The short answer
Etsy has no deposit field. What it has is the private custom listing, created from the buyer's request message, and the way to take a deposit is to send two of them in sequence — one for the deposit, one for the balance when the piece is ready. It costs you one extra listing fee, not double commission, and Etsy will not connect the two halves for you.
A buyer messages about a commissioned ring. You agree on $900, six weeks of work, and $520 of gold and stones you have to buy before you can start. You want half now. You open the listing editor and there is nowhere to ask for half.
That is not an oversight you can settle in the settings. Etsy is built around one listing, one payment, and one order — which fits almost everything sold there and does not fit a six-week commission. Most deposits in this trade run 30% to 60%: on this ring, 30% covers barely half your materials, 50% covers 87% of them, and 60% puts you slightly ahead before you cut anything.
What Etsy actually gives you
The tool for bespoke work is the private custom listing. When a buyer sends a custom request, you can create a custom order directly from that message thread and send a private listing back with the agreed price and details.
Etsy's help centre is clear about how private it is: the listing does not appear in your public shop or in search, so no other buyer can purchase it, and only the buyer who asked can. Once it sells, it shows on your public Sold Items page with everything else. It is a normal order in every respect except discoverability.
The rule that decides your options
There is one line in Etsy's seller policy that shapes everything here. Where a seller needs to collect additional payment after checkout — because the final price could not be determined when the original listing went up, on bespoke or highly customised work — the policy directs sellers to Etsy's Create Custom Order feature.
Read that as permission and as a constraint at once. Collecting more money later is expected on custom work. The sanctioned way to do it is another listing, inside Etsy, rather than an invoice you send around it. Which makes the two-listing route the default rather than a clever workaround.
Route one: two private listings
This is what most sellers do and what the policy points at. You agree the total in messages. You send a private listing for the deposit and the buyer pays it. You build the piece. When it is ready you send a second private listing for the balance, and ship once that clears.
The description on the first listing does the work Etsy will not. State the total price, state that this listing is the deposit and what percentage it represents, state when the balance will be requested, and state what happens if the buyer cancels once work has started. A buyer reading that receipt in five weeks should not need your messages to understand what they paid for.
What splitting actually costs
The fear that stops sellers doing this is fees, and the arithmetic retires it. Etsy's transaction fee is a percentage — 6.5% at 2026 rates — so it does not care whether the $900 arrives once or twice. Half of 6.5% collected twice is the same money.
What you do pay twice is the listing fee, about $0.20. On this ring the whole cost of splitting the order is $58.90 instead of $58.70: twenty cents to let a nervous buyer commit in a step they can afford. Verify current fee rates in Etsy's Fees and Payments Policy before you quote, but the shape of that comparison has been stable for years.
One order holding both halves: what was paid, what is still owed, and what the piece has cost you so far.
See how it worksRoute two: ask for the whole amount
Perfectly reasonable at some prices. Under a couple of hundred dollars, a deposit adds a step to the buyer's day and a second listing to yours, and the exposure it protects you from is small. Ceramics and jewellery sellers often work this way for the whole shop.
It stops being reasonable when the number gets serious or the wait gets long. Asking a first-time buyer for $900 up front, for something that will not exist for six weeks, from a shop they found this afternoon, loses orders you would otherwise have won. The deposit is as much about the buyer's nerve as your cash flow.
Route three: taking the deposit off Etsy
Sellers do this — a transfer or a payment link for the deposit, the balance through a listing, or the reverse. It saves the fee on one half and it is the route with the most to lose.
Money that never went through Etsy is not part of the transaction Etsy can see. If the order goes wrong, the half you took outside sits outside the case process as well, and your position under Etsy's payment rules is worth reading before you rely on it. Given that splitting inside Etsy costs about twenty cents, the saving is rarely the trade it looks like.
The three routes side by side
The last row is the one no marketplace answers, whichever route you pick.
| Full payment upfront | Two private listings | Deposit off Etsy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buyer commits in a smaller step | No | Yes | Yes |
| Both halves inside Etsy's protection | Yes | Yes | No |
| Extra fee for splitting | None | One listing fee | Etsy's cut on half only |
| Buyer sees one order | Yes | No — two | No |
| Etsy links the halves for you | Nothing to link | No | No |
| Tells you the order's margin | No | No | No |
Two limits worth knowing before you promise anything
Etsy documents a couple of restrictions on custom orders that catch people out mid-quote:
- No private listings for digital items. If your commission ends in a file rather than an object, the private-listing route is not available to you.
- No calculated shipping on custom orders. You set the shipping price yourself, which on a heavy or awkward piece means quoting carriage by hand and being wrong in one direction.
Both are Etsy's own documented behaviour rather than folklore, and both are easier to plan around than to discover after you have agreed a price.
What the split leaves in your records
Here is the part the how-to guides skip. After the second listing sells, Etsy holds two completed orders: $450 in June, $450 in August. Nothing in either says it was half of something. Nothing anywhere says the ring cost $520 to make.
With three commissions a year you carry that in your head. With twenty open at once you do not, and the failures are specific: a balance listing sent twice, a balance listing never sent, a piece shipped on a deposit because the second payment looked familiar. The money was collected correctly every time. The order was never in one place.
Where the order should live instead
Etsy is a shopfront and a payment rail, and it is good at both. It is not an order book. It cannot tell you the balance outstanding across every open commission, because it does not know which payments belong together, and it cannot tell you a margin, because it never saw what you paid for the gold.
That is why the spreadsheet appears beside the shop. Spreadsheet, accounting software or an order tool goes through what each of those actually holds, and what a deposit is on paper explains why the two halves are not the same kind of money.
If you also sell on Shopify
The same question has a different answer there, and it is worth knowing both if your commissions arrive through two channels. Shopify does have a deposit feature, documented as part of its Plus plan, and on the standard plans sellers reach for a deposit product plus an invoice.
How to take a deposit on Shopify covers the plan line, the quirk in Shopify's deposit calculation, and what each workaround leaves in the admin. And selling made-to-order without wrecking your inventory deals with the other thing both platforms get wrong about pieces that do not exist yet.
When the buyer goes quiet between the two halves
Splitting the payment creates a gap, and the gap has a failure mode. You send the balance listing, the piece is finished, and nobody buys it. The deposit is spent, the ring exists, and it fits one finger in the world.
Two habits keep this cheap. Do not ship on a deposit, however far along the conversation felt — possession is the only leverage a one-off piece gives you. And put a window in the first description: how long you will hold a finished piece after the balance is requested, commonly thirty days, and what happens to the deposit after that. A stated window turns your decision into a term the buyer already agreed to.
What to do when a customer will not pay the balance works through the messages and the deadline, and why a staged schedule shrinks the exposure on every order after this one.
Decide the percentage once, not per order
The mechanics take an afternoon. The number takes a decision. A deposit that covers your materials and your workshop payment turns a disappearing buyer into a wasted week; a 20% deposit turns the same silence into your money gone.
How much deposit to charge sets it by price band and lead time, and covers when three payments beat two.
Deposits, balances and the real margin per order, for brands selling before they deliver.
See OrdamoThe bottom line
Etsy will not take a deposit for you, and it will let you take one. Two private listings, the total and the terms written into the first description, the balance requested when the piece is ready. Twenty cents more in fees and both halves stay inside the marketplace that protects the order.
What Etsy cannot do is hold the order. Two payments in two months, one commission, and one cost — that has to live somewhere that knows they are the same thing.
Frequently asked questions
Does Etsy have a deposit option?
No. Etsy's help centre documents private custom listings for bespoke work, and nothing that splits one listing into a deposit and a balance. Sellers who take deposits do it with two sequential listings, which Etsy allows but does not link together for you.
Can I just take the deposit by bank transfer and keep the balance on Etsy?
Sellers do it, and it moves that half of the money outside the transaction Etsy sees. That affects buyer protection, your case history if something goes wrong, and your position under Etsy's payment rules. Read the current Etsy Payments Policy before you build a process on it, and treat the second listing as the safer default.
Do two listings cost me double in fees?
No, and this is the fear worth retiring. The transaction fee is a percentage, so charging $450 twice and $900 once come to the same commission. What you pay twice is the listing fee — about twenty cents at 2026 rates. Verify current fees, but the order of magnitude is not a reason to avoid splitting.
What does the buyer see when the order is split?
Two purchases. Two receipts, two order pages, two review prompts, and no screen anywhere that says the first payment was half of something. Whatever ties the halves together has to be written by you, in the listing description and in your messages.
Can I create a private listing for a design service rather than an item?
No. Etsy is a marketplace for items, and a listing is expected to result in something tangible for the buyer. A deposit listing works because it is the first payment towards a physical piece, not because it is a fee for your time.
Should the deposit listing be non-refundable?
Say so in the description if that is your policy, and say it before the buyer pays rather than after they change their mind. Etsy's case process looks at what the listing and your messages promised, so the terms being visible at purchase matters more than how firmly they are worded.
How do I stop a private listing being bought by someone else?
You do not need to. A listing created from a custom request is private between you and that buyer, does not appear in your public shop or in search, and cannot be bought by anyone else. Once it sells it shows up on your Sold Items page like any other order.
Note
Marketplace policies and fees change, and Etsy has revised both. Everything here was checked against Etsy's own help centre and seller policy in September 2026 — the private custom listing created from a request thread, its invisibility in shop and search, the restriction on digital items and calculated shipping, and the policy pointing additional post-checkout payment at the Create Custom Order feature. The 6.5% transaction fee and $0.20 listing fee are 2026 rates. Check the current Fees and Payments Policy before you quote a customer.