How to move from Etsy to your own website

What Etsy actually costs you

Work out your real rate before you decide anything. At the time of writing (October 2026) a US seller pays:

• $0.20 per listing, which covers four months or until the item sells, then renews and charges you again.
• 6.5% transaction fee on the total order, including what the buyer paid for shipping and gift wrap.
• Payment processing of roughly 3% plus a small fixed charge per order in the US. The rate is set by country and is higher in the UK and much of Europe.
• Offsite Ads, which is the one that stings: 15% of the sale if your shop has done less than $10,000 in the past 365 days, 12% once you cross that line. Under $10,000 you can switch it off. Once you have crossed $10,000 you are enrolled permanently and cannot opt out, even if sales fall again. The fee is capped at $100 per order.
• Etsy Plus at $10 a month, optional, for listing credits and a small ads credit.

Put that on a real order: a $40 item with $6 shipping.

So on a quiet order Etsy takes about 10% and your own store takes about 3.5%, a difference of roughly $3.20. Against a $29 a month platform that is break-even at about nine orders a month. If Offsite Ads fire on that same order at 15%, Etsy's cut jumps to around $11.70 and break-even arrives in three or four orders.

Two things that do not appear in the table matter just as much. Etsy owns the customer list and Etsy owns the ranking. You are renting both.

What you give up, and for how long

Be honest with yourself about this part. Etsy reported 87.0 million active buyers in the quarter ending June 2026, down very slightly year on year. Those are people already searching for handmade, vintage and personalised things, already logged in, already holding a saved card. Your own domain has none of that on launch day.

In practice, for the first two months almost every sale on your own site comes from someone who already knows you: past buyers, your email list, your Instagram followers, people who found a card in a parcel. Google usually takes three to six months to start sending real traffic to new product pages, and longer in crowded categories like jewellery and prints.

That is the whole argument for not closing the Etsy shop. Etsy pays for itself while your own site is young. The fees are rent on traffic you have not built yet.

There is one case where you should not start this at all. If Etsy is 100% of your income, you have no email list and you have only a handful of followers anywhere, spend six months building the list first and move later. A store with no audience is just a bill.

The order to do it in

1. Export your shop data while everything is still live.
2. Start collecting email addresses today, before the new site exists.
3. Buy the domain and build the site quietly.
4. Rebuild the listings properly rather than pasting them across.
5. Write the shipping, returns and privacy pages.
6. Place a real order on your own site and ship it to yourself.
7. Tell your audience, off Etsy, and run both shops side by side for a full season.
8. Thin out Etsy listings slowly, at renewal, rather than closing the shop.

Most people who regret the move did step seven first.

Export everything before you touch anything

Etsy lets you download your own data from Shop Manager, under Settings, then Options, then the Download Data tab. Take all of it:

• Listings CSV. Titles, descriptions, prices, currency, quantity, tags, materials, SKUs and image URLs for your active listings. It exports everything at once, with no way to pick a subset.
• Orders CSV and Order Items CSV. Choose a month and year, or a whole year at a time. Download every year your shop has existed.
• Payments CSV if you use Etsy Payments, plus your monthly statements. Your accountant will want these, and they are much harder to get hold of once a shop closes.

Two gaps to plan around. The listings file gives you image URLs, not image files, so work from your own original photos rather than compressed copies. And your reviews do not travel. Copy your best ones into a document now, as plain text with first names only, so you have something to put on the new product pages.

Rebuild the listings, do not paste them

Etsy titles are written for Etsy's internal search, which is why so many read like "Personalised Birth Flower Necklace Gold Custom Name Jewellery Gift for Her Mum Birthday". Google does not reward that, and a shopper arriving cold from a search result finds it off-putting.

For each product page:

• Write a human title, then let the keywords sit in the body copy where they read naturally.
• Give the page a clean address, like /shop/birth-flower-necklace, not a number.
• Open with what the thing is, what it is made of and how long it takes to make. Etsy buyers know the conventions of the platform; a cold visitor does not.
• Put dispatch time, materials, sizing and care in a short list rather than a wall of text.
• Re-crop your photos. Etsy pushes you towards square, and your own product page may want tall images, with a lifestyle shot doing the work at the top.
• Add the review you saved earlier, just under the add to basket button.

If you have more than about fifty listings, do your twenty best sellers properly and leave the long tail on Etsy for now. Twenty good pages beat two hundred thin ones, for shoppers and for search alike.

Start collecting email addresses today

This is the part that decides whether the move works, and you can start it this week without building anything.

Etsy's seller policy does not let you add a buyer to a mailing list simply because they bought from you. The email address on an order is there for order related contact. Copying it into a newsletter tool breaks Etsy's rules and, in the EU, the UK and plenty of other places, the law as well. People have to opt in.

What you can do:

• Put a card in every parcel with a short offer and a QR code: a care guide, a discount on a second order, early access to the next drop.
• Use the Message to Buyers field, which appears on the receipt and the confirmation email, to invite people to subscribe.
• Link your site from the About page of your shop and from your social bios.
• Ask on Instagram or TikTok, with something worth having behind the sign up form.

Give yourself a number so you can see it working. If you ship 40 orders a month and a quarter of those buyers take the insert offer, that is around 120 addresses a quarter and roughly 500 in a year. Five hundred people who have chosen to hear from you is a launch, and it is the one asset no marketplace can switch off.

The boring pages you need before launch

On Etsy these were handled for you. On your own site they are yours, and in most countries they are not optional.

• Checkout people trust. Card payments plus Apple Pay and Google Pay, because a large share of handmade buying happens on a phone and a saved wallet beats typing a card number.
• A shipping page. Zones, prices, dispatch time as a number of working days, and who pays import duty. If you sell internationally, say plainly whether the price includes duty or the buyer pays on delivery. Most angry emails come from that one line being missing.
• Returns and refunds. Buyers in the EU and the UK generally have 14 days to withdraw from a distance sale. Goods made to the buyer's specification or clearly personalised are excluded under Article 16(c) of the EU Consumer Rights Directive and the equivalent UK rules, but state that clearly on the product page and in your policy rather than hoping it is understood. Faulty goods are a separate right and the exclusion does not cover them.
• A privacy policy and cookie notice, because you are now the one collecting the data.
• Terms of sale and a contact page with a response time you can actually keep.
• Tax. Check your own registration thresholds for sales tax or VAT. Etsy handled a good deal of this invisibly and your own store may not.

Then place a real order on your own site, with your own card, from your phone, and ship it to yourself. You will find at least one thing broken. Everyone does.

Move your audience deliberately, not all at once

There is a rule here that catches people out. Etsy's fee avoidance policy does not let you use Etsy to direct shoppers to another venue to buy the same items you list there. Links are generally only clickable from your shop's About page, and a listing description telling buyers to go and buy it cheaper elsewhere is a reliable way to get a shop suspended.

So the handover happens off Etsy, through channels you own:

• Email your list with a reason to visit, not a plea to leave Etsy. A product that is only on your site works far better than "please buy here instead, it saves me fees".
• Change your social bio links and pin a post about the new site.
• Keep putting inserts in parcels, including Etsy parcels.
• Launch new designs on your own site first and let them reach Etsy a few weeks later. Over a year that quietly shifts the centre of gravity.

Run both for at least one full season, including whichever quarter is busiest for you. When Etsy listings come up for their four month renewal, that $0.20 charge is a natural decision point: renew the ones that still earn, let the rest lapse. You are not closing a shop, you are letting it shrink while the other one grows.

Keep the Etsy shop open even when it is small. A handful of live listings costs almost nothing, it keeps a second channel for the Christmas rush, and it is reversible in a way that closing is not.

Doing it on WebNewBiz

WebNewBiz is built for this situation: a shop owner who needs a site, a checkout and somewhere for customers to live, without hiring anyone. You describe the business in plain language, the AI drafts the pages, and you change things by chatting with the Copilot instead of wrestling with a drag and drop editor.

What matters for an Etsy move:

• Starter, $29 a month, adds the online store with a cart and secure checkout, taking card payments through Stripe plus Apple Pay and Google Pay. The store can run on WooCommerce, Shopify or WebNewBiz's own engine.
• Growth, $79 a month, adds the AI CRM with 3,000 contacts and three team members, basic SEO tools, backups and a free domain for the first year. Store buyers become contacts automatically, which is the part Etsy never gave you.
• Pro, $149 a month, adds email campaigns, social posting, advanced SEO with a site audit, and the Website Booster for speed.
• Every plan is $1 for the first month, there is no minimum contract, and yearly billing is cheaper.

The honest limits. The $9 Lite plan has no store at all, so a seller needs Starter as a minimum and Growth if the customer list matters. There is no free plan. WebNewBiz is younger than Shopify or Wix with a much smaller app ecosystem, so if you depend on a niche print on demand or shipping integration, check before you commit. The AI gives you a solid first draft rather than a finished shop: your photos, your product facts and your own edits are still the job. And if you later move on, your content and domain come with you but the layout is rebuilt, so do not plan on exporting the site as files.

If your catalogue runs to hundreds of items and you live inside apps, Shopify at $29 a month for Basic is the better tool, and we say so in our guide to Shopify alternatives. For a maker with twenty to eighty products who wants the site, the store and the customer list in one place, the all in one route is usually simpler. The same stepwise logic applies to any platform move: our guide on moving a website off Wix covers the technical side, and if you are still choosing we compare the options in the best AI website builders.

To see what your shop might look like before paying for anything, try the free AI Website Preview: describe your shop in one sentence and it designs a homepage you can look at.

Quick answers

Should I close my Etsy shop when my own website launches?

No. Run both for at least one full season, including your busiest quarter. Etsy keeps paying the bills while your own site has no search traffic, and letting listings lapse at their four month renewal is reversible in a way that closing is not.

How many orders a month make my own store cheaper than Etsy?

On a $46 order Etsy costs about $4.82 in fees and your own store costs about $1.63 in card processing, a saving of roughly $3.20. Against a $29 a month store plan that is break-even at about nine orders. If Offsite Ads fire on your sales, break-even comes much sooner.

Can I email my Etsy customers to tell them about my new site?

Not unless they opted in. Etsy's seller policy limits order email addresses to order related contact and bars adding buyers to a mailing list without consent, and data protection law in the EU and UK says much the same. Invite people to subscribe through parcel inserts, your Message to Buyers and your social accounts.

Can I link to my own website from my Etsy listings?

Treat that as risky. Etsy's fee avoidance policy prohibits using Etsy to direct shoppers elsewhere to buy the same items, and links are generally only clickable from your shop's About page. Put the link there and in your social bios, and do the real persuading off Etsy.

How long until my own site gets traffic from Google?

Plan for three to six months before product pages bring meaningful search traffic, and longer in crowded categories like jewellery and prints. Until then every sale comes from people who already know you, which is why the email list has to come first.

Do my Etsy reviews and sales history move with me?

No. Reviews, your star rating and your sales badge stay on Etsy. Copy your best reviews into a document as plain text before you shrink the shop, and use them as testimonials on your new product pages.

Related guides

• Best AI ecommerce website builders: an honest cost comparison

Where to start

Do the two free things this week: download your shop data, and put a sign up card in every parcel you post. Neither commits you to anything, and both are worth having even if you stay on Etsy forever.

When you are ready to build the site, WebNewBiz is an AI website builder with the store and the customer list in the same place, and the first month costs $1. Start for $1, see what the AI drafts from one description of your shop, and cancel before the month is out if it is not right for you.