Crosslist from Etsy to Amazon — which of your listings Handmade will actually take

On this page

• The triage: which of your listings qualify
• The application, and what it wants from you
• Handmade goods have no barcode
• What changes about your margins
• One habit Etsy taught you that Amazon does not need
• What a Handmade listing looks like next to an Etsy one
• Where the rest of your Etsy shop should go
• What syncs, and the direction that does not
• What it costs
• Sources and verification
• Related guides

The triage: which of your listings qualify

Etsy’s Creativity Standards recognise four routes onto the platform: made by a seller, designed by a seller, handpicked by a seller, and sourced by a seller. Amazon Handmade recognises one idea — that a person made the thing — and defines it as products that are hand-altered, hand-designed, handcrafted, repurposed or upcycled.

Map one onto the other and the picture is immediate.

Three of those deserve more than a table row.

Vintage is the big one, because it is where the largest share of disappointed sellers sit. Etsy’s rule is generous and clear: 20 years or older, personally curated by you, with the explicit exclusion of “resold commercially available items that are newer than 20 years old, even if the item is designed to appear vintage”. Handmade has no vintage route at all. And Amazon’s main marketplace does not rescue you either if the vintage in question is clothing, because Amazon’s UK condition guidelines make Apparel and the Shoes and Handbag category New only.

Print-on-demand is the surprising one. Sellers assume that because Etsy accepts it as a creative route, the platform built to compete with Etsy will too. It does not. If your shop runs on a production partner, Handmade is closed and the honest answer is to stop planning around it.

Reworked clothing is the encouraging one. Amazon’s UK Handmade categories include Clothing, Shoes & Handbags — which sits oddly beside the New-only rule on the main marketplace until you see the distinction Amazon is drawing. A garment you hand-altered or hand-assembled is a made thing. The same garment resold untouched is not. If you genuinely rework, that door is open where it is shut for everyone else selling second-hand clothes.

Do this triage against your actual listings, not against your sense of your shop. Most makers have more bought-in and personalised stock than they remember.

The application, and what it wants from you

The order of operations is the reverse of Etsy’s, and it changes how the first month feels.

On Etsy you open a shop and list. Vetting happens afterwards, and Etsy’s policy notes that sellers “remain obligated to pay any fees incurred in listing such items” even where listings are later removed. On Amazon Handmade you are approved before anything goes live — Amazon says it “uses an application process to add new makers to the Handmade category to ensure customers can buy with confidence”.

The sequence Amazon publishes: register as a Professional seller; submit an application entering information about you, your products and your process; list and classify products with the Handmade Classification attribute; create your maker profile; and optionally expand internationally.

Two practical notes. The application is about process, so the answers that work are the ones an Etsy “about” section would contain — what you make, how, where, with what. If you have written that already, reuse it. And you register and pay as a Professional seller first: the monthly fee waiver applies after the first month, so you pay one month regardless of how the application goes.

We could not find an official turnaround time. The figures circulating are third-party, so plan for it taking a while rather than for a specific number of days.

Handmade goods have no barcode

Amazon needs to know which catalogue entry an offer belongs to, which normally means a barcode. Handmade goods, by definition, have never been through a manufacturer who issued one.

Amazon’s answer is the product ID exemption, and it names “private brands or handmade products” as qualifying grounds. Amazon’s own Handmade page puts it as: during listing “you’ll provide a product ID or request a product ID exemption”. Note the wording — request. It is not automatic, even inside Handmade.

You apply within the listing flow: choose “I don’t have a product ID”, continue, and an “Apply now” button appears where an exemption is needed. The application wants images showing all sides of the product and its packaging, and Amazon says approval “usually takes about 48 hours”.

The constraint that catches people out is scope: “You need separate approvals for each product category and store.” A maker working across jewellery, ceramics and textiles is making three applications, not one — and again for each Amazon marketplace. Coming from Etsy, where you list a necklace and a mug in the same afternoon without asking anyone, that is the single biggest change in tempo.

FLUF will not guess its way past a missing identifier. Where it cannot resolve one it refuses with a message naming the fix, rather than attaching your piece to some approximately-similar catalogue entry — which would be considerably worse than not listing.

What changes about your margins

The two platforms take a comparable share and take it in opposite places, so the effect on your business depends almost entirely on how fast your stock moves.

Etsy front-loads. £0.15 or $0.20 per listing, charged again every four months and again on each additional quantity sold in a multi-quantity order, whether anything sells or not. Then 6.5% transaction fee — charged on the total order including the postage you charge — plus payment processing at 4% and £0.20 in the UK or 3% and $0.25 in the US, plus a 0.48% UK regulatory operating fee. Roughly 11% all in, on top of a standing cost.

Handmade back-loads. Nothing to list, ever. Then a flat referral fee: Amazon’s US page says “15% or $0.30, whichever is greater” per unit shipped, while its UK page says 12.24%. We quote both because both are verbatim from Amazon and we could not reconcile them; it may be a VAT-exclusive presentation on the UK side. The Professional subscription is waived after your first month, which Amazon’s US page values at “$480 per year”.

So the crossover is your sell-through rate, and it is worth actually calculating rather than guessing. A maker with forty fast-moving items barely notices Etsy’s listing fees and pays less per sale there. A maker with six hundred one-off pieces that turn over slowly is paying roughly £90 every four months in pure standing cost on Etsy, against zero on Handmade — which reverses the comparison well before the referral-rate difference catches up.

One Etsy cost with no Handmade equivalent, and it belongs in the sum: Offsite Ads, at 15% of an attributed sale or 12% for high-volume shops, mandatory above a revenue threshold. Handmade has no involuntary advertising fee.

One habit Etsy taught you that Amazon does not need

An Etsy listing expires after four months and costs you again to renew. That fact shapes how experienced Etsy sellers behave: you watch the clock, you cull, you decide what is worth another twenty pence.

Amazon has no listing expiry. An offer stays live until you remove it or run out of stock, and it costs nothing to sit there. For a maker with slow, high-value pieces — the sort of thing that finds its buyer in month seven — that is a genuine structural advantage and it rarely gets mentioned.

The flip side is that nothing prompts you to review. On Etsy the renewal charge forces a decision four times a year. On Amazon a mispriced or forgotten offer will sit there indefinitely, and since Amazon supports none of FLUF’s automation features — no relisting, no offer management, no smart pricing — nothing will nudge it for you. Put a calendar reminder where Etsy used to put a fee.

What a Handmade listing looks like next to an Etsy one

An Etsy listing is yours: shop name, your photographs, your story, your policies, your buyer messaging. Much of what makes a maker’s shop work lives in that presentation, and a good deal of it does not travel.

On Amazon the page template is Amazon’s and the layout is fixed. The maker profile is a real concession — it is the one place your story exists — but it is a page a buyer has to choose to visit rather than the frame around every listing. Buyers largely experience the purchase as buying from Amazon, and post-sale contact is restricted to order-related messaging, so the repeat-custom loop that Etsy makes plausible is much harder to build.

Two practical consequences worth planning for. Photography still matters, but it works alone rather than as part of a coherent shop aesthetic, so each image has to carry more. And personalisation, which is often where a maker’s margin lives, is a first-class field on Etsy and a much less prominent one on Amazon — buyers are simply not primed to look for it.

Where the rest of your Etsy shop should go

The triage above will have left you with listings Handmade cannot take. They are not homeless.

• Vintage clothing and accessories — Vinted, Depop and, at the designer end, Vestiaire Collective. All three want precisely what Amazon refuses.
• Vintage homeware, books, records and collectibles — eBay, and Amazon’s main marketplace where the item is barcoded, since Amazon permits used in books, music, video, games, electronics and home.
• Print-on-demand — your own Shopify or WooCommerce store, where nobody adjudicates whether it counts as handmade.
• Craft supplies — if they carry manufacturer barcodes, Amazon’s main marketplace is a better fit than Handmade.

That is the argument for running the catalogue from one place: the sorting is a data problem rather than four separate businesses.

What syncs, and the direction that does not

Connect both channels using their authorisation prompts in FLUF Connect. Neither requires a browser extension or an open browser.

Etsy supports crosslisting, inventory sync, order sync and relisting. Amazon supports crosslisting, price and stock updates, and sold-elsewhere protection: when a piece sells on Etsy, or anywhere else you have connected, your Amazon quantity goes to zero.

What does not work yet: a sale on Amazon does not pull the Etsy listing down. Order sync is not claimed on Amazon, and the omission is deliberate rather than an oversight — the Amazon guide explains the order-status problem behind it.

For a maker this asymmetry has a sharper edge than it does for most sellers, because your pieces are frequently one of one. The working discipline: treat Etsy as the channel you actually watch, and let Amazon be the one that gets cleared for you.

What it costs

7 days for £1, then from £9/month. There is no free plan and no free tier.

Crosslisting, inventory sync, order sync and bulk operations are on every plan. Relisting, offer management and smart pricing are included from Seller (£29/month) upwards; Starter does not include them. Paying annually saves 40%.

Etsy supports relisting and Amazon supports no automation at all, so on this pairing the automation tier buys you something on one side only.

Sources and verification

Every fee, rule and date was checked against a primary source on 7 September 2026.

• Etsy’s Creativity Standards — the four routes, the inclusion of a seller’s own computerised tools and of production partners under “designed by a seller”, the 20-year vintage definition, and the verbatim exclusion of resold commercially available items newer than 20 years.
• Amazon Handmade (US) and Amazon Handmade (UK) — the hand-altered, hand-designed, handcrafted, repurposed or upcycled definition; the exclusion of vintage sold as it is; the UK category list including Clothing, Shoes & Handbags; the five-step application; the “15% or $0.30, whichever is greater” US referral fee and the 12.24% UK figure; the waiver of the Professional subscription after the first month and its “$480 per year” value; and the requirement to “provide a product ID or request a product ID exemption”.
• Amazon’s GTIN guide — handmade products as a qualifying ground for a product ID exemption, the application flow, the roughly 48-hour approval, and the per-category, per-store scope.
• Etsy’s UK seller pricing and its US equivalent — the £0.15 and $0.20 listing fees and their four-month duration, the 6.5% transaction fee, payment processing at 4% plus £0.20 and 3% plus $0.25, and the 0.48% UK regulatory operating fee.
• Etsy on fees and taxes — that the transaction fee is charged on the total order including postage, and that the listing fee applies again per additional quantity sold.
• Etsy on Offsite Ads — the 15% and 12% rates and the mandatory participation above a revenue threshold.
• Amazon’s UK Condition Guidelines (PDF) — the New-only restriction on Apparel and on the Shoes and Handbag category, and the categories where used goods are permitted.

What we could not verify, and therefore left out. Amazon Handmade’s application turnaround time, which appears only on third-party sites, so no number of days appears above. The reconciliation between the 15% US and 12.24% UK Handmade referral rates, since Amazon’s authoritative Handmade fee schedule sits behind a Seller Central login. Whether Handmade sellers receive any blanket product ID exemption rather than applying per category — Amazon’s wording is “request”, and the mechanics live on gated pages. The exact revenue threshold at which Etsy’s Offsite Ads becomes mandatory and which side carries 12% rather than 15%, because Etsy’s legal fee pages block automated access; check your own Shop Manager. And precisely how much alteration Amazon requires before a personalised bought-in item counts as handmade, which Amazon does not quantify anywhere we could find — if your work sits on that line, ask in your application rather than assuming.

Related guides

• Amazon vs Etsy — where handmade and vintage belong
• Sell on Etsy — the complete seller guide
• Sell on Amazon — the complete seller guide
• Promote your Etsy products on Instagram
• Crosslist from eBay to Amazon
• All marketplace guides
• All crosslisting routes
• Crosslist from Shopify to Amazon
• Crosslist from PrestaShop to Amazon