Etsy, Inc. (ETSY)

Wie das Geld verdient wird

Etsy is paid by its sellers, not by its buyers. The bulk of revenue is a set of fees taken on each sale: a transaction fee on the item price (which also includes the fee charged when a sale comes from Etsy's off-site advertising), a payments processing fee on orders settled through Etsy Payments, and a small fee to list an item. On top of that Etsy sells optional services sellers can choose to buy — on-site advertising to push their listings up in search, and discounted shipping labels. Because the fees scale with the value of goods sold, revenue tracks gross merchandise sales, and the ratio between the two — the take rate — is the number management steers: it was 24.2% in 2025 against 22.3% in 2024. That rising take rate is why revenue grew 2.7% to $2.88 billion in 2025 even as gross merchandise sales fell 5.3%.

Umsatz nach Segment

Etsy's advantage is the two-sided marketplace itself: 8.76 million active sellers across the group make the catalogue worth searching, and the buyers that search bring the sellers. A rival cannot buy that inventory of one-off, handmade and vintage items — it has to be assembled one small seller at a time — and the Etsy name has become the default word for that kind of shopping. But the moat is narrow rather than wide, and the 2025 figures show why: active buyers fell 3% to 86.5 million on the Etsy marketplace and habitual buyers fell 9%, so the network is not holding its users automatically. Sellers face little cost to list the same goods on a rival marketplace, a social platform or their own storefront at the same time, and buyers switch on a search result.

Almost everything sold on Etsy is discretionary — a gift, a decoration, a piece of jewellery, a personalised item — so demand follows how willing households are to spend on things they do not need. On top of that the year is strongly seasonal: the filing states that sellers see increased sales during the fourth-quarter holiday shopping season, which lifts gross merchandise sales and revenue in the fourth quarter of every year. The 2025 numbers show the sensitivity plainly: consolidated gross merchandise sales fell 5.3% and Etsy marketplace gross merchandise sales fell 4%, with new buyers down 10% year on year.

Wichtigste Risiken

• Intense competition — Etsy lists competition first among its own risk factors and states it may not be able to compete effectively. Sellers can list the same goods with large online retailers, at craft fairs and local markets, on social networks and — a channel the company now names explicitly — through agentic shopping experiences, or sell wholesale directly to traditional retailers. Etsy also competes with the companies that sell software and services to small businesses.
• Trustworthiness and safety of the marketplaces — The company identifies the perceived trustworthiness and safety of its marketplaces as critical to its success, and flags the risk of fraud and illegal activity on the platform. Because Etsy neither owns nor inspects the goods, counterfeit, unsafe or misdescribed items listed by sellers can damage the brand that draws buyers in.
• Enforcing marketplace policies — Etsy lists the enforcement of its marketplace policies as a strategic risk. The company has to police what may be listed — handmade, vintage or craft-supply criteria among them — across millions of independent sellers, and both under-enforcement and over-enforcement carry costs: the first erodes buyer trust, the second alienates the sellers who supply the inventory.
• Technology disruption, cybersecurity and reliance on third parties — The risk factors cover disruption of Etsy's technology and cybersecurity incidents, dependence on third-party technology the company does not control, and risks in its payments systems. Etsy Payments both moves the money and generates a share of the fee income, so a failure there hits revenue and seller trust at once.
• International trade barriers — Etsy names international trade barriers among its strategic risk factors. A large share of the marketplace's activity crosses borders — small parcels shipped from an individual seller in one country to a buyer in another — so tariffs, customs thresholds and import rules bear directly on whether those orders remain economic.
• Quarterly volatility and missed guidance — The company warns that its quarterly operating results fluctuate and that it may fail to meet the guidance it provides. It also notes the difficulty of tracking its own operational metrics — the buyer and seller counts investors use to judge the business — and the possibility of impairment charges on acquired assets.
• Execution of the Depop sale and past acquisitions — Etsy carries a specific risk factor on the Depop sale, alongside the general risk of acquisitions and partnerships. The agreement with eBay, signed 15 February 2026, is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close in the second quarter of 2026 — it is not certain until it does, and Depop was the group's growing marketplace, up 36.3% in gross merchandise sales in 2025.
• Convertible notes and dilution — Etsy flags its convertible debt as a risk and, separately, the dilution of existing shareholders that can come from the conversion of those notes and from equity issuances.

The filing discloses no customer concentration and states no threshold such as a customer accounting for 10% or more of revenue. That is consistent with the structure of the business: Etsy's paying customers are its sellers, 8.76 million active across the group at the end of 2025, and no single one of them is material. The concentration risk sits elsewhere — in the buyers, whose numbers fell in 2025, and in the traffic sources Etsy depends on to reach them.