Shopify Vs Etsy: When A Maker Brand Outgrows The Marketplace

Shopify vs Etsy isn’t a choice between two versions of the same thing. Etsy is a marketplace: your shop is one of many on Etsy, and buyers find it by searching Etsy. Shopify is software you pay for to run a store of your own, and its visitors are the ones you send there.

That difference decides the rest. Etsy’s fees pay for the buyers its search brings you, and they rise with every order. Shopify charges a flat monthly plan and a smaller card fee, and it leaves the customer list with you. For a maker or a small brand already selling on Etsy, the fees favor Shopify very early, and the timing of a move depends on when you can bring enough of your own buyers to make it pay.

On Etsy, you rent space inside someone else’s store. You can dress it up: Etsy Plus (opens in new tab) costs $10 a month and adds banner and layout options, featured listings and sections, a custom color theme for your shop home, 15 listing credits and $5 in Etsy Ads credit each month. It’s still a shop page on Etsy, under Etsy’s rules.

Etsy also sells its own website builder, Pattern (opens in new tab), at $15 a month after a 30-day free trial, with no transaction fee and payment processing that varies by country. Squarespace is another builder a small brand often weighs, and our comparison of Shopify vs Squarespace covers price, catalog size, in-person selling and checkout on each.

A Shopify store is the business itself rather than a listing inside a bigger one. You pick the design, you set the checkout, you own the customer records, and you pay for the traffic. The rest of this post puts numbers on each of those trades.

Etsy’s fees stack. Each listing costs $0.20 to publish (opens in new tab), whether or not it sells, and it expires after four months. When a listing sells and auto-renews, you pay another $0.20 for each additional quantity, and the four-month clock starts over.

On top of that, the transaction fee is 6.5% of the total order, and it applies to the shipping and gift wrapping you charge as well as the item. US sellers then pay payment processing of 3% + $0.25 (opens in new tab) per order, charged on the sale price including shipping and any sales tax. Processing comes in addition to the 6.5%, not instead of it.

On a $100 order, that’s $6.50 in transaction fees and $3.25 in processing, or $9.75, before the $0.20 renewal. With the renewal it’s $9.95. Etsy also charges a 2.5% fee when currency conversion is needed, and a one-time shop opening fee that varies by location.

Offsite Ads is Etsy’s program for advertising your listings on other sites, and you pay only when an ad leads to a sale. An order counts as an Offsite Ads sale (opens in new tab) when a buyer clicks an ad and buys from your shop within 30 days. The fee is charged on the order total and never exceeds $100 on any single order.

What you pay depends on your sales history. A shop that has always made less than $10,000 in any consecutive 365-day period pays 15% on an attributed order and can opt out. Once a shop makes $10,000 or more in any consecutive 365 days, the rate drops to 12%, and the shop is automatically enrolled and has to stay in the program for the life of the shop.

That means a growing Etsy shop can’t turn Offsite Ads off, and a slow year doesn’t bring the opt-out back. A $100 order that came through an ad costs $12 in Offsite Ads on top of the $9.95, for $21.95 in Etsy fees. You don’t choose which orders get attributed.

Shopify’s US plans (opens in new tab) are Basic at $39 a month, Grow at $105 and Advanced at $399. Paid yearly, the monthly equivalents are $29, $79 and $299, and annual billing charges the full year up front. There are no setup fees on any plan.

Card fees depend on the plan and the card. With Shopify Payments, Basic charges 2.9% + 30¢ on a standard consumer card, Grow 2.7% + 30¢ and Advanced 2.5% + 30¢. Premium cards (opens in new tab), which include every domestic American Express card and business-tier cards such as Visa Business, cost 3.5% + 30¢ on Basic. International cards carry an extra charge above the base rate.

If you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own third-party transaction fee: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. On $5,000 a month in sales, that’s $100 a month on Basic before your provider’s own fee. Stay on Shopify Payments unless you have a reason not to.

On the same $100 order, a standard card on Basic costs $3.20 against Etsy’s $9.75. The plan isn’t the only cost of running a store, though. A theme, apps and a domain come on top, and our breakdown of what a Shopify store costs to build and run covers each of those from a free theme up to a custom build.

Here’s one worked example. It assumes a US seller with US buyers, $5,000 a month in sales at a $50 average order (shipping included, no sales tax), so 100 orders. Every sale renews its listing at $0.20, Etsy Payments and Shopify Payments handle the cards, and nothing needs currency conversion.

A shop at $5,000 a month passed $10,000 in a 365-day period long ago, so its Offsite Ads rate is 12% and it can’t opt out. The table shows the fees with no Offsite Ads orders and with an assumed 10% of orders attributed.

Etsy with no Offsite Ads costs $306 a month more than Shopify Basic on standard cards, or $3,672 a year. With 10% of orders coming through Offsite Ads, the gap is $366 a month. Even if every buyer paid with a premium card, Basic would cost $244, less than half of Etsy’s $520.

The fees cross much earlier than $5,000. At a $50 average order, Etsy takes $3.45 more per order than Basic, so the $39 plan is paid for at about 11 orders, or roughly $565 a month in sales. Paid yearly, it’s about 8 orders and $420.

Is Shopify better than Etsy, then? On fees alone, yes, from a few hundred dollars a month. But the comparison leaves out what Etsy’s 6.5% buys: shoppers who were already searching Etsy. A Shopify store starts with no visitors, and whatever you spend on ads, email and social to bring them comes out of the gap.

Read the $306 as a monthly budget for bringing your own buyers, not as savings. If you can bring them for less than that, the move pays. If almost all your orders start with an Etsy search, the move costs you those orders, and the lower fee doesn’t make up for it.

Etsy’s Share & Save program (opens in new tab) refunds part of the fee on buyers you send to your shop yourself. Enrolled sellers earn back 4% of the order total when a buyer they sent through their shop link places an eligible order within 30 days. Links sent in Etsy Messages or placed in listing descriptions don’t count, and an order whose last visit came from an Offsite Ad doesn’t qualify.

That 4% comes back as a refund, so the 6.5% transaction fee and processing are still charged on the order. On a $50 order, a buyer you sent to Etsy yourself still costs $3.20 in fees after the credit, against $1.75 for the same buyer on a Shopify Basic store with a standard card. Once you’re the one bringing the buyer, there’s no reason to pay a marketplace for the sale.

Etsy doesn’t hide your buyers from you. You can look up each order by the buyer’s name, username, email and shipping address (opens in new tab), and you can email or message the buyer directly through Etsy. What Etsy controls is how you use that contact.

Etsy wants all your communication with a buyer kept inside Etsy Messages (opens in new tab), which protects your shop if the buyer opens a case. Your shop announcement and auto-reply can’t direct buyers to buy from your own website (opens in new tab). Etsy also scans messages (opens in new tab) to catch spam, scams and attempts to move a sale off Etsy.

You can’t add an Etsy buyer to your mailing list without their consent (opens in new tab); they have to subscribe willingly. If you sell to buyers in the EU and store their details outside Etsy, such as an email address for a newsletter, you have to be open about how you use it (opens in new tab) and stop when the buyer asks. In practice, an Etsy sale gives you an order to fill, not a subscriber.

On a Shopify store, the customer list is yours. You can export all your customers (opens in new tab) and their details to a CSV file at any time from the Customers page. Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus all include Shopify Messaging (opens in new tab), Shopify’s built-in email tool, with 10,000 free marketing emails at the start of each month.

Past that allowance, Shopify Messaging costs $1 per 1,000 extra emails up to 300,000, and unused emails don’t carry over. Abandoned checkout emails are always free and don’t count toward the limit. A buyer who signs up at your checkout can hear from you again next month, which is how a second order gets made without paying a marketplace for it.

Can I sell on Etsy and Shopify? Yes, and for most makers that’s the right way to start. You keep the Etsy shop for the buyers who find you there and open a Shopify store for the buyers you bring. The work is keeping one stock count across both, so a piece that sells on Etsy doesn’t also sell on your own store.

Shopify’s own connector won’t do that for a new Etsy shop. Shopify Marketplace Connect (opens in new tab) can’t make new connections to Etsy. Shops already selling on Etsy through it can keep using it, and the app still connects Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Target Plus.

To link Etsy to Shopify today, you install a third-party app from the Shopify App Store. Each developer describes its own app, and these three are representative:

Two of the three match stock by SKU, so give every product the same SKU on Etsy and Shopify before you install anything. Check the order limit against your busiest month, not your average one, and check which direction stock moves. QuickSync’s developer describes Etsy sales updating Shopify stock, CedCommerce’s Beginner plan lists Shopify-to-Etsy inventory sync, and Digital Product Labs describes two-way sync.

Running both costs more in fixed fees but less per order. Using the $5,000 example, a seller who moves 20 of the 100 orders to a Shopify Basic store and adds DPL’s $19.99 Silver plan pays $509.99 a month in total fees, against $520 on Etsy alone. Moving 50 orders brings it to $406.49. Moving only 10 costs $24.49 more than staying on Etsy, because the plan and the app are fixed costs.

Once Shopify holds the count, how it tracks stock matters. Our guide to Shopify inventory management covers Shopify’s inventory states, how orders route between locations and the gaps that call for a reconciliation check before a busy season.

Plenty of makers sell in person too. Shopify’s in-person card rate on Basic is 2.6% + 10¢, and our comparison of Shopify vs Square covers in-person rates, POS plans and hardware for brands selling at a counter as well as online.

Leaving the marketplace doesn’t mean selling only to your own visitors. Shopify Collective lets other Shopify stores in the same country list and sell your products while your store ships the orders, so other retailers’ customers can buy what you make. That post covers the supplier role, the eligibility rules and the overselling risk at volume.

Shopify’s own Store Migration app (opens in new tab) imports your Etsy products and nothing else. You export them from Etsy under Shop Manager > Settings > Options > Download Data, then download the CSV for currently-for-sale listings, so sold-out and expired listings don’t come across. Imported products arrive as drafts, and a listing with 101 or more variation combinations comes in without its variants.

Customers, past orders and reviews need third-party apps. Shuttle – Sync with Etsy and Etsy Integration – ShopList bring customers and orders across, and the App Store has a collection of apps for importing Etsy reviews. Import products first, then customers, then historical orders (opens in new tab).

A customer record isn’t permission to email. Etsy buyers who never subscribed to your list still haven’t, so import them as customers, not subscribers, and invite them to sign up from your store.

Moving from Etsy to Shopify works best as a slow shift rather than a switch. Open the Shopify store, sync stock, keep the Etsy shop running, and point your own channels at your own store: your email list, your social accounts, your packaging inserts and your market booth. Your Etsy shop announcement can’t do that job. When the Shopify store carries more orders than the Etsy shop, you can cut the Etsy catalog back to the pieces that sell there.

If you’d rather hand off moving listings, customers and reviews, our Shopify migration services cover products, customer records, order history, reviews and redirects, and we build the new store alongside the old one so the old one keeps selling during the move.

The fees settle quickly in the Shopify vs Etsy question. At $5,000 a month, Etsy costs about $306 more each month than Shopify Basic, and Offsite Ads only widens that once it’s mandatory. What decides the timing is where your buyers come from.

If a real share of your orders already comes from repeat buyers, your email list, social or in-person sales, put them on a Shopify store now and keep Etsy for discovery. If nearly every order starts with an Etsy search, open the Shopify store anyway, sync it, and build the list that will carry it. Either way, each buyer who signs up on your own store is one you won’t pay Etsy to reach again.

When the store becomes the brand, it should look like one. Our custom Shopify theme development builds your theme from blank files instead of a marketplace template, designed for fast mobile loads and conversion, so the store your buyers land on feels like the work you make. Start your custom Shopify build when you’re ready to make your own store the main one.