{"id":174,"date":"2026-09-30T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/?p=174"},"modified":"2026-09-30T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T12:00:00","slug":"folded-shipping-cyber-sale-discount","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/folded-shipping-cyber-sale-discount\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Etsy Cyber Sale Is Discounting Your Shipping Too"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your Etsy Cyber Sale Is Discounting Your Shipping Too<\/h1>\n

You did what everyone told you to do. Etsy said listings with shipping under $6 get priority in US search, so you took the $6 you used to charge for postage, added it to the item price, and flipped the listing to free shipping. Buyer pays the same total. Same fees. Nothing lost. It felt like a free win.<\/p>\n

Now it’s the end of September, Cyber 5 (Thanksgiving, Nov 26, through Cyber Monday, Nov 30) is about eight weeks out, and you’re setting up the sale. You type in 25% off, same as last year.<\/p>\n

Here’s what changed since last year: that 25% isn’t coming off your item<\/em> anymore. It’s coming off your item and<\/strong> the postage you tucked inside it. USPS doesn’t give you 25% off the label.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The math nobody finished<\/h2>\n

Folding shipping in is good advice, and it’s true that at full price nothing changes. The trouble is that the advice stops at full price, and nobody runs the numbers through a sale.<\/p>\n

Take a leather card holder. You price it at $30 and it costs about $6 to ship, so under the old setup you’d list it at $30 plus $6 shipping. Under the new setup it’s $36 with free shipping.<\/p>\n

Run a 25% sale on each version:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Shipping charged separately:<\/strong> 25% off $30 is $22.50. The buyer pays $22.50 plus $6 shipping, so $28.50. You keep $22.50 for the item.<\/li>\n
  • Shipping folded in:<\/strong> 25% off $36 is $27. The label still costs $6, which leaves $21 for the item.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    That’s $1.50 per order. It’s easy to shrug at, so let’s put it in context.<\/p>\n

    What $1.50 really does to your profit<\/h2>\n

    The $1.50 doesn’t come out of your price. It comes out of your profit<\/em>, and during a sale your profit is already thin.<\/p>\n

    Say the card holder’s true cost is $15: leather, thread and edge finish, twenty minutes of your time at $25 an hour, plus your share of rent, tools and packaging. Now run standard Etsy fees on each scenario: 6.5% transaction fee on the full order, 3% + $0.25 payment processing, and the $0.20 listing fee. (Leave Offsite Ads out for now. They only make it worse.)<\/p>\n

    | | Full price, $36 | 25% off, shipping separate | 25% off, shipping folded |
    \n|—|—|—|—|
    \n| Buyer pays | $36.00 | $28.50 | $27.00 |
    \n| Etsy fees | $3.87 | $3.16 | $3.02 |
    \n| Postage label | $6.00 | $6.00 | $6.00 |
    \n| Your true cost | $15.00 | $15.00 | $15.00 |
    \n| Profit<\/strong> | $11.13<\/strong> | $4.34<\/strong> | $2.98<\/strong> |<\/p>\n

    Fees drop a little along with the lower total, so the real gap is closer to $1.36 than $1.50. But look at the bottom line: the folded-shipping sale earns about 31% less profit than the same sale did last year.<\/strong> Nothing about the leather, the stitching or your hours changed. Only where the postage sits in the price changed.<\/p>\n

    Spread that over a busy Cyber weekend of 80 orders and it’s about $109 you worked for, packed, and handed to the post office for free.<\/p>\n

    \"A<\/p>\n

    It gets worse the heavier the item<\/h2>\n

    The card holder is the gentle case. Six dollars is a small slice of $36.<\/p>\n

    Now take a stoneware mug priced at $38 that costs $11 to ship in a box with padding. Fold that in and the listing reads $49 with free shipping. At 30% off, the discount eats $3.30 of the postage alone on every order, before fees. Potters, candle makers with glass jars, anyone shipping boards, lamps or quilts: the heavier the parcel, the bigger the share of your "price" that’s really the post office’s money, and the more of it a percent-off sale gives away.<\/p>\n

    \"Hands<\/p>\n

    "But Etsy said the buyer pays the same and the fees are the same"<\/h2>\n

    That’s true at full price, and it’s why the advice sounds airtight. A percentage discount, though, applies to whatever number is on the listing, and the listing number now includes postage. The advice is fine. The sale is what nobody checked afterward.<\/p>\n

    Other objections you might have:<\/p>\n

    "I only folded part of it."<\/strong> Plenty of sellers set shipping at $5.99 to stay under the line and folded in the rest. Say a $9 label, $5.99 charged, $3.01 folded. Then the leak is smaller: 25% of $3.01, or about $0.75 an order. It’s smaller, but you should still know it’s there.<\/p>\n

    "Buyers expect the same 25% as last year."<\/strong> They expect a good deal. They don’t check whether it’s 25% or 21%. A shopper looking at a card holder that was $36 and is now $28.80 sees a real discount. Only you see the percentage.<\/p>\n

    How to set a sale that doesn’t give away your postage<\/h2>\n

    You don’t have to undo free shipping. You just have to aim the discount at the part of the price that’s actually yours.<\/p>\n

    1. Find your real discount.<\/strong> Multiply the discount you want by the share of the price that’s the item:<\/p>\n

    \n

    effective discount = intended discount \u00d7 item price \u00f7 listed price<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    For the card holder: 25% \u00d7 $30 \u00f7 $36 = about 21%. Run the sale at 20% or 21% and you keep roughly what a 25% item-only sale would have kept. For the mug: 30% \u00d7 $38 \u00f7 $49 = about 23%.<\/p>\n

    2. Or use a dollar amount instead of a percentage.<\/strong> A $7.50-off coupon on the $36 card holder lands the buyer at $28.50, exactly what the old item-only 25% sale charged. Dollar-off discounts don’t scale with the postage inside the price.<\/p>\n

    3. Group listings by shipping weight.<\/strong> One shop-wide percentage treats a card holder and a boxed mug the same way, and they aren’t. Put light items in one sale and heavy ones in another, or leave your heaviest pieces out of the percent-off sale and give them a dollar-off coupon.<\/p>\n

    4. Check your floor before you commit.<\/strong> For every listing in the sale, subtract fees, the label and your true cost from the sale price. If what’s left is near zero, that item shouldn’t be at that percentage, however good the number looks in the banner.<\/p>\n

    Do it now, not on Thanksgiving night<\/h2>\n

    Cyber 5 is when most of your fourth-quarter orders arrive at once. A small per-order leak adds up fastest when volume is highest, and you’re too busy packing to notice. The settings you choose in October are the ones you’ll live with in late November.<\/p>\n

    So pull up your sale candidates this week. For each one, write down four numbers: item price, folded shipping, true cost, and the sale price. If you’d rather not do it on the back of an envelope, CrafterBy’s free cost calculator keeps materials, labor, overhead and fees in one place, so you can see your floor before you pick the percentage.<\/p>\n

    Free shipping can still get you found in search. Just make sure the sale that follows is paid for out of your margin on purpose, and not out of your postage by accident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Folded $6 postage into your price for Etsy search? A 25% Cyber 5 sale now cuts your shipping too. See the math and how to pick a sale % that’s safe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[211,209,208,210,213,212],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pricing","tag-etsy-6-shipping-rule","tag-etsy-cyber-monday-sale","tag-etsy-free-shipping-price","tag-etsy-sale-discount-shipping","tag-etsy-sale-percentage","tag-how-to-price-handmade-items-with-free-shipping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":177,"href":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/177"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crafterby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}