The Real Cost of Selling on Faire (Most Brands Are Guessing)
Here's a question that sounds simple but few people can answer: on your last Faire order, how much money did you actually make?
Most brands on Faire haven't done this calculation. Not because they're bad at math — because the costs stack in ways that are hard to see all at once. And when you're making decisions about whether to offer free shipping, run a promotion, or invest more time in the platform, you're making those decisions without this crucial piece of information.
Let's walk through it.
The costs everybody knows about
Start with the commission. Faire charges 15% plus $10 on first orders from new customers, and 15% on reorders. If you brought a customer to Faire yourself through Faire Direct, the commission drops to 0%.
On top of the commission, there's a credit card processing fee — 3.5% plus $0.30 per order.
Most brands know about these two. They show up in your payout breakdown. They're not small, but they're straightforward.
The costs that sneak up on you
Then there's the $10 new customer fee. Every time a brand-new retailer places their first order with you through Faire, you pay an extra $10 on top of the commission. On a $200 opening order, that $10 is another 5% off the top. On a $100 order — common when Faire's low minimums are doing their thing — it's 10%.
Then there's shipping. On standard orders, the retailer pays shipping at checkout and Faire reimburses you. So far so good. But Faire also incentivizes brands to offer free shipping — retailers filter for it and the algorithm favors it. If you set your own free shipping threshold, that cost is yours. And if you join Faire's Insider Partnership program (which gets your brand in front of their highest-spending retailers), Faire covers shipping on most eligible marketplace orders, but you cover shipping on your Faire Direct Insider orders. For heavier or bulkier products, those costs add up. You can ship through Faire's label service (they've negotiated discounts with UPS and FedEx) or use your own carrier and get reimbursed. Either way, your fulfillment costs — packing materials, labor, the shipping itself — are still yours, and they're easy to undercount.
Then there's promotions. Faire encourages brands to offer percentage-off discounts to attract new buyers, especially during seasonal markets.
And if you're running promoted listings — Faire's paid advertising — that spend comes off the top too.
What this actually looks like on a real order
Here's an actual payout breakdown from a maker who shared her numbers with us.
She got a $444.90 order from a new customer. After Faire's 15% commission, the $10 new customer fee, and the processing/payout fees, her actual deposit was $352.29. That's about $92.61 in costs just to make that sale.
She sold 32 products. Her cost of selling worked out to about $2.89 per product — nearly 21% of her wholesale price.
And she hadn't run any promotions on that order. Let’s suppose this same order came in during a Faire Market, and she'd offered a 5% discount (the minimum to participate). During Faire Markets, Faire matches brand discounts up to 5%, so the retailer sees 10% off — but the brand only absorbs the 5% she offered. On a $444.90 order, that's another $22.25 off her end.
And let's say she was also running promoted listings that month — Faire's pay-per-click advertising — with a $200 monthly budget. If this order was one of, say, ten orders that month, you could allocate roughly $20 in ad spend to this one.
So now the stack looks like this:
15% commission: $66.74
$10 new customer fee: $10.00
Processing/payout fees: $15.87
Shipping costs: $0.00 (in this case)
5% Faire Markets discount: $22.25
Allocated ad spend: ~$20.00
Total cost of selling: ~$134.86
That's about 30% of her wholesale price just to make the sale — up from 21% without the promo and ads. And that's before she's paid for the product itself, the packing materials, or her time. Granted, other orders might stack up differently… and as you can see, changing a couple of these numbers will make a big difference in what she takes home.
The number you might not be calculating
This is the concept that matters most: what does it cost you to make a sale on Faire?
Every wholesale sale has a cost attached to it — whether you're selling through Faire, a trade show, or cold outreach. On Faire, the commission is the obvious one. But when you stack on the new customer fee, the processing fee, shipping (if you're absorbing it), any promo discount, and any ad spend, your total cost of selling as a percentage of your wholesale price adds up.
In the example above, it went from 21% to 30% just by adding a modest discount and some ad spend. We regularly see brands where 25–35% of their wholesale price is going to the cost of making the sale once everything is stacked. For brands with lower price points or higher shipping costs, it can be more.
(This is exactly why we built a free Profitability Calculator into Making Faire Work — it does this stacking math for you so you can plug in your own numbers and see what it's actually costing you to sell per order. More on that below.)
That doesn't mean Faire isn't worth it. It may or may not be… and there are two things you need to consider to know the answer to that:
Reorders change the math
The “compared to what” question
Reorders change the math
Customer lifetime value matters a lot here.
That $444.90 first order that cost $92.61 to get? If that retailer reorders quarterly for the next five years, the total relationship could be worth tens of thousands of dollars. The new customer fee only hits once. The commission stays at 15%, but on a growing relationship, your cost of making the first sale gets spread across dozens of orders.
This is a real reason Faire can work — you're not paying for a single order, you're paying to start a relationship. But it only works out if reorders actually happen, and at a volume that justifies the upfront cost. For some brands they do. For others, most Faire customers order once and move on.
So the question isn't just "what does this order cost me?" It's "what's the realistic lifetime value of this customer, and does the cost to get it make sense given that?"
The Profitability Calculator in Making Faire Work includes a lifetime value comparison for exactly this reason — it helps you see whether the relationship math holds up over time, not just whether a single order is profitable.
The key question: compared to what?
Here's what gets lost in most conversations about Faire's fees: every sale costs something to make, no matter what channel you're selling through.
Trade shows cost booth fees, travel, samples, and follow-up time. Outbound outreach costs time. Driving wholesale through Instagram or your own site costs content, ad spend, and a lot of patience. Those are all costs of selling too — they just don't show up as line items on a payout statement.
Faire charges what it charges. That's not a good or bad thing on its own — it's just a cost of selling. The question is whether your cost of selling on Faire is more or less than your cost of selling through other channels.
For some brands, Faire is the cheapest path to new retail accounts. The customers show up, the orders come in, and even after the fees, it costs less per customer than anything else they've tried. For other brands, the same math shows they'd be better off putting that margin into a different channel.
You can't make that comparison if you don't know your actual cost of selling on Faire. And most people don't.
What to do with this
Run the math on a handful of orders. Add up every fee Faire charged. Add any discount you funded, any ad spend, and any shipping costs you covered. That's your cost of selling on Faire for that order.
Then do the same thing for your other wholesale channels. What does it actually cost you to make a sale through a trade show? Through outreach? Through your own marketing?
Once you have those numbers side by side, the decision gets a lot simpler. Maybe Faire is your best channel. Maybe it's your worst. Maybe it depends on the order size or the product. But at least you're deciding based on real numbers instead of a guess.
Questions? Comments? Feelings? Let us know down below and check out Making Faire Work for a clear-eyed approach to the marketplace and deciding on your Faire strategy.
4 Things About Faire Most Makers Get Wrong
Get your free guide & discover:
🔓 What Faire actually requires to succeed (and what most sellers never find out)
🔓 The real limits of the platform — before they cost you time and money
🔓 Exactly how to decide if Faire is worth it for your specific business