The short version: Etsy brings you shoppers who came looking for handmade, and Amazon Handmade brings you shoppers who came looking for a product. That single difference drives almost everything else — what sells, what price holds, how much you spend on advertising, and how much a wholesale buyer cares about your numbers afterwards.
Most makers do not have to choose. Neither platform demands exclusivity, and running both is common. But they reward different products and different ambitions, and knowing which one your product suits saves a year of pushing against the grain.
The audience difference, which is the whole thing
An Etsy shopper typed something into a search box on a site that only sells this kind of thing. They already accept that items are made by a person, that shipping may take a week, and that the price reflects hands rather than a factory. Handmade is the baseline assumption, not a feature.
An Amazon shopper typed the same words into a search box on a site that sells everything. Your ceramic mug appears next to a case of twelve factory mugs at a quarter of the price with two-day delivery. The Handmade badge tells them the difference once they are looking at your listing, but it does not stop the comparison happening.
This cuts both ways. On Etsy your handmade story is table stakes, so you compete on aesthetic and niche against thousands of makers doing similar work. On Amazon your handmade story is genuinely differentiating, because almost nothing else in the results has it — but you have to survive the price comparison to get the chance to tell it.
The practical read: products whose value is obviously in the craft, the personalisation or the specificity do well on Etsy. Products that also work as a solution to a normal need — a good candle, a useful bag, a better cutting board — do well on Amazon, where the handmade quality reads as an upgrade rather than as the category.
Costs, side by side
| Amazon Handmade | Etsy | |
|---|---|---|
| Per listing | None | Small fee per listing, renewed |
| Per sale | Referral fee on the order | Transaction fee plus payment processing |
| Monthly | Waived while approved | None required |
| Advertising | Optional, auction-based | Optional, plus offsite ad fees |
The structures differ more than the headline numbers. Amazon takes a referral fee of fifteen percent of the order total including shipping, and waives the monthly Professional plan fee while you are in the programme. Etsy charges a small listing fee that renews when an item sells or expires, a transaction fee in the middle single digits, and payment processing on top, which together land in a broadly similar zone once everything is counted.
Where they diverge sharply is advertising. Amazon advertising is a keyword auction you opt into, and in competitive categories the cost per click is high enough that it becomes a real line in your margin. Etsy's offsite advertising programme is not fully optional for larger shops and charges a share of any sale it attributes, which surprises makers the first time it appears.
A worked comparison on a $32 hand-poured candle. On Amazon the referral fee is $4.80. On Etsy the transaction and processing fees on the same order land near $3.30 plus the listing fee, so a little less. If Amazon advertising is adding $3 of click cost per sale and Etsy offsite advertising takes a share of some orders, the gap narrows or reverses depending on your category. Neither platform is reliably cheaper. The full Amazon side is in Amazon Handmade fees.
Discovery and how much each platform does for you
Etsy discovery rewards niche specificity. A shop with a clear aesthetic, consistent tags and a defensible corner of a category can be found by people browsing rather than searching. Favourites, shop follows and the browse experience all generate some traffic without a purchase intent behind it.
Amazon discovery is almost entirely intent-driven search. Nobody browses Amazon for pleasure. If your product does not map to words a person types when they want to buy something, it will not be found, regardless of how beautiful it is. Titles and backend search terms carry the weight that an aesthetic carries on Etsy.
There is a volume difference underneath this. Amazon's total traffic is vastly larger, but the share of it that will ever see a handmade item is small. Etsy's traffic is smaller and almost all of it is potentially yours. Makers report both experiences as true: Amazon can produce a bigger month, and Etsy can produce a steadier one.
Fulfilment and delivery expectations
This is where Amazon has a real structural advantage. Fulfilment by Amazon lets you send stock in once and have Prime handle the rest, which changes conversion for anything a shopper compares against a Prime alternative. You stop packing parcels and start making product, which for a maker is the constraint that matters.
Etsy has no equivalent. You ship every order, you buy the postage, you go to the post office. That is manageable at ten orders a week and punishing at eighty.
The exception is customisation. Personalised items cannot go through fulfilment by Amazon because the item does not exist until the order arrives, so the shipping burden is identical on both platforms for those. If personalisation is the core of your business, the fulfilment advantage mostly disappears.
Which one a wholesale buyer respects
Most makers eventually want shelves rather than parcels, and this is where the two platforms stop being equivalent.
A retail buyer evaluating a new brand is asking whether it sells to strangers at a given price without anyone hand-selling it. Etsy success is real, but a buyer discounts it, fairly or not, because they read Etsy as a place where people go specifically to buy from makers. It proves the craft audience likes you.
Amazon proves something harder. A listing sitting in the results against factory alternatives, holding a price, accumulating reviews, is evidence the product wins on its merits in an open comparison. A made-up example a buyer understands immediately: a $32 candle in the top two hundred of its subcategory with 600 reviews at 4.7 stars. That tells them it survives shipping, it does not get returned, and shoppers choose it over cheaper options. Very few maker brands walk into a buying meeting with that.
None of which means abandoning Etsy. It means that if getting into stores is the goal, the Amazon listing is doing double duty as sales channel and as evidence. Amazon Handmade to retail covers how that evidence gets used in a pitch.
Running both without doubling the work
The combination most makers settle on: Etsy for the personalised and one-off work where the craft story does the selling, Amazon Handmade for the standard line that can sit in fulfilment by Amazon and earn Prime speed.
Three rules keep it from becoming two businesses. Keep the same retail price on both, because shoppers compare and a brand that undercuts itself trains people to hunt. Keep the same photography and the same product names, so the brand reads as one thing. And keep the production planning in one place, because the failure mode is selling stock on one platform that was promised to the other.
The stronger reason to run both is simple exposure. A shop that lives entirely on one marketplace has one policy change between it and no income. Diversify beyond Amazon makes that case in more detail, and it applies equally to a shop that lives entirely on Etsy.
The channel that is neither
Both platforms take a cut of every single unit, forever, and both require you to win the customer again tomorrow. Wholesale does not. A store that buys twelve candles at $16 is one transaction, no marketplace fee, no advertising, no customer service, no twelve parcels — and if the product sells through, they reorder without you doing anything.
That is the direction the marketplace numbers are really for. Paste a product link into WholesalePilot and the preview shows which shops and distributors plausibly stock something like it, which is how you find out whether your category has enough of them to be worth the effort.
Questions makers ask when choosing
Does listing on both hurt search ranking on either? No. Neither platform penalises selling elsewhere, and neither can see the other's performance.
Which is better for a brand-new maker? Etsy, usually, because listing is cheap, the audience is forgiving and you learn what sells. Add Amazon once a product is proven.
Is the Amazon application harder? Yes. Etsy lets you open a shop immediately; Amazon Handmade reviews your process first. The checklist is in Amazon Handmade requirements.
Which handles taxes and invoices better for wholesale? Neither. Wholesale runs on purchase orders and invoices outside both platforms, which is a separate system to set up.