How to Sell Printables and Digital Downloads Outside Etsy (and Keep More of Each Sale)

If you sell printables, planners, templates or other digital downloads on Etsy, you've probably looked at a payout and wondered where the rest went. Listing fees, transaction fees, processing fees and, on some orders, a 15% Offsite Ads fee all come out of the same small price.

The usual advice is "just move to your own site." That's only half right. Etsy charges more because it brings buyers you didn't find yourself, and your own site brings nobody until you send people there. The better question is: for the buyers you bring yourself, where should they pay?

This guide compares what you keep from a typical $8 printable and a $27 bundle on Etsy and on four other ways to sell, explains what Etsy's rules do and don't allow, and gives a simple setup that keeps Etsy for discovery while your own traffic pays through your own checkout.

Fees below come from each platform's own pricing and policy pages, checked in October 2026, for a US seller and a US buyer paying by card. Pricing changes often, so confirm before you switch. This isn't tax or legal advice.

The short answer

• Keep your Etsy shop. It's still the easiest place to be found by people searching "budget planner printable" or "wedding checklist."
• Add your own checkout for traffic you bring: Pinterest, your email list, search, social posts. On an $8 printable, Stripe Payment Links keep about $0.68 more per sale than an ordinary Etsy sale, and about $1.88 more than an Etsy sale charged the 15% Offsite Ads fee.
• Don't redirect Etsy buyers. Etsy prohibits steering buyers who found you on Etsy to purchase elsewhere. Your own site is for your own audience.
• If you don't want to handle sales tax, use a merchant-of-record platform such as Lemon Squeezy instead of Stripe. You keep a bit less, and they deal with tax for you.

What you keep from an $8 printable

The math:

• Etsy: $8 − $0.20 − $0.52 − ($0.24 + $0.25) = $6.79
• Etsy with Offsite Ads: $6.79 − (15% × $8 = $1.20) = $5.59
• Stripe: $8 − ($0.23 + $0.30) = $7.47
• Lemon Squeezy: $8 − ($0.40 + $0.50) = $7.10
• Payhip + Stripe: $8 − $0.40 − $0.53 = $7.07
• Gumroad direct: $8 − ($0.80 + $0.50) − ($0.23 + $0.30) = $6.17

Two things stand out. First, fixed per-sale fees hurt most at low prices. Lemon Squeezy's $0.50 and Etsy's $0.20 + $0.25 are a much bigger share of $8 than of $27. Second, Gumroad is not the cheap escape from Etsy at this price: its 10% + $0.50 plus processing comes out below an organic Etsy sale.

What you keep from a $27 bundle

The Etsy Offsite Ads line is $23.99 − (15% × $27 = $4.05). The other figures are worked out in our Gumroad alternatives comparison and how to sell a PDF online.

Bundles are where your own checkout matters most, because Etsy's percentage fees scale with the price while Stripe's fixed $0.30 doesn't.

The Offsite Ads fee, explained

Etsy buys ads for listings on other sites (search engines, social networks). If a buyer clicks one of those ads and orders from your shop within 30 days, Etsy charges an advertising fee on that order:

• 15% if your shop has made less than $10,000 in sales over the prior 365 days. Shops under that threshold can opt out.
• 12% once your shop reaches $10,000 in a 365-day period. At that point participation is required for the life of the shop, even if sales later drop.
• The fee on a single order is capped at $100.

For a small printable shop, opting out is a choice worth making deliberately: the ads can bring buyers, but each attributed order costs 15% on top of the normal fees. You can change the setting in Shop Manager.

What Etsy's rules allow (read this before you add a website)

Etsy's off-platform transactions policy doesn't allow you to:

• tell a buyer to purchase an item through your own website or another shop instead of Etsy,
• share an email, phone number or social handle so a sale can be completed off Etsy,
• offer a discount or freebie for buying somewhere else, or
• use a QR code to send buyers off Etsy.

That includes Etsy Messages and the files you deliver to Etsy buyers. A "save 20% on my website" insert in your Etsy download is exactly what the policy prohibits.

What you can do is build your own audience and send it to your own checkout. Traffic you earn on Pinterest, from search, from your own email list or from posts on social media is yours, and you can choose where those people pay.

Etsy also has a Share & Save program: if you share your Etsy shop or listing links yourself and a buyer orders within 30 days, Etsy refunds 4% of the order total. Check whether it's available for your shop. If you'd rather keep your own traffic on Etsy, it narrows the gap.

The simple setup: Etsy for discovery, your checkout for your traffic

You don't need a full store builder. For a handful of printables, this is enough:

1. Pick your checkout. Stripe Payment Links if you want the lowest fees and will handle sales tax yourself (or add Stripe Tax). Lemon Squeezy or Payhip if you want tax handled for you.
2. Create one product per printable or bundle and upload the file (or, with Stripe, set "after payment" to redirect to a download page on your site that isn't linked or indexed).
3. Make one simple page per product: who it's for, what's included (page count, sizes, formats), 2–3 preview images, the price and a buy button. Our Stripe Payment Links walkthrough covers the delivery page step by step.
4. Test the purchase on your phone in a private window and make sure the file arrives.
5. Point your own channels at your page, not at Etsy. Pinterest pins, your email signup, your blog posts.

Keep prices consistent across both. Different prices on Etsy and your site confuse buyers, and offering a lower price elsewhere to Etsy buyers is against Etsy's rules.

Where your own traffic comes from

This is the part that decides whether your own checkout ever gets used. Etsy did the finding for you; now you have to.

• Pinterest. People search Pinterest for printables, planners and checklists, and pins can keep sending visitors long after you post them. One clear pin per product, linking to your product page or a helpful post, is the closest thing to Etsy search you can own.
• Search. A short article that answers a question your buyer asks ("how to plan a wedding budget", "printable chore chart for toddlers") with your printable as the next step can bring visitors for months.
• An email list. Offer a free sample page in exchange for an email. People who opted in are the buyers most likely to pay on your site.
• Communities, carefully. Answer questions where your buyers already ask them, follow each group's rules and only share links where they're allowed.

If you have no audience yet, read how to sell digital products without an audience and how to get your first digital product sale before you build anything.

Common questions

Should I close my Etsy shop?

Usually not. If Etsy is where your sales come from today, it's working as a discovery channel. Add your own checkout alongside it and move only the traffic you generate yourself.

Can I put my website link in my Etsy shop?

Etsy's buyer safety guidance says sellers are allowed to share links to their own websites and social media, but its policy doesn't allow using them to complete a purchase off Etsy or with an incentive to buy elsewhere. Read the policy linked above before you add anything.

Do I need to collect sales tax on printables sold on my own site?

Possibly. Many US states tax digital products once you pass their thresholds, and the EU and UK charge VAT on digital sales to consumers. Etsy, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad and Payhip handle this for you; with Stripe directly it's your job. Check your situation or use a merchant-of-record platform.

What's the cheapest way to sell printables outside Etsy?

On card payments, Stripe Payment Links on your own site keeps the most per sale in this comparison. The trade-off is that sales tax, the download page and your storefront are on you.

The bottom line

Etsy charges more because it finds buyers for you. Keep it for that. For every buyer you find yourself, send them to a checkout you control: on an $8 printable that's roughly $0.68 more per sale than an organic Etsy order, and on a $27 bundle about $1.93 more, before any Offsite Ads fee. The real work isn't the checkout, though. It's building the Pinterest, search and email traffic that gives that checkout something to do.

Sources (checked October 2026)

• Etsy fees & payments policy and how Etsy's Offsite Ads work
• Etsy off-platform transactions policy and Etsy Share & Save
• Etsy marketplace sales tax
• Stripe pricing
• Lemon Squeezy pricing
• Payhip pricing
• Gumroad pricing