Why Hand & Kin exists

Etsy raised its transaction fee from 5% to 6.5% in April 2022. It also charges Offsite Ads fees on ad-attributed orders: 15% for shops that have never reached $10,000 in any consecutive 365-day period (who can opt out) and 12% for shops that have ever reached it (required for life even if sales later fall), capped at $100 per order. Our opinion: large marketplaces that accept listings at volume make it hard for buyers to tell handmade work from resold mass-produced goods. That is why we check.

Hand & Kin is built around the opposite choices. Every seller is reviewed by a person. Every listing image goes through an anti-slop pipeline that compares it against known dropship catalogs, and matches go to human review. The marketplace fee is 5%, with no listing fees and 90-day notice on any change. Card payments are processed by Stripe and passed through at cost (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction on standard US cards), so the total is the 5% fee plus processing.

We publish our policy changelog. We commit in writing not to auto-suspend sellers. And we never sell your data.