Why Your Etsy Customers Should Be Buying From Your Website Instead

Etsy is a brilliant place to start. But it was never meant to be where you finish.

If you've built a customer base on Etsy and you're not actively moving those customers to your own website, you're leaving money on the table every single month — and building on ground you don't own. Here's why that matters, and what we did about it.

The Etsy fee you're probably not counting properly

Most Etsy sellers know about the 6.5% transaction fee. Fewer think about what it compounds to over a year. On a £40,000 Etsy turnover, you're paying £2,600 in transaction fees before you account for listing fees, payment processing and the offsite ads levy Etsy charges whether you opted in or not.

That's a significant sum. And unlike most business costs, it doesn't buy you anything lasting. It doesn't build your brand. It doesn't grow your audience. It pays Etsy for the privilege of selling on their platform, to their customers, under their rules.

They're Etsy's customers, not yours

This is the harder truth. When someone buys from your Etsy shop, Etsy owns that relationship. They hold the contact details, they control the communication, and they decide what that customer sees next. If they decide to show a competitor's listing underneath yours, or change the algorithm, or suspend your account pending a review — none of which is unusual — you have no recourse and no list to fall back on.

A customer on your own website is a different story. You have their email. You can follow up, offer a loyalty discount, tell them about a new product, build a relationship that doesn't depend on a third-party platform staying onside.

What we did — the wooden heart and the card

Every Cherry Grove Craft order that leaves via Etsy goes out with two things alongside the product: a small discount card for our website, and a little wooden heart with the words made with love in North Wales and our web address on it.

The card says simply: next time, buy direct. The wooden heart is a keepsake — it sits on a windowsill or hangs somewhere, and every time someone sees it they see the address. Combined, they cost pennies per order. Over hundreds of orders they've moved a meaningful portion of our Etsy customers to direct buyers.

It's not sophisticated. It's consistent. And it works precisely because it's physical — something to hold, rather than a screen you swipe away.

What changes when they buy direct

On your own website you keep the full margin. No transaction fee, no listing fee, no offsite ads charge. On a £40 sale the difference is real money.

You also learn more. Shopify and most e-commerce platforms give you far more data about customer behaviour than Etsy does. You can see how people navigate, what they look at before they buy, where they leave. That data shapes better decisions.

And you build an asset. A returning customer base on your own platform is something with genuine long-term value. An Etsy shop, however well optimised, belongs to Etsy.

The other reason to build your own site harder: AI search

This is newer, and most Etsy sellers aren't thinking about it yet — which is exactly why now is the time to act.

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overview "where can I buy a personalised oak house sign in the UK," Etsy may well appear. Your specific shop almost certainly won't. AI search surfaces websites with credible content and clear expertise — not marketplace listings.

Every blog post, every guide, every honest piece of content on your own site is a signal that you know your subject and can be recommended. We've built that case deliberately across this site over recent months — not to show off, but because it's the thing that compounds. The businesses that establish that authority now will be the ones AI recommends in two years. The ones who wait will be catching up.

What's possible — without telling you exactly how

We won't lay out the full method here. That's not us being coy — it's that the specifics depend on your business, your products and where you're starting from. What we can tell you is what it looks like when it's working: a content cluster that covers every question your buyers ask, internal links that pass authority between pages, a site that Google and AI tools treat as the definitive source on what you make.

You're reading a version of that strategy right now. This site has gone from standing start to a growing body of content that ranks, refers and converts — built without an agency, without a big budget, and faster than most people would believe possible.

Start with the card

If you take nothing else from this post, take this: put something physical in every package that points customers to your own website. A discount code. Your web address. Something they'll keep. It costs almost nothing and it starts the shift immediately.

Everything else — the content strategy, the SEO, the AI search visibility — builds on top of that foundation. But the foundation is a customer who knows you exist outside of Etsy.

If you're still setting up your own machines while you work on this side of the business, our hands-on training course covers the production side, so you're not learning software and settings and marketing all at once.

Want help with the rest? Our e-commerce consultancy covers everything from Etsy optimisation to full AI search strategy. Or get in touch and we'll have a conversation first.

Disclosure: The Shopify link in this post is an affiliate link — we earn a commission if you sign up via our link. This doesn't affect what you pay and we only recommend tools we genuinely use.