Crosslist from Causee to Etsy — Vintage and Handmade Only

On this page

• Which Causee items is Etsy allowed to sell?
• How do you prove an item is vintage?
• Handmade and upcycled pieces
• How FLUF declares an Etsy listing, and when to change it
• What Etsy costs a UK seller compared with Causee
• Offsite Ads: the fee that arrives later
• Why bother: a UK-only room against an international one
• Postage, labels and overseas buyers
• What transfers from Causee to Etsy, field by field
• How to crosslist from Causee to Etsy with FLUF Connect
• What syncs between Causee and Etsy, and what does not
• Tax: Etsy reports you to HMRC
• What FLUF Connect costs
• Sources and verification
• Related guides

Which Causee items is Etsy allowed to sell?

Etsy will only take Causee stock that is vintage, made by you, or genuinely transformed by you. Anything else — ordinary secondhand clothing, homeware and books under twenty years old — is reselling, and Etsy does not allow reselling. Work out which pile each item belongs in before you connect anything, because that decides whether this route is worth setting up at all.

The two platforms are built on opposite ideas. Causee is a general pre-loved marketplace: its FAQ describes a launch focus on pre-loved fashion, children’s school uniform and accessories, and it asks nothing about who made an item or when. Etsy’s Seller Policy says everything listed must be made, designed, handpicked or sourced by the seller, and its reselling guidance treats selling a commercially available item you did not make or design as prohibited.

Since June 2025 those rules have been written as four Creativity Standards categories. Only two matter for a Causee seller: “made by a seller” and “handpicked by a seller”, the second of which is where vintage lives. The standards also name what is excluded, and one line describes much of Causee’s catalogue exactly: resold commercially available items newer than 20 years, even if they are designed to look vintage.

Here is how Causee’s own categories sort against that rule. The shares are from our count of Causee’s live catalogue on 3 September 2026.

If most of your Causee shop is recent fashion, point that stock at Vinted, Depop or eBay instead, which take ordinary secondhand goods. This page is for the slice that is older, or that you made.

How do you prove an item is vintage?

Etsy’s vintage line is a number: an item has to be at least 20 years old. In 2026 that means made in 2006 or earlier, and the cutoff moves forward every January. “Retro style”, “Y2K look” and “old stock from a shop clearance” do not count unless the item itself is old enough.

Causee never asked you when something was made, so most listings carry no date. You need evidence you could show if asked: a retailer label design that was dropped years ago, old-style care labels, metal zips with maker’s marks, a backstamp on ceramics, the edition page of a book, or best of all an original receipt or dated photograph.

The honest rule is simple: if you cannot date it with confidence, it is not vintage for Etsy’s purposes, and it belongs on a general resale marketplace. Put the approximate decade and your reason in the description (“1990s, dated by the label”). Buyers of vintage read it, and it is the record you want if a listing is ever questioned.

Condition works differently too. Causee grades every item on a five-step scale: New, New with tags, Used – Excellent, Used – Good and Handmade. Etsy’s listing form has no universal grade like that; the attributes you can add depend on the category. Etsy’s own advice to vintage sellers is to spell condition out in words, such as “deadstock” for never-worn old stock. So the flaws matter more in the Etsy description than they ever did on Causee.

Handmade and upcycled pieces

Causee is one of very few marketplaces that treats “Handmade” as a condition. If you used it, you already have a list of candidates for Etsy’s “made by a seller” category, which covers physical items made by the seller by hand or with tools.

Three cases come up often with Causee sellers.

Things you made from scratch — knitwear, quilts, jewellery, ceramics, children’s clothes sewn from a pattern. These are the clearest fit on the whole route. Etsy’s buyers pay for the making, and a handmade piece usually sells for more there than on a low-priced resale site.

Upcycled clothing and furniture. Rework counts when it actually transforms the item: a jacket rebuilt from vintage fabric, a chair stripped and reupholstered, patchwork cut from old denim. The Creativity Standards exclude a commercially available base item with only a superficial change, such as a stick-on decoration. A high-street T-shirt with an iron-on patch is still a resold T-shirt.

Old fabric, buttons and patterns. These can often be listed as craft supplies, which is part of the “sourced by a seller” category. Vintage sewing patterns and haberdashery are an established niche on Etsy.

How FLUF declares an Etsy listing, and when to change it

Every Etsy listing states who made the item and when. When FLUF Connect creates an Etsy listing, it declares the item as vintage, made by someone else, before 2006. For a genuine vintage piece that is the correct answer, and you have nothing to do.

For anything you made yourself, it is the wrong answer. Open the listing in Etsy’s Shop Manager after it is published and change “who made it” and “when was it made” to match the item. Do the same for craft supplies. It takes seconds per listing, and it keeps your shop’s declarations true, which is what Etsy’s standards actually check.

It is also why you should never push a whole Causee catalogue across in one go: recent fashion would be published declared as vintage. Filter first.

What Etsy costs a UK seller compared with Causee

Causee charges sellers nothing. Etsy charges several fees that stack, and for a UK seller they come to roughly 11–12% of the order before any advertising. The gap is real, and it should shape your prices on Etsy.

On Causee, the FAQ says sellers keep 100% of the price they sell for, with no listing fee. The platform earns from a Protection Fee paid by the buyer. The charity part sits on Causee’s side, not yours: Causee says it donates its own profits after costs, and it does not ask sellers to give anything.

A worked example

Take a 1990s wool jacket sold for £40 with £5 postage charged to the buyer, so an order of £45.

The figures are rounded, but the same price earns you less on Etsy. Many sellers on this route set Etsy prices a little higher than their Causee prices, which Etsy’s international buyers for vintage and handmade usually accept. FLUF can apply a price rule per marketplace, so you do not have to edit each listing by hand.

Getting paid in pounds

Both platforms pay a UK seller in sterling, on different clocks. Causee holds the buyer’s payment and releases it through Stripe once the item is delivered, after which its FAQ says money typically arrives within 3–7 business days.

Etsy Payments pays into a verified UK bank account, and for a UK shop the payout currency is GBP. You choose a deposit schedule of daily, weekly, every two weeks or monthly, and a Bacs transfer then takes a few business days to land. Etsy takes its fees from your sales balance before paying out, so the figure in your bank is already net of everything in the table above.

Offsite Ads: the fee that arrives later

Offsite Ads are adverts Etsy buys for your listings on other websites. You pay only when a buyer clicks one and orders within 30 days, and the fee is taken from that order, capped at $100 per order.

Under Etsy’s Offsite Ads rules, the rate depends on your sales. A shop that has made less than $10,000 in the past 365 days pays 15% and can opt out. Once a shop passes $10,000, the rate drops to 12%, but the shop is enrolled permanently and cannot opt out again.

A Causee seller testing Etsy is far from the threshold, so decide at the start whether to opt out: on low-priced items, 15% takes most of the margin left after the standard fees.

Why bother: a UK-only room against an international one

The reason to accept Etsy’s fees is the size and type of its audience. Causee is a UK-only marketplace in its autumn 2026 launch phase, and when we counted on 3 September 2026 it held 2,011 live listings, with sampled prices between £1 and £65. It publishes no buyer numbers, and its FAQ says international expansion will come “over time”.

Etsy reported about 87 million active buyers over the twelve months to the second quarter of 2026, and the UK brought in only about 9.5% of Etsy’s revenue that quarter. Most of the demand is elsewhere, and vintage and handmade are its core categories rather than a side line. A 1970s Liberty print blouse competes on Causee against two thousand mostly modern listings, and few of the people browsing there came looking for it. On Etsy it sits in front of buyers who search for exactly that.

Causee has no objection to you selling elsewhere. Its FAQ says sellers may keep selling on other marketplaces and that it does not require exclusivity.

Postage, labels and overseas buyers

On Causee you type a postage price into each listing and buy postage yourself at retail; there are no integrated labels and no tracking link. Etsy works differently in three ways.

Postage profiles. Etsy listings take their postage from a profile you set up once in Shop Manager: prices per destination, dispatch time and origin postcode. FLUF uses the postage profile and returns policy you already have in your Etsy shop, so create them before you crosslist. Without them the Etsy listing cannot be published.

Labels. UK Etsy sellers can buy Royal Mail labels inside Etsy, including a QR code you take to the Post Office instead of a printer, and Evri labels for UK parcels. The tracking is added to the order for you. Royal Mail also offers duty-paid labels for parcels to the US, where Evri labels are currently suspended. Compare the label price with what you would pay at the Post Office before you set the postage you charge.

International orders. This is the real change. Once you offer overseas postage, you need customs declarations for parcels leaving the UK, and you should price in the buyer’s import charges and longer delivery times in your listing text. Many sellers start with the UK and Europe, then add further destinations once they have seen a few orders arrive safely.

What transfers from Causee to Etsy, field by field

Most of this route is growth, not loss. Etsy’s fields are larger than Causee’s in almost every direction, and the gaps are information Etsy wants that Causee never collected.

Etsy’s title, photo and tag limits are listed in its guide to creating a listing and its advice on tags.

Rewrite titles for your best pieces: Etsy buyers search by decade, material and style, so “1980s hand-knitted cream Aran jumper” beats “cream jumper size 12”.

How to crosslist from Causee to Etsy with FLUF Connect

1. Sort your Causee stock first. Mark the vintage, handmade, upcycled and craft-supply items. Everything else stays off Etsy.
2. Set up your Etsy shop. At least one postage profile and a returns policy, plus Etsy Payments with a UK bank account.
3. Connect Causee in FLUF Connect with your Causee email and password. No browser extension is needed. If you joined Causee with Google or Facebook, set a Causee password first.
4. Connect Etsy and approve FLUF on Etsy’s own permission screen.
5. Import your Causee listings. Title, description, photos, price, category, sub-category, size, condition and colour come across.
6. Improve the eligible items. Longer titles, dating evidence, measurements and flaws in the description. Set an Etsy price rule if you want Etsy prices higher.
7. Crosslist the filtered set to Etsy. Select the items, or use auto-crosslisting rules for new stock you add in future.
8. Fix declarations for your own work in Etsy’s Shop Manager, then check the category on anything unusual.

What syncs between Causee and Etsy, and what does not

The one-way sold detection is the part to build a habit around. Causee sales are not currently picked up, so when a Causee order arrives, mark the item sold in FLUF straight away. A unique vintage piece cannot be sold twice, and an Etsy buyer who pays for something you have already posted to a Causee buyer means a refund and a mark against your shop.

Tax: Etsy reports you to HMRC

Moving stock onto Etsy makes your sales visible to HMRC. Under the UK reporting rules for digital platforms, in force since 1 January 2024, marketplaces send HMRC seller details every January for the previous calendar year. A seller is left out only if they made fewer than 30 sales of goods and received less than €2,000 (about £1,700). Reach 30 sales or €2,000 across a year on Etsy and you will be reported.

Being reported is not the same as owing tax. Selling your own old clothes is generally not trading. Buying vintage to resell, or making things to sell, usually is, and the £1,000 trading allowance and Self Assessment rules apply. Add your sales across Causee, Etsy and anywhere else when you work out where you stand, and take advice if you are close to the line.

What FLUF Connect costs

7 days for £1, then from £9/month, then plans from £9/month.

Crosslisting, inventory sync, order sync and bulk operations are on every plan, and every plan has unlimited listings. That covers the essentials of this route: pushing the filtered Causee items to Etsy, and closing the Causee listing when Etsy sells. Relisting, offer management and smart pricing come with the plans above Starter. On this pair only relisting applies, on the Etsy side, so Starter is a sensible place to begin.

The same catalogue reaches all 51 marketplaces FLUF supports, so the stock Etsy refuses still has somewhere to go. See pricing.

Sources and verification

Fees, limits and policies were checked against primary sources in September 2026. Causee’s catalogue figures come from our own count of its live listings on 3 September 2026.

• Etsy Creativity Standards — the four categories, the 20-year vintage rule and the exclusions
• Etsy Seller Policy — what may be listed and the consequences of breaking the rules
• Etsy on dropshipping and reselling
• Etsy on production partners
• Etsy Fees & Payments Policy — listing fee, transaction fee, Offsite Ads rates, threshold and cap
• Etsy Payments Policy and Etsy on UK payment processing fees — 4% + £0.20
• Etsy regulatory operating fee and Etsy’s announcement of the UK rise to 0.48%
• How Etsy’s Offsite Ads work — 15% and 12% rates, the $10,000 threshold and the $100 cap
• Etsy Payments currencies and Etsy on deposit schedules — GBP payouts
• Etsy on creating a listing and on tags — title, photo and tag limits
• Etsy on attributes and Etsy’s tips for vintage shops — condition wording
• Royal Mail labels on Etsy and Evri labels on Etsy
• Etsy Q2 2026 shareholder letter and Q2 2026 quarterly report — active buyers and UK revenue share
• Retail Technology Innovation Hub, 24 August 2026 and What is Causee — launch timing and the profit-donation model
• Causee FAQ — 0% seller fees, profit donation, no exclusivity, launch focus
• Causee Protection Fee
• HMRC: selling goods or services on a digital platform and the trading allowance

What we could not verify. Causee does not publish its buyer Protection Fee amount or any buyer numbers. Etsy does not publish a single list of which categories have a condition or size attribute, so the field table describes the general pattern. We found no published figure for how much of a typical Causee catalogue is old enough for Etsy, so we describe the filter rather than guess a percentage.

Related guides

• Sell on Causee — fees, listing fields and payouts
• Sell on Etsy — the full seller guide
• Crosslist from Causee to Vinted — for the modern fashion Etsy will not take
• Crosslist from Causee to eBay
• Crosslist from Causee to Depop
• Crosslist from Depop to Etsy — the same eligibility filter from a fashion app
• All marketplace guides
• All crosslisting routes