Custom software for makers selling online, against Etsy's 6.5%

On Etsy, a €60 piece of jewellery loses over 12% to fees before any advertising. Those percentages buy an audience no homemade tool creates. Your own software changes the back office: production, materials, cost price, parcels.

Custom software for makers selling online is compared with two bills: Etsy takes 6.5% per sale plus 4% and €0.30 on payment; Shopify charges €27 monthly and 1.5% card fees (pricing recorded September 2, 2026). FEVAD counted 153,000 active retail websites in 2024.

What commission buys

Those 153,000 sites cover all French ecommerce, not just handmade creation, so comparison applies only to fees. Etsy's 6.5% buys traffic, millions of existing buyers looking for an object and finding yours, rather than software. Your site converts visitors sent to it better without creating any. A maker living from marketplace searches would lose revenue by leaving, which should be said before selling an alternative. Shopify takes the opposite position: subscription replaces commission, but audience costs advertising. Its tiers rise to €79 monthly with five staff accounts and €289 with fifteen; card fees fall from 1.5% to 1.1% at higher tiers, and third-party transaction fees from 2% to 0.6% for payments elsewhere. Wix and PrestaShop publish no consultable euro schedules: pricing is nonpublic for one, the pricing page errors for the other.

Dated seller complaints

Etsy's Trustpilot page is rated 1.4 out of 5 from 21,077 reviews, overwhelmingly by buyers rather than sellers, a caveat before quoting. Merchant reviews point to the same absence of recourse. A French seller writes August 24, 2026: 'Etsy closes my account and recalls my €250 payment.' Boris Viel on August 22, 2026: 'it removes product listings without valid reason or explanation'. Former seller San describes on August 1, 2026 'a resurgence of resellers of mass-produced goods from low-cost countries' and says they closed their shop. These situations share the underlying question of what you take when you leave.

The back office nobody sells

Makers lack five functions, none concerning the storefront. A made-to-order production book turns each sold piece into a dated task with statuses: to do, in progress, drying, firing, finishing, ready to ship, making the promised lead time real. Stock tracks raw materials rather than finished products: grams of silver, metres of fabric, kilos of glaze remaining, and reorder thresholds and suppliers. Per-piece cost includes materials, time, packaging, marketplace commissions, and actual shipping, showing money-losing references on one screen. Shipment preparation combines labels, weight, format, carrier, and tracking number with the day's parcel list printed together. Finally, customer records stay with you, exportable with history and timestamped consent, instead of a platform address book that can close your account.

Distance-selling rules

Withdrawal rights structure the rest: fourteen days for customers, fourteen for refunds, and since June 1, 2023 online cancellation as easy as subscription. Precontractual information must include product characteristics, total tax-inclusive price, and delivery times; legal notices must remain accessible, with absence exposing companies to fines up to €75,000. Surcharging by payment method is prohibited. GDPR requires freely given, informed, unambiguous consent without prechecked boxes, with requests handled within thirty days. Pay attention if also selling at markets or the workshop: an online shop paid through a payment provider escapes till obligations, in-person payments do not, and paragraph 375 of tax guidance prohibits self-developed software from replacing one. Electronic invoicing deadlines are in our dedicated article. Check your case with your adviser.

Six months later, the rule changes

Take an ordinary case: in April your shop is online only; in October you book three Christmas markets. Two things change together. In-person payments bring a compliant till alongside your tool, which stops handling payment. Your cost price must distinguish commissioned online sales from commission-free direct sales or displayed margins become wrong. Evolving custom software resembles construction: reopen the specification, describe the new rule in French, Victor writes it, Constance checks for contradictions, and Marcel splits it into one or two steps. The prior version remains in the timeline, restorable if you dislike the new one. The time and usage needed for this change depend on the existing code and required checks. AI spending in our tests guarantees neither a price nor an evening's work; add approval, hosting, external services and maintenance. Understanding what you had built helps prepare the next change. Maestro does this on your Mac, free for invited testers throughout beta.

Where to start

Take the last three months' sales and calculate what remains for your bestseller after all platform fees and shipping. Compare it with production time. If uncomfortable, first understand where money goes reference by reference instead of leaving the marketplace overnight. Production tracking and shipping come next, and the storefront last.