How much to sell digital downloads on Etsy for: what a UAE seller keeps at $4, $8 and $20

Two percentages sit on every Etsy sale made from Dubai before the price is even chosen: 6.5% for the transaction fee and 6.5% plus $0.30 for payment processing, because the United Arab Emirates sits on the higher of Etsy's processing rows. So the answer to how much to sell digital downloads on Etsy for comes in two parts. It costs a UAE seller 13% of the price plus $0.50 on each sale, once the $0.20 listing renewal is counted, and the price that holds up is the one where those fifty fixed cents stop being a quarter of the money. Below is the fee stack from Etsy's own help pages, then one small prompt pack priced at $4, $8 and $20 so the floor is visible rather than guessed.

I sell a few digital products from Dubai in the evenings, and the mistake I made first time was treating the percentage as the cost. The fixed cents decide the price.

What does it cost to sell a digital download on Etsy from the UAE?

Etsy publishes each fee below in its help centre, and none of them is specific to downloads. The same stack applies to a printable or a prompt pack.

• Listing fee. "$0.20 per listing. Fee is added to your Payment account when an item is listed. Has to be paid regardless of resulting sales." The same page charges $0.20 again when a listing auto-renews and "$0.20 per each additional quantity" sold, so on a download that keeps selling the $0.20 lands on every order. That is how I count it below.
• Transaction fee. "6.5% of the total order amount in your designated listing currency."
• Payment processing. "Payment processing fees are a set rate plus a percent of the total sale price of the item. This rate and percent vary by country." The by-country table lists the United Arab Emirates at "6.5% + 0.30 USD". The United States row is "3% + 0.25 USD". That gap is the UAE-specific part of the answer.
• Offsite Ads, charged only when an order came through one of Etsy's own adverts: "If you made less than $10,000 on Etsy in the past 365 days, you'll be charged a 15% fee on the order total. If you made at least $10,000, you'll get a discounted fee of 12%. The Offsite Ad fee will never exceed $100." A shop under that line can opt out; one that has crossed it in any 365-day period is enrolled for the life of the shop.
• Currency conversion. "A 2.5% fee is assessed when currency conversion is required." Listing in the payout currency avoids it.

The payout is the other UAE wrinkle. Etsy's eligibility page marks the UAE as a country whose sellers "can accept Etsy Payments with a Payoneer Payment Account", and the Payoneer article adds that "Etsy only supports deposits in United States Dollars (USD) to your Payoneer Payment Account" and that "Sellers who use Payoneer may be subject to Payoneer's withdrawal minimums and additional fees." So the money arrives in dollars, inside Payoneer, and the cost of moving it to a dirham account is Payoneer's number, not Etsy's, which is why it is left out of the table.

How much should a digital download sell for once the fees are in?

Here is one product worked through: a 20-prompt Arabic UGC starter pack, a slice of the kind of library the studio sells, listed from the UAE and priced in US dollars so no conversion fee applies. The first three rows assume the buyer came from Etsy search; the last shows one order attributed to an Offsite Ad at 15%.

The two percentage fees take the same 13% at every price. What moves is the $0.50 that never changes: the $0.30 processing floor and the $0.20 renewal. At $4 those cents are 12.5% of the price on their own; at $20 they are 2.5%. A seller in the United States keeps $6.79 of the same $8 sale, because the processing row there is 3% + $0.25, so the UAE seller gives up an extra 33 cents on every order before Payoneer takes its turn.

On Etsy the percentage is the same at every price; it is the fifty fixed cents that decide whether a cheap download is worth listing.

That is why my floor for an Etsy download sits higher than for the same file sold through a direct link. Gumroad vs Stan Store works the direct-link maths, where the percentage is higher but there is no renewal and no advert fee. On Etsy the marketplace does the finding and the fees charge for that: a small fixed cost on every order, a larger slice when its advert brought the buyer.

The Offsite Ads row is the one I check before setting any price. Below the $10,000 line the adverts can be switched off, and I keep them off, because 15% on top of the stack turns an $8 sale into $5.26 kept.

How much do you make in profit per month selling digital downloads?

Nobody can answer that from a fee table. What it can show is how many sales each price needs to reach the same money, which is the useful version of the question.

The $4 pack needs more than twice the buyers of the $8 pack to leave the same amount in Payoneer, and each extra buyer is a review, a message and a possible refund request. The $20 pack needs twelve, which is a different product: a fuller library, not a starter slice. The gross column also shows how far these counts sit from Etsy's $10,000 line: at $240 a month it is roughly three and a half years away. Profit is the kept column minus the time already spent making the file.

What I settled on, after running these rows for the studio's own files, is that $4 on Etsy is a price for being found, not for being paid, and that an $8 to $20 band is where a download from the UAE keeps enough of itself to be worth the listing. The maths does not say which of those a given file deserves. It only says that below the band, the fifty cents are the real buyer.

Sources

• Etsy Fee Basics · Etsy Help
• What are the Fees and Taxes for Selling on Etsy? · Etsy Help
• What are Payment Processing Fees for Selling on Etsy? · Etsy Help
• How Etsy's Offsite Ads Work · Etsy Help
• Countries Eligible for Etsy Payments · Etsy Help
• How Do I Use a Payoneer Account With Etsy Payments? · Etsy Help