The short version: Cookies sell in eight places: a farmers market booth, your own online storefront link, a local coffee shop, craft and holiday fairs, Etsy, bulk and corporate orders, custom event work, and a repeat cookie club. A $24 dozen keeps $23.23 after a card swipe at the booth, $23.00 through your own link, $21.27 on Etsy, $19.41 on Amazon, which is why Amazon is not on the list, and $12.00 when a shop buys it to resell. Most part-time cookie vendors do best running two places at once: one in person, where people can smell the tray, and one online, where a regular can reorder on a Tuesday night.
Checked September 22, 2026: Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually or $12.50 billed monthly, $0 platform fee and 0% commission, card processing 2.9% + $0.30 paid by the vendor, with 7 days at no charge before the first bill on day 8 (findhomegrown.com/signup). Etsy charges a $0.20 listing fee, a 6.5% transaction fee and 3% + $0.25 payment processing (etsy.com/sell). Honest bounds: your customer creates a Homegrown account to place a first order, there is no countdown or timed release feature, and your storefront is listed on the Homegrown marketplace but most orders will come from the link you hand out yourself.
You have four flavors working, the neighbors keep asking, and the question that stalls most home bakers is not how to bake more. It is which counter, table or web page the cookies belong on. Every place takes a different cut, and almost nobody prints the whole number next to the channel.
This guide walks through eight places a home cookie vendor actually sells, what each one costs on a single $24 dozen, and how to tell which one fits the cookies you bake. If you still need the legal side, the labels and the per-cookie price, the companion guide on how to sell cookies from home covers all of that.
Eight places take home-baked cookies, and a part-time vendor can run any two of them without hiring help. Each one asks for something different: floor time, a pitch, photography, or nothing more than a link you text to a regular.
The rule for picking is short. Start where the customers already are, then add the place that lets them buy again without seeing you. Almost every cookie vendor who sticks with it ends up running one in-person place and one online place, because the first one finds the customer and the second one keeps her.
Pick the first place from what you already have, not from what pays best on paper. A vendor with 400 neighbors on a local app and no market history should not rent a booth first, and a vendor with a Saturday booth already should not open an Etsy shop before opening an order link.
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| What you have right now | Start here | Add second | Why that order |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neighbors and friends already asking | Your own storefront link | A farmers market booth | The demand exists, so the missing piece is a way to take the order and the money without 20 text threads |
| A booth you already work | Your own storefront link | A coffee shop | Market customers reorder midweek if you hand them a link; the shop then fills the weekdays you are not selling |
| Decorated cookie skills, no local following | Custom and event referrals | Craft and holiday fairs | A $60 decorated dozen does not need volume, it needs planners and venues who see your work |
| Nothing yet, and a full-time job | A farmers market booth | Your own storefront link | One Saturday tells you which flavors move and what people will pay, faster than any amount of planning |
Fee figures used throughout this guide come from each company's own pricing page, all loaded September 22, 2026.
A farmers market is the best first place for cookies, because a booth costs $20 to $75 a week and three dozen at $24 clears a $40 booth fee before lunch. Cookies are also the easiest baked product to sell from a table: the price point is low enough for an impulse buy, they need no refrigeration, and nobody needs a knife or a plate to try one.
The card fee at the booth is the lowest of any place on this list. A Square reader charges 2.6% + $0.15 in person, which is $0.77 on a $24 dozen, and cash costs nothing at all. Compare that to $2.73 on the same dozen through Etsy and the booth starts looking less like rent and more like the cheapest checkout you have.
Three numbers decide whether your market is worth it:
Your state decides which venues a cottage food permit covers, and farmers markets are not automatically on the list. Forrager's Washington page, checked September 22, 2026, lists events, farmers markets, the home, online sales and roadside stands as allowed venues for a Washington cottage food permit, and puts mail order on the prohibited list, so shipping is out there no matter where you list. Check your state's current rules before you pay a booth deposit.
Your cookies should live on an order link you control, because a market booth only sells on Saturday and a regular who wants two dozen on Wednesday has nowhere to put that order except your text messages. An online storefront is where the customer you met at the table buys again without you being there.
Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually, or $12.50 billed monthly, with no percentage fees beyond standard payment processing at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. On a $24 dozen that is $1.00, and the platform takes 0% commission on top of it. You list your flavors, set pickup windows for your porch or your booth, and hand out one link. Orders and payment land before you preheat anything, which is the part that matters for a product baked to order.
Here is how the alternatives compare for a cookie vendor specifically:
What Homegrown does not do is worth saying plainly. Your customer creates a Homegrown account to place a first order, which is one extra step at the checkout. There is no countdown timer or timed release feature, so a "drops at 8pm Friday" launch is not something the platform runs for you. Your storefront is listed on the Homegrown marketplace, but plan on most orders coming from the link you send out yourself. And the 2.9% + $0.30 comes out of your side with no pass-through to the customer.
In a pull of the Homegrown catalog on September 22, 2026, 263 of the 2,580 products listed by 292 vendors had "cookie" in the name, and those listings came from 97 different vendors. Only sourdough, which appears in 401 listings, shows up in more product names. Of those 263, 45 say "dozen" in the name, and 28 of those are priced by the full dozen once you filter out the 14 half dozens, the single three-dozen block and two listings that are cake pops and cupcakes rather than cookies: the median is $22.00 and the range runs from $7.00 a dozen for pizzelle to $45.00 a dozen for gluten free.
If you are already taking orders in text threads and losing track of who wanted what, that is the specific problem the link solves: one page, one pickup window, one payment. You can set up a Homegrown storefront and have your flavors listed before your next bake day.
A coffee shop buys cookies at roughly half your shelf price, so a $24 dozen becomes $12.00 to you with no card fee and no floor time. That is the trade: you halve the revenue per dozen and you delete the Saturday. For a vendor with a full-time job, a standing Tuesday and Friday delivery of three dozen is often worth more per hour than a market booth.
Two arrangements exist and they are not the same:
Here is the same $24 dozen through the three ways a shop can take it:
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| How the shop takes it | What you get per dozen | Who holds the inventory | When you get paid |
|---|---|---|---|
| You sell it yourself at the booth | $23.23 after a 2.6% + $0.15 card swipe | You | At the sale |
| Wholesale, half the shelf price | $12.00 | The shop, once they buy it | On delivery, or on their 15 or 30 day terms |
| Consignment, shop keeps 30 to 40 percent | $14.40 to $16.80 | You, sitting on their shelf | Only after it sells |
Wholesale is the better deal for cookies. They have a short counter life, and a consignment shop has no reason to push a product it has not paid for yet. Take consignment only when the shop is somewhere your own customers already walk past, so the shelf is doing marketing for you as well as selling.
One rule changes once a shop is reselling you: the package needs a net quantity statement, because it is now sitting on a retail shelf. The NIST Office of Weights and Measures packaging and labeling standards set what a net weight or count declaration has to look like on a consumer package. The rest of the label, including ingredients and allergens, follows your state's rules, which are laid out in cottage food labeling requirements. The full pitch, including what to send after the drop-off, is in how to get your food into a local coffee shop.
Craft fairs pay better per head than farmers markets for cookies, because the shopper is there to buy gifts and a boxed set sells for $18 to $40 where a loose dozen sells for $24. The cost is a table fee of $50 to $150 for one or two days, and a juried fair can run higher.
The math is the same as a booth, with a bigger number on both sides. At a $100 table fee and the same $16 left after a $24 dozen costs about $8 to make, you need about seven dozen across the weekend to break even, and a good December fair moves far more than that. What changes is the format: bring gift boxes, not bags.
December concentrates hard. A cookie vendor who does four fairs between Thanksgiving and Christmas can book more revenue in five weekends than in the other forty-seven, which is a real opportunity and a real trap: the whole year rides on whether you got into the right fairs by the September application deadline. The payback math per table is worked through in craft fair table fee ROI for food vendors, and the holiday gift-set format is covered in selling Christmas cookie gift sets.
Etsy costs $2.73 on a $24 dozen, which is the highest platform fee on this list after Amazon, and Hotplate is the only place whose order total runs higher once you add the $1.75 it charges your customer, and it is worth paying only when you are shipping decorated cookies to people who could never buy from you locally. For a vendor selling to the next zip code, it is the most expensive way to reach a neighbor.
The three fees every sale pays, from Etsy's own page on September 22, 2026: $0.20 to publish a listing, which runs four months or until it sells; 6.5% of the sale price including the shipping you charge; and 3% + $0.25 payment processing on top. On $24 that is $0.20 plus $1.56 plus $0.97, so you keep $21.27. The same page lists a fourth fee underneath those three: 15% on any sale that comes from an ad Etsy paid to run for you. Etsy calls that Offsite Ads fee optional for most sellers, but says it can become required once your sales over a 12-month period pass the level Etsy sets, so read that line before you plan around $2.73. The same page also carries a block headed "One-time shop set up fee": "Once you've opened your shop, please note that you may be charged a one-time shop set-up fee. If you are required to pay this fee, you will see the amount due before completing your final shop set-up steps." Etsy does not publish the amount, so treat opening a shop as a cost you will not see until the last set-up screen.
Etsy earns that fee in exactly one situation: a decorated cookie set with a look nobody near you makes, priced at $45 to $80, shipped nationwide. At that price the $2.73 is a rounding error and the audience is the whole country. At $24 a dozen of chocolate chip, it is 11% of the order to reach someone who would have driven to your porch.
Two constraints matter before you list:
Amazon is the wrong place for a home cookie vendor, and the referral fee is why. Grocery and Gourmet referral fees run 8% on a total sales price of $15.00 or less and 15% above $15.00, and a $24 dozen lands in the 15% band at $3.60. Add $0.99 an item on the Individual plan and one dozen costs you $4.59, so you keep $19.41.
The Professional plan swaps that $0.99 for $39.99 a month, which only pays back above about 40 units a month. Selling 50 dozen through Amazon would cost you $219.99 on the Professional plan or $229.50 on the Individual plan, against $60.00 on annual billing, or $62.50 month to month, for the same 50 dozen through your own link.
Price is not the only problem. Amazon's customers expect two-day delivery and a shelf-stable product, which a fresh-baked cookie is not, and a single one-star review about a stale cookie outweighs a month of good ones. The cheaper split is to keep the national ambition on Etsy, where the audience actively wants handmade, and keep local sales on a link you own.
Bulk cookie orders come from five predictable places, and every one of them buys in 5 to 20 dozen blocks with a single invoice: real estate closings, office birthdays and client thank-yous, teacher appreciation weeks at schools, church and community events, and hospital or clinic staff gifts.
The economics are different from retail. A 10-dozen office order at $22 a dozen is $220 in one drop-off, baked in three batches, with one payment and no booth time. Even at a volume discount below your $24 shelf price, the effective hourly rate beats a Saturday market for most vendors.
The bulk tier is already a real listing shape on the marketplace, and not every vendor discounts it. In the same pull on September 22, 2026, Mrs B Brownies LLC lists "3 dozen freshly baked cookies" at $105.00 alongside single dozens at $30.00, which is $35.00 a dozen on the three-dozen block against $30.00 on the single. That is a bulk premium, not a bulk discount, and it is a defensible choice: three dozen is its own bake day and its own scheduled drop-off, so the price covers work the single dozen never asks for. Pick your direction before you publish the tier, because the buyer will compare the two lines. That block is also the only multi-dozen cookie listing in the whole pull. The closest thing to a tier anywhere else is a six-count box, like Steph Delight Bakery's 6 Cookie Assortment Box at $24.00 or Chapter Azúcar's six gourmet cookies at $35.00, which means the 5 to 20 dozen order is a tier almost nobody on the marketplace has published yet.
What gets you these orders is not a storefront, it is being findable in the right week. Three moves cover it:
Tiered pricing for these orders is worked out in corporate gifting and bulk pricing tiers.
Custom cookie orders come from referral partners, not from search, and that makes them the one channel where the place to sell is a person rather than a page. A decorated dozen runs $30 to $80, and the people who book them almost always heard your name from someone planning the same event.
The five partners worth cultivating, in the order they pay off:
The approach is the same for all five: a labeled sample box, a card, and a price per dozen in writing. Do not ask for a referral on the first visit.
Custom work lists at a clear premium over standard dozens. In the September 22, 2026 catalog pull, Nonna's Table lists "Custom order, decorated sugar cookies made w/organic flour" at $30.00 per dozen, against a $22.00 median across the 28 dozen-priced cookie listings on the marketplace. Mal's Bake Shop lists "Custom Royal Icing Sugar Cookies" at $36.00 with no count anywhere in the listing name, which is its own lesson: put the count on the listing so the buyer is not guessing what $36.00 buys.
Minimums, deposits and the cancellation policy that protects three hours of decorating are covered in custom orders for a home bakery. Set them before the first order, not after.
A cookie club books revenue a month ahead instead of a Saturday at a time, because 20 members at $29 a month is $580 collected before you bake anything, and cookies are one of the few cottage food products people genuinely want every single week. The ingredient cost is low, the shelf life is a few days rather than a few hours, and the flavor can rotate without reworking your process.
A cookie club is a live product shape, not a theory. In that same September 2026 pull, Breadstreet lists an "October Cookie Subscription (1 month)" at $29.00 alongside the four October weeks sold one at a time: Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies in week one, Snickerdoodle Cookies in week two and Halloween Monster Mash Cookies in week four at $7.50 each, and Maple Blondie Bars in week three at $9.50.
Run the numbers before you offer it. Breadstreet's own listings show the trade exactly: the four October weeks bought one at a time come to $32.00, which is three cookie weeks at $7.50 plus a $9.50 blondie bar week, and the month as a subscription is $29.00. The club member saves $3.00, about 9 percent, and the vendor gets all four weeks paid on the first, which is the whole point. Keep the discount in single digits on purpose, because the thing you are buying is the forecast, not the loyalty.
Four things make a cookie club hold together:
The full model, including how to price it against your one-off dozen, is in weekly subscription baked goods for home bakers.
One $24 dozen leaves you $0.77 lighter at the booth, $1.00 through your own link, $1.00 on Shopify Basic, $1.00 in card processing on Hotplate with another $1.75 added to your customer's bill, $1.09 through Square's online plan, $2.73 on Etsy and $4.59 on Amazon, and a shop reselling it pays you $12.00. Here is every place with the complete stack next to it, so nothing is left off one row and shown on another.
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| Place | Subscription | Trial | Platform fee or commission | Card processing | What you pay on one $24 dozen | What you keep | 50 dozen ($1,200) in a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Square reader at the booth | $0/mo Free plan | Free plan, no trial needed | $0 | 2.6% + $0.15 in person | $0.77 | $23.23 | $38.50 plus booth rent |
| Cash at the booth | none | none | $0 | none | $0.00 | $24.00 | $0.00 plus booth rent |
| Your own storefront link (Homegrown) | $10/mo billed annually, $12.50 billed monthly | 7 days, no charge until day 8 | $0, 0% commission | 2.9% + $0.30, paid by the vendor | $1.00 | $23.00 | $60.00 including the subscription |
| Hotplate | none, no monthly subscription | not applicable | 5% + $0.55, charged to your customer at checkout | 2.9% + $0.30, paid by the vendor | $1.00 to you, $1.75 added to your customer | $23.00 | $50.00 to you, $87.50 added to your customers |
| Bakesy | $9.99/mo Standard, $17.99/mo Premium | 30 days at no charge | not stated on the pricing page | not stated on the pricing page | not publicly disclosed | not publicly disclosed | $9.99 plus an undisclosed processing rate |
| Square Online, Free plan | $0/mo Free plan | Free plan, no trial needed | $0 | 3.3% + $0.30 online on the Free plan | $1.09 | $22.91 | $54.50 |
| Shopify Basic | $29/mo billed yearly, $39 billed monthly | 3 days at no charge, then $1/month for 3 months | $0 on Shopify Payments, 2% on another gateway | 2.9% + $0.30 online standard | $1.00 | $23.00 | $79.00 on annual billing |
| Etsy | none required, but Etsy says you may be charged a one-time shop set-up fee; the amount is not published and is shown to you before you finish set-up | none | 6.5% transaction fee plus $0.20 per listing | 3% + $0.25 | $2.73 | $21.27 | $136.50 |
| Amazon, Individual plan | $0.99 per item sold | none | Grocery and Gourmet referral 15% above $15.00 | no separate processing fee published | $4.59 | $19.41 | $229.50 |
| Amazon, Professional plan | $39.99/mo | none | Grocery and Gourmet referral 15% above $15.00 | no separate processing fee published | $3.60 plus the monthly | $20.40 | $219.99 |
| Wholesale to a shop | none | none | the shop keeps half the shelf price | none, the shop pays you by invoice | $12.00 of the $24 | $12.00 | you receive $600 of the $1,200 |
Every rate was read off the company's own pricing page on September 22, 2026: findhomegrown.com/signup, hotplate.com/pricing, bakesy.app/pricing, squareup.com/us/en/pricing, shopify.com/pricing, etsy.com/sell and sell.amazon.com/pricing. Bakesy's pricing page lists two monthly prices and a 12-row comparison of what each plan includes, and names no per-transaction rate, so its row says so rather than guessing. Annual prices are compared to annual and monthly to monthly. Rates change, so re-check before you commit.
The fee on one $24 dozen, place by place
Source: each company's own pricing page, all loaded September 22, 2026, applied to a $24 dozen. Amazon is the Individual plan. Hotplate is the one place where a fee lands on your customer by default: 2.9% + $0.30 in card processing on your side and its 5% + $0.55 platform fee on theirs, which its pricing FAQ says you can absorb instead, so it gets two bars. Cash, wholesale and Bakesy have no bar: cash carries no fee, wholesale is a margin split rather than a fee, and Bakesy publishes no per-transaction rate. Bar widths are each fee divided by the $4.59 maximum.
Read it as a ladder rather than a ranking. The cheapest place to take money is the booth you are already standing at, the cheapest place to take money while you sleep is a link you own, and everything above $2.00 a dozen is buying you an audience you could not reach yourself.
Castiron, which was recommended to home bakers for years, is gone. On September 22, 2026 its address at castiron.me loaded a Canadian online casino page titled "Online Casinos Canada 2026" with a Castiron sign-up banner still stuck to the top of it. Before you list anywhere on the strength of an article, load the company's own pricing page yourself and check the date.
Forrager's state-by-state directory lists a cottage food or home bakery program in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and those programs are written for baked goods like cookies. The list of places you may sell them, though, is set state by state, and it is shorter than most vendors expect. Direct to the person eating them is almost always fine. Everything else has a rule attached.
The four venue questions that decide your channel list:
You can look up your own state in the state-by-state cottage food law directory at Forrager, which lists the venue limits, sales caps and permit requirements for each one. Rules change with each legislative session, so verify your state's current rules on its own agriculture or health department page before you commit to a channel.
A sales cap can quietly close a channel, and the caps are nowhere near each other. Forrager's directory puts Michigan and Maryland at $50,000 of cottage food sales a year, Texas at $150,000, and Illinois at no cap at all. A good December of bulk and fair sales can push a part-time vendor past a number she did not know applied. Check your state's number before you take on a 20-dozen corporate order, not after.
Adding one place takes about two hours of work spread over a week, and the order matters: confirm you are allowed, price it, list it, then tell the customers you already have. Doing it in that order stops the two failures that kill a new channel, which are finding out you are not permitted after you have paid, and launching to nobody.
Price the half dozen above half the dozen, and the dozen sells itself. On the Homegrown marketplace on September 22, 2026, True Mountain Homestead lists a half dozen large cookies at $14.00 and a full dozen at $22.00, so the second six cost $8.00 instead of $14.00. That $6.00 gap is doing the upsell work at every table without anyone having to say a word.
Experienced cookie vendors run fewer flavors than beginners and sell them in more places, which is the opposite of what most new vendors do. Four or five flavors let you bake in real batches, buy chocolate in bulk and set up a table in 20 minutes; twelve flavors turn every bake day into a dozen small jobs and leave you with the same total sales.
The habits that separate the vendors still doing this in year three:
The baking cost side of that per-hour number, counted line by line instead of estimated, is worked through in cost per dozen cookies.
Every place on this list carries costs that never appear on a fee schedule, and for a part-time vendor those usually outweigh the percentages. A $40 booth is really a seven-hour day once you count the bake, the load-in, six hours of standing and the load-out. Sell ten dozen at $24 and you gross $240, keep about $160 after roughly $8 a dozen in ingredients and packaging, pay the $40, and the day paid you about $17 an hour before card fees, or about $16 if all ten dozen went across the reader at $0.77 apiece. Sell four dozen and it paid you $3.
The unpriced costs, by place:
None of these are reasons to skip a channel. They are the reason two places is the right number for a part-time vendor and five is not, and the reason the cheapest fee on the table is not automatically the best place to sell.
If your problem right now is that the orders are coming in through four different text threads and you are copying them into a notebook, that is the part a storefront link fixes first. Set up a Homegrown storefront and every order for every flavor lands in one list with the money already collected.
Eight places take home-baked cookies: a farmers market booth, your own online storefront link, a local coffee shop buying wholesale, craft and holiday fairs, Etsy, bulk and corporate orders, custom event work, and a monthly cookie club. Your state's cottage food law decides which of those you may use, and the one that is allowed almost everywhere is a direct sale to the person eating them, including an online order picked up in person. A $24 dozen costs you $0.77 at the booth and $2.73 on Etsy, so the place you pick changes what you keep.
It depends on your state, and it is usually simpler than people expect. Most states let you sell cookies at a farmers market under a cottage food law, with some requiring a registration, a permit or a food safety course first and others requiring nothing at all. Separately from the state, the market itself will usually ask for proof of your cottage food status and sometimes for liability insurance. Check your state's agriculture or health department page and the market's vendor application before you pay a booth deposit.
Through your own link, unless you are shipping decorated cookies nationwide. Etsy takes $2.73 on a $24 dozen once you add its $0.20 listing fee, 6.5% transaction fee and 3% + $0.25 processing, all checked on etsy.com/sell on September 22, 2026. Your own storefront link costs $1.00 in card processing on the same dozen plus $10 a month billed annually, or $12.50 month to month, and the customer is yours rather than the marketplace's. Etsy earns its cut when the buyer lives 800 miles away and could not find you any other way.
Pick three shops that do not bake their own pastries, walk in at 2pm on a weekday, ask who orders the pastry case, and leave a labeled dozen with that person. Quote per dozen when they ask: $12.00 a dozen wholesale on a $24 shelf price is the standard split, and they sell each cookie for $2 to $3. Start at three dozen a week and let the shop ask for more. Once a shop is reselling your cookies, the package needs a net quantity statement because it is now on a retail shelf.
Usually not under a cottage food law. Most state cottage food rules keep the sale and the handoff inside the state, and several rule out mail and courier shipping outright, which applies no matter what an online marketplace lets you list. A few state programs are written more broadly: Forrager's Pennsylvania page, checked September 22, 2026, says a registered limited food establishment there can sell anywhere it wants including interstate, while its Ohio page says interstate sales are not allowed and only shipping inside the state is. Look up your own state before you promise shipping to anyone, and verify your state's current rules on its own agency page rather than on a blog.
The cookie club and the bulk order carry January, because the fairs are over and market traffic is at its lowest point of the year. A monthly club gives you revenue that does not depend on foot traffic at all, and on Homegrown it is a listing rather than a standing charge: you post a one-month club product the way Breadstreet posts its "October Cookie Subscription (1 month)", relist it each month, and the member buys it again. Office and school orders also continue year-round, while gift buying stops. Valentine's Day sets up in the last two weeks of January, so a decorated heart cookie preorder posted on January 20 often does better than anything you could sell from a table that month.
Six guides that pick up where this one stops, from the permit to the price on the box.
Cookies are one of the few cottage food products a part-time vendor can sell in four places at once without anything spoiling, and the fee on each one decides which of those places is worth a Saturday. If your regulars are already asking when the next batch is coming out, give them somewhere to put the order: open a storefront, list your flavors with their counts and prices, and put the link on the box.
