True profit overlay on the Etsy dashboard

The idea

Etsy shows sellers revenue everywhere and profit nowhere, and the fee stack is genuinely hard to compute in your head: a listing fee, 6.5% transaction fee on item plus shipping, payment processing with a flat component, and offsite-ads fees of 12 to 15% on some orders but not others. When Etsy nudges a rate, thousands of sellers lose margin without noticing. The standard fix is a profit spreadsheet, and every profit spreadsheet dies of neglect within six weeks.

The wedge is zero habit change. An overlay puts the margin number directly on the listings and orders pages the seller already stares at daily, so there is no new tool to remember to open. Local storage of material costs also sidesteps the trust problem of granting a third party access to shop data.

Who pays

The seller pays $6/month, an impulse price for anyone doing a few hundred dollars a month or more on Etsy, and the buyer discovers the product in the exact moment of fee confusion. Distribution is the Chrome Web Store’s own search, r/EtsySellers and Etsy seller Facebook groups (where fee complaints are a daily genre), and Etsy-seller YouTube, which reviews tools constantly and works for a product that demos in ten seconds.

MVP scope

• Content-script parsing of Shop Manager listings and orders pages
• Per-listing material and packaging costs stored locally in chrome.storage
• Full Etsy fee engine with offsite-ads toggle and country setting
• Injected margin badges on listing rows and profit on order rows
• Popup summary with best and worst listings by margin
• Skip for v1: Etsy API/OAuth integration, historical analytics, CSV import, multi-shop support, and Firefox

Build EtsyMargin, a Chrome extension that overlays true profit onto the Etsy seller dashboard. Stack: Plasmo framework, Chrome extension APIs (content scripts, chrome.storage.local), Stripe for the licence.

Core flow: content scripts run on the Etsy Shop Manager listings page and orders page. On the listings page, each listing row gets an injected margin badge; clicking it opens a small panel where the seller enters material cost and packaging cost for that listing, stored in chrome.storage.local keyed by listing ID, no server, and the data stays on the machine (say this plainly in the UI, sellers are wary of tools reading their shop). On the orders page, each order row shows computed profit: sale price minus the full Etsy fee stack, materials, and actual shipping label cost parsed from the order detail.

The fee engine is the substance: listing fee ($0.20 with renewal logic), transaction fee (6.5% on item plus shipping), payment processing (3% + $0.25, US defaults with a country setting), and offsite-ads fee (12% or 15% toggle, per-order flag since it only applies to attributed orders). Keep fee rates in a config object with an effective-date field so rate changes ship as updates.

Include a popup with a shop-level summary (average margin, top and bottom five listings by margin) computed from visited pages, and a settings page for fee toggles and licence entry.

Monetisation: 14-day trial, then $6/month via Stripe payment link with a licence key checked by the extension.