific kind of product.

Here’s how the platforms compare at a glance:

What is Amazon Handmade?

Amazon Handmade is a maker-only section of Amazon where approved sellers can offer handcrafted, hand-designed, hand-altered, repurposed, and upcycled products. 

Amazon runs an application and audit process to ensure the store sells only genuine handcrafted products. Approved sellers create a maker profile that customers can see, they can list products in 14 eligible categories, and can then fulfill qualifying orders themselves or through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).

“If you just look at how many people visit Amazon every day, you will realize real quick that just having your listing on Amazon increases your exposure by thousands of percentage points,” says David Shoap, who sells handcrafted pins as Sarah’s Treats and Treasures. 

What is Etsy?

Etsy is a global online marketplace for unique and creative goods sold by independent businesses. The platform’s product standards extend beyond traditionally handmade items. 

You can list products you make, original designs produced with help from a disclosed production partner, digital downloads, vintage goods, and qualifying party or craft supplies.

As a seller, you create your own Etsy shops and manage listings, orders, customer messages, promotions, and shipping through the platform. 

At the end of 2025, Etsy had 86.5 million active buyers and 5.6 million active sellers. During the same year, sellers generated $10.46 billion in gross merchandise sales, giving small creative businesses access to a sizable built-in audience. 

How do the fee structures compare?

Amazon Handmade charges a higher but more predictable percentage of each sale, while Etsy starts with a lower transaction rate but stacks listing, processing, and potentially advertising fees.

Amazon Handmade fees breakdown

Approved sellers pay the Professional plan’s $39.99 charge for the first month, after which Amazon waives the monthly subscription. There are no listing or storefront fees, but you will need to consider:

• Transaction fee. Amazon deducts 15% of each sale or 30¢ per unit shipped, whichever is greater.
• Optional fees. If you opt for fulfillment by Amazon, Amazon Ads, or Amazon Custom for personalized orders, each costs extra, and their rates are published separately from the Handmade page.

Etsy fees breakdown

On Etsy, you’re charged in layers. All of these published fees exclude VAT:

• Setup fee. This one-time charge may be required to open a shop. It is displayed during onboarding and is non-refundable once paid Etsy reserves the right to adjust it and to waive it during promotional periods. 
• Listing fee. It costs 20¢ per item and is charged whether or not the item sells. Listings expire after four months and auto-renew at 20¢ each unless you switch to manual. 
• Transaction fee. This is 6.5% of your displayed price, plus what you charge for shipping and gift wrapping. US sellers aren’t charged on sales tax; sellers elsewhere pay it on the listing price including any taxes they’re responsible for. Optional personalization fees are added to the display price and charged at the same rate.
• Payment processing. This is charged per transaction, varying by the country of your bank account, and assessed on the full sale amount including tax and shipping.
• Regulatory Operating fee. This fixed percentage in certain countries is charged on top of everything else. 
• Offsite Ads. Any order attributed to an ad will be charged 15%, which drops to 12% once a shop passes $10,000 in sales over any trailing 365-day period. Below that threshold, you can opt out. Once you cross it, participation and the 12% fee apply for the lifetime of the shop, even if sales later fall back. The fee is capped at $100 per order.
• Optional fees: You can get Etsy Plus at $10 a month, Pattern at $15 a month after a 30-day trial, and a 2.5% currency conversion fee if you list in a currency other than your payment account’s.

How the fees compare on a pre-tax $35 order

Say you’re a US seller with a US-based bank account and you’re selling a $30 item with $5 shipping. Both platforms calculate their commission on the same base. 

Amazon’s referral fee applies to an item’s total price, which includes its list price, shipping costs, and any gift-wrapping charges. Etsy’s transaction fee applies to your displayed price plus what you charge for shipping and gift wrapping. 

Here are the fees you would pay and the amount you would keep:

Etsy costs $1.47 less on this order. The processing fee for a US bank account is 3% plus 25¢, assessed on the gross order amount, and Amazon folds payment processing into its 15% referral fee rather than charging separately.

Amazon Handmade may have lower total fees in two instances:

• Below roughly $8 an item. Etsy carries two fixed charges on every sale—the 20¢ listing fee and the 25¢ processing component—against Amazon’s single 30¢ minimum.
• Above roughly 2.8 listings per annual order. Etsy’s per-listing charge works out to about 60¢ a year, paid whether the item moves or not, while Handmade charges nothing to list. A shop with 1,000 listings and 300 orders a year pays around $1,673 on Etsy against $1,575 on Handmade. Push it to 500 orders, and Etsy is back in front.

Note: Sellers outside the US pay different processing rates on Etsy and different referral rates on Amazon. The best way to compare the fees you will pay overall is to compare your average order value (AOV) against your sell-through rate.

Audience, reach, and buyer intent

Amazon Handmade has a larger audience than Etsy, while Etsy caters to an audience that is highly motivated to discover unique handmade items.

Note: Etsy publishes its buyer count, seller count, and spend per buyer four times a year. Amazon publishes none of the equivalents for Handmade, so what follows is drawn from Etsy’s filings and Amazon’s seller documentation.

Amazon Handmade: You get broad reach with search-first behavior

Amazon doesn’t publish a current active-buyer count or annual sales figure specifically for Handmade. The broader marketplace nevertheless gives sellers access to substantial existing demand: independent US sellers sold more than 4.6 billion items through Amazon in 2025, or over 8,900 every minute, and independent businesses now generate more than 60% of Amazon store sales. 

These are Amazon-wide figures rather than Handmade performance benchmarks, but they show the scale of the retail environment Handmade sellers enter.

The trade-off is context: A shopper may encounter your handmade product while searching for a particular item rather than deliberately looking for an independent maker.

Etsy: You get a smaller audience with niche buyers

Etsy attracts a smaller but more concentrated creative-commerce audience. As of December 31, 2025, it had more than 100 million items for sale. The marketplace generated about $10.5 billion in gross merchandise sales, 74% of which came from US buyers. More importantly for handmade sellers, custom or made-to-order products accounted for about 30% of Etsy’s 2025 sales value. 

Etsy also identifies gifting, holidays, weddings, and personal milestones as major buying occasions, suggesting that shoppers often arrive looking for something specific and/or personal, rather than the quickest available product. Etsy’s Seller Trend Report: Spring and Summer 2026 revealed unique wedding search trends: wildflower wedding signs more than doubled, wedding statement rings rose 200%, and bridesmaid baskets increased 4,200% compared with the same period a year earlier. 

Those figures are category-specific rather than marketplace-wide forecasts, but they show how strongly occasion-led and personalized demand can surface on Etsy.

Branding and owning your business

Amazon Handmade and Etsy give you space to present a brand and sell personalized work, but you’re still restricted by the rules of each marketplace. 

While both marketplaces restrict your ability to move a buyer into a relationship you own, Etsy states it outright. Etsy’s Fees & Payments Policy says any action to move a transaction off Etsy is strictly prohibited—explicitly including encouraging buyers to purchase from your shop through another venue, or directing them to one via a QR code.

Amazon operates a comparable restriction. David Shoap, cofounder of Sarah’s Treats & Treasures, says, “We’re not really allowed to brand ourselves as much on Amazon and eBay. They say you are, but the minute you suggest ‘go to my website’ inside of a chat, you’re actually in violation of Amazon’s policies.” 

What Amazon Handmade does give you is a maker profile visible to customers, where you describe your inspiration, your process, and your products. That’s the branded surface, and it sits inside Amazon’s product page template.

For the founders of Sarah’s Treats, it made sense to keep Amazon for its reach while adding Shopify to gain more control over their branded storefront and manage thousands of product listings across both channels.

Customization and print on demand

There are specific rules and restrictions for personalized work and print-on-demand items.

What changes with customization?

Both let you sell personalized work, but neither lets you do it for free.

On Etsy, an optional personalization fee is added to the listing price you display, and the combined total is subject to the same 6.5% transaction fee. If you charge $5 to engrave a name, Etsy takes its cut of the $5.

On Amazon, the toll is operational. Personalized Handmade orders run through Amazon Custom, and Custom products must be fulfilled by the seller; they can’t go through Fulfillment by Amazon. The moment you offer personalization, you give up FBA on those items, and with it, the fulfillment speed that drives a large share of Amazon’s conversion advantage.

Which platform is best for print-on-demand (POD) sellers?

Etsy allows POD production partners when the product uses your original design or a buyer’s customization, and you must disclose the partner on the listing. But you must disclose that the item is made by a production partner, and state accurately where it ships from. If the item was created using AI, that requires its own disclosure.

For Amazon Handmade, it reads as narrower. The qualifying classifications include hand-altered and hand-designed, and entry runs through an application and audit designed to keep the store to genuine handcrafted products.

Shopify offers the broadest operating flexibility, with POD apps that connect product creation, order routing, and fulfillment to your own storefront.

Why Old World Kitchen and Oakywood moved beyond marketplaces

Handcrafted home-goods brand Old World Kitchen made their first Etsy sale just three days after launching and credits the marketplace with helping establish the business.

As prices moved upmarket, business manager Loran Polder found the typical Etsy shopper—younger, more budget-conscious—was no longer their customer. Plus, reselling complementary products wasn’t possible on Etsy at all. 

“There’s a huge amount of distraction on Etsy,” Loran says. “It’s more like strolling through a crafts fair rather than intentionally driving up to a brick-and-mortar store."

After launching on Shopify, the brand’s conversion rate increased, and they expanded into email marketing and resale products while keeping Etsy as a secondary sales channel.

Polish furniture maker Oakywood opted to leave Etsy outright, instead. When their founder, Mateusz Haberny, sold on Etsy, the brand went head-to-head with competitors and had no standalone store to differentiate itself. 

Fulfilling custom work on Etsy posed an even larger issue because buyers had to describe the piece they wanted on a form, with no way to picture the result before committing to something expensive. 

“I thought, ‘There needs to be a better way of doing this,’” says Mateusz. “The great thing about Shopify is that it was very easy to take a webshop to market in a matter of hours—not weeks.”

Oakywood moved to Shopify in 2017. And after adding a 3D configurator, their business that had gone months at a time with almost no custom orders began taking roughly 200 to 300 a month.

What are the signs you’ve outgrown the marketplace model?

When you outgrow the marketplace model of Amazon Handmade and Etsy, it often means the built-in audience no longer compensates for the margin or operational flexibility you give up in return. These are some common signs:

• Your catalog is growing faster than your sales. Etsy charges 20¢ when you publish a listing and again when it renews after four months, regardless of whether it sells, while Amazon Handmade takes 15% from each sale.
• You’ve crossed $10,000 and lost the ability to opt out of ads. Etsy’s Offsite Ads fee falls from 15% to 12% once a shop passes $10,000 in trailing annual sales. At that point participation becomes mandatory for the lifetime of the shop, even if sales later fall back below the threshold. 
• Your buyer is no longer the marketplace’s buyer. If your prices increase or products change, your typical buyer profile may change as well, making a marketplace less of a fit.
• Your product range is moving beyond marketplace eligibility. Amazon Handmade limits its program to approved handcrafted, hand-designed, hand-altered, repurposed, and upcycled products in eligible categories. Etsy is broader, allowing items sellers make, design, handpick, or source under its Creativity Standards, but it still restricts general resale.
• You want a direct relationship with customers. Both Amazon Handmade and Etsy restrict direct marketing, off-platform communications, and customer data. 

An owned online store like your own Shopify storefront gives you control over your domain, storefront design, navigation, product storytelling, content, and promotions.

It also lets you list unlimited products without a per-listing charge. You only need to account for your Shopify subscription and payment processing fees.

Plus, it allows you to manage the customer information shoppers provide to your business and use built-in tools for email, messaging, customer accounts, analytics, and remarketing. 

Can you sell on Amazon Handmade and Etsy while expanding to Shopify?

Yes, and most sellers do. Old World Kitchen kept their Etsy shop running as a secondary channel after launching their own storefront, and Bookishly still runs more than 700 live Etsy listings alongside their own Shopify site. Shopify’s marketplace sales channels are designed to support this kind of multichannel model.

For Amazon, Shopify Marketplace Connect lets you manage listings, orders, and inventory from your Shopify admin. You can list or edit Amazon products, import orders automatically or manually, synchronize inventory and tracking, and choose between merchant fulfillment, FBA, and Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment. 

Amazon Handmade approval and product requirements still apply to the products you sell through that program. 

Etsy requires a different setup. As of this writing, new Etsy connections can’t be created through Marketplace Connect, although stores with an existing connection are grandfathered in.

For new Shopify sellers, you can import your Etsy listings using a CSV file or Shopify’s first-party Store Migration app, which is currently in early access for eligible stores. For ongoing inventory and order synchronization, Shopify gives sellers access to third-party Etsy integration apps in the Shopify App Store.

Amazon Handmade vs. Etsy vs. Shopify: Which platform is right for you?

The right platform depends on whether you need built-in demand, access to Amazon’s retail infrastructure, or greater control over the business you’re building. You can also use more than one: Marketplaces can introduce new customers while Shopify becomes the home of your brand.

Start with Amazon Handmade when…

• You list far more than you sell. Listing is free, and the monthly Professional fee is waived after the first month, so Amazon only charges when something ships. Past roughly 2.8 listings per annual order, Amazon beats Etsy.
• Your items are inexpensive. The 30¢ minimum referral fee is gentler on low-priced goods than Etsy’s combined 20¢ listing and 25¢ processing charges. 
• You want Amazon’s fulfillment. FBA is available, though not for personalized orders, which must be seller-fulfilled through Amazon Custom.
• You’re prepared to compete within Amazon’s shopping environment. David Shoap, who sells handcrafted pins through Amazon’s main jewelry category rather than Handmade, reported in 2017 that the Amazon channel accounted for 76.8% of his orders and 72.7% of monthly sales value.

Start with Etsy when…

• You want to test demand without a monthly subscription fee. You can launch with a small catalog and pay listing, transaction, and payment-processing fees as you go.
• Your products suit occasion-led browsing. Etsy shoppers actively seek handmade and personalized gifts, wedding products, vintage items, craft supplies, digital downloads, and original designs.
• You’re still working out what sells. A marketplace gives you purchase data on a small catalog before you commit to a range; you learn which products people actually want by listing several and observing.
• You want marketplace discovery while your brand is young. Old World Kitchen made their first Etsy sale within three days and credited the platform with helping establish the business.
• You accept that the customer belongs to Etsy. “Building brand loyalty on Etsy is hard. Most of the time, a customer’s loyalty is to Etsy, not to your brand,” says Olivia Wang, founder of Floral Neverland.

Consider moving to Shopify when…

• Your brand has become part of the product. You want control over your domain, design, navigation, product storytelling, content, merchandising, and promotions rather than fitting into a marketplace template.
• You’re generating your own demand. When customers arrive through social media, email, press, creators, or word of mouth, sending them to your own storefront can reduce reliance on marketplace discovery.
• Your buyers need to see the product before they’ll buy it. Oakywood moved beyond Etsy to offer visual 3D product store customization and now receives around 200 to 300 custom orders per month, after years of going months at a time with almost none through a marketplace order form.
• You’re selling through several channels. Shopify can become the central system for products, inventory, orders, and customer relationships while Amazon Handmade or Etsy continue supplying marketplace discovery.

For eligible Shopify stores, products are structured once through Shopify Catalog and surfaced by default across channels including Shop, ChatGPT, and Copilot, with performance across those channels visible in the Shopify admin.

For a small team, you need to figure out what gaining wide reach costs in hours of labor. For example, Heirloom Leathercraft is a two-person leather atelier whose founders run it on Shopify precisely so their artisans don’t have to think about marketing or inventory. 

As cofounder Tristan Walker says: “We can focus artisans on artisanship.”