Selling on Etsy but Not Making Money? The Stall Form

2026-10-22

It's Tuesday, 10:25, and the Christmas market application is open on your laptop.

Stall fee: 85. Deadline: Friday. There's a little box at the bottom that asks, Expected turnover? The cursor blinks in it.

You are Ines, an illustrative maker who prints linocut cards and tote bags at the kitchen table. Your Etsy shop has had a good autumn. The orders keep pinging in. Last week there were five in one day, and you did a small, private victory lap around the hallway.

So why can't you type a number into that box?

The question under the question

The honest answer is that you don't know if you're making money.

You know you're selling. You can see that. The little orange notification sits on your phone like a badge of honour. But when you picture the bank account, it doesn't feel like a business with five orders a day. It feels like a tap that drips slowly into a bucket with a small hole.

You think about the last few weeks. The lino blocks you replaced. The good paper, bought twice because the first batch was the wrong weight. The tote bags in a box in the hall. The padded envelopes. The stamps. The fees that arrive in pieces, a listing fee here, a transaction fee there, something called a payment processing charge you've never quite looked at.

Every piece is small. Together they are a fog.

And under that fog sits the thought you don't say out loud, not even to your sister: What if I'm working all these hours to earn almost nothing?

The price you picked in 2023

You try to remember how you chose your prices. You didn't, really. You looked at what other shops charged for similar cards, took a number that felt polite, and shaved a little off in case it seemed greedy.

That was two years ago. The paper has gone up. The postage has gone up. You have gone from five cards a week to fifty, and you never sat down and asked whether the first number still made sense.

Somewhere along the way you started telling yourself a story: It's a side thing. It's a hobby that pays for itself. It doesn't need to be a proper business.

But it feels like a proper business on Sunday evenings, when you're packing parcels until your fingers hurt.

The sticky-note answer

You do what you always do. You open the Etsy dashboard and look at the big sales figure at the top. It's a nice number. It makes you feel better for about eleven seconds.

Then you remember that this number is what came in. It says nothing about what went out. It doesn't know about the paper, the ink or the bags. It doesn't know about the two hours you spent on that custom order for a woman who then changed the wording three times.

You pick up a sticky note and try to do the sum by hand. The first line goes fine. The second line needs a receipt you can't find. By the fourth line you're guessing, and by the fifth you're staring out of the window at a neighbour's dripping gutter.

You put the pen down. The application box is still blinking.

What you want is not a lecture about margins. You want to see it. One calm page that says: this card, this bag, this much in, this much out, this much actually yours.

The turn

Here's the thing you start to notice, sitting there with cold tea.

Not knowing isn't a character flaw. You are good at making things people want to buy. Nobody ever told you that the second half of the job, knowing what each thing really earns, is a separate skill, and that it can be made small and quiet.

It doesn't need to be a spreadsheet maze. It could be one place where each product has its real costs and its real fees next to it, and a price that comes out the other end. A place where the market-day cash box and the online orders sit in the same picture instead of two notebooks.

You realise you don't need to become an accountant. You just need to stop guessing.

A different Tuesday

Imagine the same morning, a few weeks from now.

The application form is open. You glance at your sheet, and you already know which three products paid for themselves last month and which one quietly didn't. You know the tote bags are fine. You know the cheap cards are the ones that need a new price, and you know roughly what that price is.

You type a number into the turnover box. It isn't a wild guess. It's an honest, slightly boring number, and boring feels wonderful.

Then you decide, calmly, whether 85 for the stall is a good bet or a pass this year. Either answer is fine. The point is that it's your answer, and not a flinch.

You close the laptop. The kettle goes on. The orange notification pings again, and this time it just sounds like good news.

If you recognised yourself

If you read this and thought that's me and my little hole in the bucket, there's a gentle next step.

Price Your Handmade Work Right – Cost, Fees & Profit Calculator is an Excel workbook for makers. It shows cost, fees and profit per product, suggests a price, and lets you track market and online sales in one place. It opens with a Start here sheet, so you can enter one product and see the picture fill in within a few minutes.

It comes with a 30-day money-back promise: if it doesn't help, you get a full refund, no questions. It's an organising tool, and the decisions stay yours. It does not replace a tax professional.

You don't have to be certain about your shop before you look. You only have to be a little tired of guessing.

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.