Shopify vs Etsy: which one should you sell on?

For most small businesses and makers, Etsy is the better place to start and Shopify is the better place to build. Etsy brings shoppers who are already searching, but takes about 10% of a typical $50 sale in fees before ads and keeps the customer relationship. Shopify costs a monthly fee and brings you no traffic, but you own the brand, the customer list and the search rankings.

Many sellers end up on both: Etsy for discovery, Shopify for repeat buyers. We run both for clients, including an Etsy storefront synced from a Shopify catalog for Elume Medspa's skincare line. This guide compares the two on fees, audience, branding, customer data, SEO and policies, then shows how to run both without doing everything twice.

Shopify vs Etsy at a glance

Prices and fees are as of October 2026 and change. Check the sources linked below before you budget.

Etsy fees vs Shopify fees

What Etsy charges

Etsy's fee basics for US sellers, as of October 2026:

• Listing fee: $0.20 per listing. A listing lasts four months and auto-renews for another $0.20 unless you turn that off. Selling one unit of a multi-quantity listing also renews it.
• Transaction fee: 6.5% of the order total, including what you charge for shipping and gift wrap.
• Payment processing: 3% + $0.25 per order through Etsy Payments in the US. Rates vary by country.
• Offsite Ads: when a buyer clicks one of Etsy's ads on another site and buys within 30 days, Etsy charges 15% of the order if your shop has always made under $10,000 in any 365-day period, or 12% once it has passed $10,000. The fee is capped at $100 per order. Shops under $10,000 can opt out; shops over it are enrolled for good (How Etsy's Offsite Ads work).

Sellers in some countries also pay a regulatory operating fee on top of these.

What Shopify charges

Shopify's pricing page, as of October 2026:

Budget for extras too: a paid theme if you want one, apps (many charge monthly), and your domain.

A $50 sale, side by side

Take a $50 item with free shipping, before sales tax:

• Etsy, organic sale: $0.20 listing + $3.25 transaction + $1.75 processing = $5.20, or 10.4%.
• Etsy, sale from an Offsite Ad at 15%: add $7.50 = $12.70, or 25.4%.
• Shopify Basic: $1.75 in card fees per sale, plus the $39 monthly plan.

The difference per organic sale is about $3.45. At $39 a month, Shopify Basic pays for itself in fees at around a dozen $50 sales a month. That math only holds if those sales actually happen on Shopify, and Shopify sends you no shoppers. Traffic you pay for with ads costs money too.

Audience: who finds you on each platform

Etsy's biggest advantage is that shoppers are already there, searching for things like "custom diploma frame" or "handmade soy candle." A new shop can make a first sale without a website, an ad budget or an email list.

The trade-off is that you're shelved next to your competitors, sorted by Etsy's search, and often compared on price. If you sell the same kind of thing as a hundred other shops, Etsy can turn into a price fight.

Shopify has no audience of its own. Every visitor comes from your SEO, ads, social posts, email list or word of mouth. That's harder at first, but the traffic is yours, and nobody else's listing sits beside your product.

Branding and customer data

On Etsy, buyers often remember "I got it on Etsy," not your shop name. You get a banner, a logo, an About section and listing photos and videos, inside Etsy's design.

The bigger issue is the customer relationship. Etsy's Seller Policy says buyer information may only be used for Etsy-related communication and the transaction. You can't add a buyer to your mailing list or send them marketing without their express consent, given through a clear action like agreeing in a message. You can't easily turn an Etsy buyer into a repeat customer on your own terms.

On Shopify, customers who opt in at checkout or through a signup form are on your list. You can send them a welcome series, an abandoned-checkout reminder or a restock email, within email and SMS law. For any business that sells things people buy again, like skincare, candles or supplies, that's where the long-term value is.

SEO: who gets the Google traffic

Etsy listings can rank on Google, but the ranking signals build up on Etsy's domain, not yours. If you leave Etsy, those rankings leave with you.

On Shopify, product pages, collections and blog posts build up on your own domain. You control titles, descriptions, URLs and structured data, and the authority you earn stays with you if you ever change themes or apps. If you later change the store's domain, you can carry that authority with you using redirects. We wrote up how in our Shopify domain change guide.

Inside Etsy, your SEO is Etsy search: titles, tags, attributes and the first lines of the description. When we synced Elume's catalog to Etsy, the search pass front-loaded titles (Etsy allows up to 140 characters), opened descriptions with the words shoppers search, and filled in volume attributes.

Etsy's rules: what you can sell, and what you can say

Creativity Standards

Etsy's Creativity Standards say everything you list must be made, designed, handpicked or sourced by you. "Sourced" covers specific categories, like craft and party supplies, not general resale. Listings now show a label such as "Made by" or "Designed by" your shop.

That shapes what goes where. Elume's Etsy shop carries only the house-brand products. Products the store sells as an affiliate stay off Etsy.

Medical claims

This is the rule that catches beauty, wellness and skincare sellers. Etsy's Medical Claims policy bans claims that a product prevents, heals, treats or cures a condition, among others, and it says a disclaimer doesn't make a prohibited claim acceptable. Medical drugs are prohibited outright: two of Elume's products can't be listed on Etsy at all because they contain hydrocortisone, an over-the-counter drug.

What we do now:

• Describe feel and appearance only. How it feels on the skin, how skin looks afterward. Not what it does inside the skin.
• Run a banned-word check before anything publishes. Our table has 69 rules, with terms like inflammation, antibacterial, rosacea, acne, scars, hyperpigmentation, heal, repair, clinical, prescription and treats. It gates every listing and every on-screen caption in the shop's videos.
• Use safe verbs: soothe, calm, hydrate, protect, support, smooth.
• Never rely on a disclaimer. Etsy's own policy says it won't help.

Etsy does have an appeal process for removed listings, but it's far cheaper to never trip the rule. Your Shopify product pages should still follow FDA and FTC rules on claims; Etsy is just stricter and faster to act. This is general information, not legal advice.

How to run Shopify and Etsy together with a SKU sync

Running both is common, and it's where most sellers start making mistakes: a price changes on one platform and not the other, an item sells out on Shopify but stays live on Etsy, or a listing edit on Etsy never makes it back.

The fix is to pick one source of truth. For Elume, that's Shopify. Shopify's own Marketplace Connect app isn't taking new Etsy connections as of October 2026, so the options are a third-party sync app or a script. We built a sync script that matches products between the two by SKU and applies changes in a fixed order:

1. Create Etsy listings for Shopify products that should be on Etsy and aren't.
2. Copy titles, descriptions and prices, after the banned-word check.
3. Images: upload product photos and set alt text. The first sync set alt text on all 76 images.
4. Prune Etsy listings for products that left the catalog.
5. Inventory: push stock levels so nothing oversells.
6. Activate listings that pass every check.
7. Shop: update shop-level settings.

After each run, a separate audit script checks every listing for the price rule, 13 tags, materials, section, SKU, policy words, image count and duplicates. The first sync also caught copy problems already live on Etsy: a dead link and a refund clause that wasn't true.

Etsy API traps we hit

• Asking for images on a listing that has none returns a 404. Our first version read that as "no images," then uploaded a duplicate set.
• Etsy's 10-image cap isn't enforced on upload, so a script can go over it without an error.
• Opening a listing in Shop Manager can silently drop images. Re-count after any manual edit.
• Some shop settings return 200 OK but aren't saved. Read the value back instead of trusting the response.

Video is worth the effort on Etsy. Listing videos run 3 to 15 seconds and play without sound, per Etsy's help center. We built square, silent 14.5-second videos for 14 of Elume's Etsy listings, with every claim on screen as text.

The same idea works for makers. For KH Art & Framing, a family frame shop, we're building the Etsy shop from config files through the Etsy API, with prices computed from the same price chart their website's frame builder uses, so a price never has to be typed twice. Listings stage as drafts, which cost nothing, and the $0.20 fee only applies when they publish.

Which should you choose? A decision framework

Three honest caveats. First, if you're testing an idea, don't pay for Shopify yet; Etsy is the cheaper experiment. Second, if you already sell well on Etsy and don't want to market a website, Shopify will just be a monthly bill. Third, running both doubles your listings to maintain unless you automate the sync, so only add the second platform when you're ready for that.

For custom products, see our guide to building a Shopify product customizer without a monthly app. If you'd like help setting up either platform, or connecting both, our Shopify and Etsy service covers setup, catalogs and syncing.

Frequently asked questions