Your kid makes something great (friendship bracelets, cookies, stickers, slime) and someone finally says the magic words: "You should sell these!" The first place most families think of is Etsy. So can a kid actually sell there?
The short answer: not really. And if your child is under 13, the answer is a flat no.
What Etsy's policy actually says
Etsy's minors policy is unambiguous:
- Children under 13 may not use Etsy at all. Not as a seller, not with supervision, not on a parent's lap. The platform is simply not available to them.
- Teens 13–17 can't have their own account either. A minor may only sell through an account that is owned and run by a parent or legal guardian. The account is in your name, the payment details are yours, and Etsy holds you responsible for everything on it.
That second rule matters more than most families realize, because of what it does to the kid's experience.
The workaround, and what it quietly costs
Plenty of families do the workaround: a parent opens the shop, lists the child's products, and handles the orders. It works, in the sense that things get sold. But look at it from the kid's side:
The kid is a ghost in their own business. No login. No dashboard. No store of their own to check in the morning. They can't see their orders come in, can't watch their own numbers, can't press the button that makes their store real. The parent does all of that, which means the parent slowly becomes the business, and the kid becomes the supplier.
The learning is exactly what gets lost. The pride of "this is mine," the habit of checking your shop, the arithmetic of what things cost versus what they sell for: those live in the doing, not in watching a grown-up do it.
There's also the practical layer: Etsy is a grown-up marketplace. Your child's bracelet listing sits alongside millions of adult sellers, the fees are real (a listing fee plus a transaction percentage on every sale), and nothing about the platform is designed with children's safety or privacy in mind, because children aren't supposed to be there.
Why the rule exists (and why it's actually reasonable)
This isn't Etsy being difficult. A U.S. federal law called COPPA (the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) sets strict rules for any online service that collects personal information from children under 13: verified parental consent, limits on data, real obligations. Most platforms respond the same way Etsy, eBay, and Facebook Marketplace do: they simply ban young kids rather than build for them. It's the cheapest form of compliance.
The result is a strange gap: we tell kids entrepreneurship is wonderful, hand them books about it, send them to business fairs. And then every real venue for actually running a store online turns them away at the door.
The alternatives, honestly compared
A parent-run Etsy shop. Fine if your goal is just to sell the inventory. Wrong tool if your goal is for the kid to learn by running something.
Shopify. A real store builder, but the account holder must be an adult, the basic plan runs about $39/month before payment fees, and you'd be assembling the training wheels (approvals, safety, kid-friendly design) yourself.
Local business fairs and markets. Genuinely great: kids' business fairs and lemonade-day events give kids real face-to-face selling experience. Their limit is that they happen a few times a year. A business that exists one Saturday per season is a lovely memory; it isn't a habit.
A platform built for exactly this. This is why we built Lemonade Stand. It's the place a kid under 13 can have an online store that is actually theirs — their own login, their own dashboard, their own orders — legally, because the whole platform is built around COPPA from the ground up. The parent approves every product, every order, and every public word before it goes live, and all customer communication happens parent-to-parent. Kids sell things they make, or services they do like car washes, gift wrapping, and pet care, with a parent present.
The bottom line
If your child is under 13, Etsy isn't an option, and the parent-account workaround for teens turns the kid into a supplier rather than a founder. Before you build the workaround, it's worth asking what you actually want out of this: products sold, or a kid who learns what it feels like to run something of their own.
If it's the second one, that's the thing we made.
Marilyn is the founder of Lemonade Stand and a mom of young shopkeepers. Policies and prices referenced were checked in July 2026; platform policies change, so always confirm current terms.