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Not On The High Street for UK Etsy Sellers: What a 25% Commission Actually Does to Your Margin

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Not On The High Street charges partners a one-off joining fee plus a commission on every sale — commonly reported at £199 + VAT to join and 25% commission per sale, with no listing fees and no annual renewal (Not On The High Street, Seller FAQs; CraftCover, “Compliance When Selling on Not On The High Street”). That’s roughly two and a half times what Etsy takes in percentage terms — and it’s a UK-only marketplace, so the comparison only matters if your business trades from the UK or Northern Ireland.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Most “get off Etsy” advice a handmade seller runs into is US-centric: Amazon Handmade, Faire, TikTok Shop, a Shopify site of your own. If you trade from the UK or Northern Ireland, there’s a marketplace that almost never comes up in that conversation, mostly because it doesn’t publish its fees anywhere near as loudly as Etsy does: Not On The High Street (NOTHS), a curated gifting marketplace with over 5,000 small business partners and reportedly more than 100 million visitors a year (Mintsoft, “Should You Sell On Not On The High Street?”). It looks, on the surface, like a bigger, better-funded version of the boutique-gift-shop experience Etsy buyers already like — curated collections, a strong gifting angle, glossy photography standards.

What it costs to get in the door is where most sellers stop reading the marketing copy and start doing math, and that’s the right instinct. This piece works through NOTHS’s actual fee structure as reported by seller-facing accounting and compliance resources, since the platform doesn’t publish exact numbers on its own consumer-facing pages, then runs a real worked example against Etsy’s published fees so you can see the percentage-point gap in cash terms, not just as an abstract “it’s more expensive” warning. It also covers a product rule that changes how you’d have to run your catalog if you’re already selling the same items on Etsy — a detail most “should you sell on NOTHS” roundups skip entirely.

What Not On The High Street Actually Is

NOTHS is a curated marketplace, not an open-listing one. You don’t sign up and start listing the way you would on Etsy or eBay; you apply, submit sample products and photography, and a curation team decides whether your catalog fits the site’s aesthetic and quality bar before you’re allowed to sell anything. The platform’s own product guidelines describe what it’s looking for as items that are “unique, bespoke or creatively sourced,” and it explicitly prohibits reselling generic stock that has no handmade or design contribution from the seller (CraftCover, “Compliance When Selling on Not On The High Street”). That’s a narrower bar than Etsy’s, which allows craft supplies, vintage resale, and a much wider range of price points and finish quality.

The trading requirement is also narrower than Etsy’s: your business has to be registered and trading from the UK or Northern Ireland to apply at all (Not On The High Street, Seller FAQs). If you’re a US-based Etsy seller reading this hoping for a new channel, this one isn’t for you — skip ahead to Store Score’s coverage of Pinterest for Etsy Sellers or Google Shopping for Handmade Sellers instead. For UK and Northern Ireland makers, though, NOTHS is one of the few marketplaces built specifically around the same gifting, handmade, and personalized-product niche Etsy occupies, with a buyer base that skews toward higher average order values on birthdays, weddings, and seasonal gifting occasions.

The Fee Structure: A One-Off Joining Cost Plus 25% Commission

NOTHS doesn’t publish a fee schedule on its public marketing pages the way Etsy publishes its Fees & Payments Policy. Its own Seller FAQs confirm the shape of the deal — a one-off joining fee with no annual renewal required — without stating the amount (Not On The High Street, Seller FAQs). The actual figures are consistently reported across multiple independent seller-advice and compliance resources that work directly with NOTHS partners: a joining fee of £199 plus VAT (£238.80 total), and a flat 25% commission taken on every sale, with no separate per-listing fee (CraftCover, “Compliance When Selling on Not On The High Street”; Mintsoft, “Should You Sell On Not On The High Street?”).

Three things about that structure matter more than the headline numbers:

  • The 25% is the whole percentage-based cost. Unlike Etsy, there’s no separate payment-processing cut layered on top — NOTHS’s commission is reported as the complete transaction-based fee, which simplifies your margin math even though the headline number is higher.
  • There’s no per-listing fee, and no renewal. Etsy charges $0.20 per listing every four months (or whenever it sells, whichever comes first); NOTHS’s joining fee is reportedly a single upfront cost with nothing recurring tied to catalog size.
  • Acceptance typically takes up to three months to convert into an actual live shop after you’re approved, since onboarding, photography review, and catalog setup all happen before your first listing goes live (CraftCover, “Compliance When Selling on Not On The High Street”).

None of this is published as a rate card the way Etsy’s fees are, which is itself worth flagging: treat the £199 and 25% figures as the consistent number reported by third parties who work with NOTHS sellers, not as a number NOTHS itself guarantees on a page you can screenshot. Confirm the current figures during your own application before you commit inventory or photography budget to it.

How That Compares to What Etsy Already Takes

Etsy’s fee structure is public and precise, which makes the comparison easier on that side. For a UK-based Etsy seller, the current published fees are:

  • Listing fee: $0.20 per listing, charged when you publish and again every four months it stays active, or immediately when it sells and you renew it.
  • Transaction fee: 6.5% of the total the buyer pays, including shipping.
  • Payment processing fee (UK sellers): 4% plus £0.20 per order (Etsy, “Fees & Payments Policy”).

Stack those together and a UK Etsy seller is paying roughly 10.5% of the sale price in percentage-based fees, plus a small flat amount per order from payment processing and an amortized fraction of a cent from the listing fee. NOTHS’s reported 25% commission is close to two and a half times that percentage cost, with no equivalent flat per-order charge on top. The gap isn’t small, and it isn’t something a slightly higher retail price quietly absorbs without you noticing — it’s roughly 14 to 15 percentage points of your top line, on every single sale, for as long as you sell through that channel.

That doesn’t automatically make NOTHS a bad deal. It makes it a different deal: you’re paying for curation, a gifting-focused buyer base that Etsy’s own search algorithm doesn’t send you, and a brand environment where you’re one of a vetted few rather than one listing among millions competing on Etsy search relevance. Whether that’s worth 14 extra points of margin depends entirely on whether NOTHS actually converts traffic your Etsy shop wasn’t already getting — which is a question only a real trial period can answer, not a spreadsheet.

A Worked Example: A £45 Candle Sold on Both Platforms

Say a UK candle maker sells the same £45 candle (free shipping baked into the price, as is common on both platforms) through both an Etsy shop and a NOTHS shop. Here’s what each sale actually nets, fees only, before cost of goods:

On Etsy:

  • Transaction fee (6.5% of £45): £2.93
  • Payment processing (4% of £45, plus £0.20): £2.00
  • Amortized listing fee (roughly $0.20, or about £0.16, assuming one sale per renewal cycle): £0.16
  • Total fees: £5.09 (about 11.3% of the sale) — seller keeps £39.91

On NOTHS (25% commission, no separate processing fee):

  • Commission (25% of £45): £11.25
  • Total fees: £11.25 (25% of the sale) — seller keeps £33.75

That’s £6.16 less per sale on NOTHS than the identical sale on Etsy, before you’ve even accounted for the joining fee. Now layer the £238.80 joining cost onto a first year of NOTHS sales. If that candle maker sells 50 units through NOTHS in year one, the joining fee adds another £4.78 of effective cost per sale, bringing first-year NOTHS take-home down to roughly £28.97 per candle (about 64% of the sale price) versus Etsy’s £39.91 (89%). At 200 units in year one, the joining fee amortizes down to £1.19 per sale — still on top of the 25% commission, but a much smaller drag. From year two onward, assuming no renewal fee, the comparison simplifies back to the straight 25% versus roughly 11.3% gap.

The practical takeaway from the math: NOTHS only makes sense if it’s generating sales you genuinely wouldn’t have gotten on Etsy, at a volume high enough to make the joining fee a rounding error rather than a real cost. A slow trickle of 10 to 15 sales in your first year, while you wait to see if the channel works, means you’re paying close to £24 of effective cost per £45 candle in year one alone — more than half the sale price gone to fees before materials and your time.

The Exclusivity Rule That Changes How You’d Actually Run This

This is the detail that most “should you try NOTHS” roundups skip, and it’s the one that actually changes how you’d operate a dual Etsy-plus-NOTHS shop. NOTHS’s product guidelines call for items that are “unique, bespoke or creatively sourced” (CraftCover, “Compliance When Selling on Not On The High Street”) — language that curation-based marketplaces typically use to mean the exact product shouldn’t be a generic, identically-listed item sitting on ten other sites at once. In practice, sellers who successfully run both channels generally don’t upload the identical Etsy listing — same photos, same title, same variant options — onto NOTHS and call it done.

What that means for your catalog planning: budget time for at least light differentiation between your Etsy and NOTHS versions of a product before you apply — a different color story, a NOTHS-exclusive gift-wrap option, a bundle configuration you don’t offer on Etsy, or new photography shot to NOTHS’s own style guidelines rather than reused Etsy shots. This isn’t just a compliance box to tick; it also protects you from a customer finding the same exact candle for less on your Etsy shop after paying a NOTHS-inflated retail price to cover the extra commission, which is its own reputational risk regardless of what any contract technically permits. Confirm the current, exact wording of this requirement during your own application, since NOTHS’s specific terms can be clarified further once you’re in the review process (Not On The High Street, Seller FAQs) — don’t build your production plan around a secondhand paraphrase, including this one.

Who NOTHS Actually Makes Sense For

Given a 25% commission with no processing fee layered on and a curated, gift-forward buyer base, NOTHS tends to fit a narrower slice of Etsy sellers than a general “diversify beyond Etsy” pitch suggests:

  • Higher average order value items absorb the commission gap better. The 14-point difference on a £15 item is about £2.10; on a £120 personalized gift set it’s about £16.80. The absolute margin loss scales with price, so low-margin, low-price items feel the 25% cut hardest in relative terms.
  • Gift-occasion products fit the platform’s own positioning. NOTHS markets itself around birthdays, weddings, Christmas, and personalized keepsakes — product lines built around those occasions are more likely to get accepted in curation and more likely to convert once live.
  • Sellers who already have strong, on-brand product photography have less new cost to absorb meeting NOTHS’s presentation bar, since a large part of what curation teams reject applicants for is inconsistent or low-quality imagery rather than the product itself.
  • Sellers testing a genuinely new customer base — rather than assuming NOTHS traffic overlaps heavily with people who’d have found them on Etsy anyway — get more real signal out of a trial run. If your products already rank well in Etsy search, NOTHS is additive reach, not a replacement.

Conversely, if your catalog is priced under about £20, relies on volume rather than margin, or is craft-supply or vintage-resale rather than handmade-by-you, NOTHS’s curation criteria and its economics both work against you at the same time.

The Application and Vetting Process

Unlike Etsy, where you can open a shop and start listing within the hour, NOTHS runs an application-first model:

  • You submit an online application with sample product images and links to your existing shop or portfolio (Not On The High Street, Seller FAQs).
  • Review by the curation team typically takes at least a week before you hear back either way.
  • If accepted, you pay the one-off joining fee and move into onboarding, which includes catalog setup, photography checks, and shop configuration.
  • Reported timelines suggest allowing up to three months from acceptance to actually going live and taking your first order (CraftCover, “Compliance When Selling on Not On The High Street”).
  • If rejected, NOTHS’s own FAQ notes their system doesn’t support a formal re-application — you’re told to get back in touch with the membership team directly rather than resubmitting through the same form (Not On The High Street, Seller FAQs).

Practically, this means the £199 you pay isn’t a “try it and see” fee the way an Etsy shop’s near-zero setup cost is. You’re paying it after acceptance, which reduces the risk of paying to get rejected, but it also means the real commitment point is earlier than the payment: the quality of your application photography and product descriptions is doing the actual gatekeeping, and it’s worth treating that submission with the same care you’d put into a wholesale trade-show application, not a quick marketplace signup form.

Common Mistakes Sellers Make Adding NOTHS as a Second Channel

  1. Pricing identically to Etsy without accounting for the 14-point fee gap. If you charge the same £45 on both platforms, NOTHS quietly earns you £6 to £11 less per sale depending on the year. Either price NOTHS listings slightly higher to reflect its own commission, or accept the lower margin deliberately as the cost of reaching new buyers — but decide on purpose, rather than by accident.
  2. Reusing Etsy photography and copy verbatim. Beyond the exclusivity concerns covered above, NOTHS’s curation team is specifically evaluating presentation quality against its own house style, and Etsy-optimized photography (built around Etsy search thumbnails) often doesn’t match what converts on a gifting-focused catalog page.
  3. Underestimating fulfillment complexity from running two shipping and inventory systems. NOTHS orders arrive through a separate seller dashboard, not Etsy’s. Sellers who don’t build a single combined inventory-tracking process risk overselling stock they’ve allocated to Etsy listings.
  4. Treating the joining fee as recouped by fee savings. It isn’t offset by anything on the Etsy side — it’s a straight upfront cost of entry that only gets cheaper per unit as your NOTHS sales volume grows. Model it against expected NOTHS-only sales, not against what you’re already making on Etsy.
  5. Applying before your product photography is genuinely ready. Given how much of the vetting is presentation-based, and that NOTHS’s FAQ states their system doesn’t support formal re-applications, submitting before your imagery meets a curated-gifting-site bar risks a rejection that’s harder to reverse than on an open-listing marketplace.

A Launch Checklist

  • Confirm your business is registered and trading from the UK or Northern Ireland before applying.
  • Run the fee math above against your own price points and margins before committing, not after acceptance.
  • Identify which products you’d differentiate for NOTHS — a color variant, a bundle, or new photography — rather than porting Etsy listings as-is.
  • Shoot or commission photography to a gifting-catalog standard, since presentation quality is a major part of what curation teams screen for.
  • Confirm the current joining fee, commission rate, and exclusivity terms directly with NOTHS during your application, since public figures are third-party-reported rather than officially published.
  • Get product liability insurance in place before going live, since NOTHS’s own terms state it won’t cover you in the event of a customer claim (CraftCover, “Compliance When Selling on Not On The High Street”).
  • Set up a single combined inventory-tracking process before your first NOTHS listing goes live, so Etsy and NOTHS stock levels can’t drift apart.
  • Set a review date three to six months out to honestly assess whether NOTHS sales are incremental, not just Etsy customers who found you a second way.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it actually cost to join Not On The High Street?
Multiple independent seller-advice and compliance resources consistently report a one-off joining fee of £199 plus VAT (£238.80 total), with no annual renewal fee, plus a 25% commission on every sale with no separate listing or payment-processing fee on top. NOTHS’s own public FAQ confirms the joining fee is one-off but doesn’t publish the exact amount, so confirm current figures directly during your application.

Can I sell on Not On The High Street and Etsy at the same time?
Generally yes, sellers do run both, but NOTHS’s product guidelines call for items that are unique, bespoke, or creatively sourced, which is typically read as meaning you shouldn’t list the exact same product, photos, and listing verbatim on both platforms. Most dual-channel sellers create at least light differentiation, such as a different variant or exclusive bundle, for their NOTHS catalog. Confirm the specific terms during your own application.

Is Not On The High Street worth it if I’m not based in the UK?
No. NOTHS requires your business to be registered and trading from the UK or Northern Ireland to apply at all, so it isn’t an option for sellers based elsewhere. Sellers outside the UK looking to diversify beyond Etsy would get more mileage from channels like Google Shopping, Pinterest, or a website of their own.

How long does it take to actually start selling after applying?
Application review typically takes at least a week. If accepted, reported onboarding timelines suggest budgeting up to three months from acceptance to your shop actually going live and taking its first order, since catalog setup and photography review both happen before launch.

What happens if my application gets rejected?
NOTHS’s own FAQ states their system does not support formal re-applications through the same form. If you’re rejected and want to try again, you’re expected to contact their membership team directly rather than resubmitting, which is another reason to treat the initial application and photography with real care rather than as a quick trial.

Key Takeaways

  • Not On The High Street’s reported fee structure — a £199-plus-VAT one-off joining fee and 25% commission with no separate processing fee — costs roughly 14 to 15 percentage points more than Etsy’s combined UK fees of about 10.5% to 11.3%, on every sale.
  • On a £45 item, that’s about £6.16 less take-home per sale versus Etsy before the joining fee, and closer to £11 to £24 less once the joining fee is amortized across a modest first-year sales volume.
  • NOTHS is UK and Northern Ireland only, application-gated rather than open-listing, and its product guidelines favor unique, bespoke, gift-oriented items over volume or low-margin catalogs.
  • Its exclusivity-leaning product language means dual Etsy-and-NOTHS sellers typically need at least light product differentiation between the two channels, not identical duplicate listings.
  • It tends to make the most sense for higher-AOV, gift-occasion products with strong existing photography, tested deliberately as an incremental channel rather than assumed to be free additional revenue.

The Bottom Line

Not On The High Street isn’t a cheaper Etsy, and it isn’t trying to be. It’s a curated, higher-commission channel that trades margin for a different buyer base and a gifting-focused brand environment Etsy’s own search algorithm doesn’t replicate. For a UK or Northern Ireland maker with higher-AOV, gift-appropriate products and photography that already meets a boutique bar, the math can work: a genuinely incremental sale at 75% margin beats no sale at all, and the joining fee stops mattering once volume climbs. For a seller pricing under £20, relying on Etsy search volume to move low-margin stock, or hoping NOTHS traffic will simply duplicate Etsy customers through a second door, the 25% commission is a real, ongoing cost with no guarantee it buys you anything Etsy wasn’t already delivering. Run the numbers on your own price points before you pay the joining fee, not after.

Content reviewed and updated: 2026-09-12

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