Should I sell teaching resources on Etsy?
Etsy is a reasonable place to sell printable classroom resources, but from January 1, 2027 you can only do it as a TPT Basic seller. If you opt in to Exclusive, paid digital educational resources on Etsy are not allowed.
What Etsy charges
As of October 2026, Etsy’s Fee Basics page and its Fees and Payments Policy list these charges for a US seller:
- A listing fee of 20 cents per listing.
- A transaction fee of 6.5% of the price you list, plus any shipping or gift wrap you charge.
- A payment processing fee of 3% plus 25 cents when you take payment through Etsy Payments.
- A one-time shop set-up fee for new shops. Etsy shows the amount before you finish setting up, so we are not quoting a figure here.
Etsy does not list a separate fee schedule for digital downloads. The same fees apply.
Here is that arithmetic on two prices, counting one listing fee per sale:
| Sale price | Listing fee | Transaction fee (6.5%) | Processing (3% + 25¢) | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $10.00 | $0.20 | $0.65 | $0.55 | $8.60 |
| $5.00 | $0.20 | $0.33 | $0.40 | $4.07 |
Etsy may also charge an advertising fee when a sale comes through one of its offsite ads, and you can choose to pay for ads inside Etsy. Those are on top of the numbers above. Read the fee policy for the current terms.
For comparison, on a $10 sale TPT Basic leaves you $5.20, TPT Exclusive leaves you $7.75, and your own store with standard card processing leaves you about $9.41.
What Etsy handles for you
- Buyers who are already searching. Etsy is a marketplace. People type “sight word printable” into its search box and find listings. That is the main thing you are paying for.
- Checkout and file delivery. The buyer pays and gets the download without you doing anything.
- Sales tax on marketplace sales. Like TPT, Etsy collects and remits sales tax on sales made through its marketplace. You do not register in other states because of your Etsy orders. This is not tax advice, and your home-state rules are a question for your accountant.
What Etsy does not do
Etsy buyers are mostly parents, homeschoolers and gift shoppers, with some teachers. It is not a teacher marketplace. Resources that sell well on TPT do not always sell on Etsy, and the listings that do well there tend to be visual, printable and easy to understand from one photo.
You also do not own the customer relationship. As on TPT, the marketplace sits between you and the buyer, sets the rules and can change the fees.
Why Exclusive rules Etsy out
TPT’s Exclusive Seller membership requires that you sell digital educational resources only on TPT. That includes resources you have never listed on TPT. You can read the wording in TPT’s announcement and its Exclusive Seller FAQs.
TPT says Exclusive sellers may still sell some things elsewhere, including physical products and digital items unrelated to education such as clip art and fonts. So an Etsy shop that only sells, say, printed classroom posters shipped by mail or a font pack is a different case from one selling phonics worksheets as PDFs. If you are unsure which side of the line a product sits on, ask TPT before you rely on it.
Please do not try to get around the rule with a shop under another name or a second account. That puts your TPT account at risk, and for most sellers the TPT account is the bigger income.
When Etsy makes sense
Sellers on Reddit’s TPT forum report that some of them earn around a third of their income on Etsy and feel pushed toward Basic because of it. If that is you, the choice is a real one and worth doing on paper:
- Etsy is already a large share of your income. Giving it up for an extra 22.5 points on TPT may cost more than it gains. Do the sum with your numbers.
- Etsy is a small side shop. If it brings in $30 a month and TPT brings in $1,000, Exclusive almost certainly pays more.
- You have not started on Etsy yet. Going Basic to open a new Etsy shop means taking a certain pay cut on TPT for an uncertain gain. That is a hard trade unless you have another reason to be Basic.
Etsy or your own store?
They do different jobs. Etsy brings its own search traffic and takes about 14% of a $10 sale. Your own store keeps about 94% of that sale but brings no traffic of its own. Sales there come from your email list, Pinterest, your blog, social media and search engines, and that takes time to build.
Some Basic sellers will use both: Etsy for strangers who are searching, their own site for people who already know them.
About us
Up At Last builds and hosts stores for teacher-sellers on WordPress and WooCommerce, from $25 a month. We do not earn anything from Etsy and we have no stake in whether you open a shop there.
Up At Last is not affiliated with or endorsed by Teachers Pay Teachers.
What to do next
- Run the free calculator with your TPT sales and your Etsy sales to see which membership pays more.
- Check Etsy’s current fee page yourself. Fees change, and this post is only correct as of October 2026.
- List what you sell on Etsy today and mark which items are digital educational resources. Those are the ones Exclusive would not allow.