Shopify vs Etsy in 2026: Fees, Buyers and Which to Pick

TL;DR: If nobody follows you yet, start on Etsy: about 87 million people bought there in the year to June 2026, and as of October 2026 its fees are mostly per sale (6.5% of the order and 3% plus $0.25 for US card processing), plus $0.20 per listing. Choose Shopify first only if you can already send your own buyers, since its Basic plan costs $39 a month ($29 billed yearly) whether you sell or not. On fees alone Shopify turns cheaper around $500 to $590 of monthly sales, but that ignores the cost of getting each buyer to a store nobody knows, which is the real Shopify bill. Many sellers end up on both: Etsy to prove a product sells, Shopify to keep the buyers who come back.

"Shopify vs Etsy" looks like a fee question, but mostly it isn't. Etsy sells you access to shoppers. Shopify sells you a store. Work out which of those you are short of and the decision largely makes itself.

The fees are all here anyway, checked on each company's own pages in early October 2026 and worked through on real orders. Then comes a straight pick for each kind of seller, and how to run both.

The difference that decides everything else: who brings the buyer

Take one product, a $34 hoodie with your design on it, and list it in both places on the same Monday.

On Etsy, the listing joins a search engine that roughly 87 million active buyers used in the twelve months to June 30, 2026, according to Etsy's Q2 2026 shareholder letter. Someone typing "retro bass fishing hoodie" that evening can find it without ever having heard of you. Beyond the $0.20 listing fee, Etsy charges nothing for that chance until the hoodie sells.

On Shopify, the same hoodie sits at a web address nobody has typed. Shopify is the software behind millions of separate stores, not a crowd of shoppers, so your store gets visitors only when you send them: a post, an email, an ad, or a search ranking earned over months. The plan fee leaves your account every month regardless.

Put plainly, Etsy rents you a crowd and bills per sale. Shopify rents you a building and bills per month. Nearly everything else follows from that:

• Fees. Etsy's percentage pays for its crowd; Shopify's per-sale cut is smaller because it brings none.
• Rules. Whoever owns the crowd decides what may be sold to it and which listings it sees first.
• Customer data. A buyer from Etsy search is first Etsy's customer; a buyer who found your own store is yours.
• Branding. On Etsy you are a page inside another company's site. On Shopify the site is yours.

Etsy vs Shopify side by side

What each platform charges, as of October 2026

Every number below comes from Etsy's and Shopify's own help and pricing pages as of October 2026. Both change their fees, so recheck before you price.

Etsy's fees

• Listing fee: $0.20 per listing, lasting four months. An auto-renewing listing that sells reposts for another $0.20.
• Transaction fee: 6.5% of the order total, including the shipping and gift wrap you charge.
• Payment processing, US bank account: 3% plus $0.25 per order, on the full amount including shipping and any sales tax.
• Offsite Ads: Etsy advertises listings on Google, Facebook, Pinterest and other sites, and an order that arrives through one of those ads costs you 15% of its total. A shop that has ever reached $10,000 in sales within a 365-day window pays 12% instead but can no longer switch the program off; smaller shops can. No single order pays more than $100 in this fee.
• Set-up fee: new shops may pay a one-time, non-refundable fee whose amount, Etsy says, varies by location and is shown during setup.
• Monthly subscription: none required.

For the smaller lines, such as currency conversion and the regulatory fees some countries carry, see my full guide to Etsy fees.

Shopify's fees

• Plans: Basic $39, Grow $105 and Advanced $399 a month billed monthly, or $29, $79 and $299 a month billed yearly. Plus starts at $2,300 a month. The old $5 Starter plan no longer appears on Shopify's pricing page, so a new online store starts at Basic.
• Shopify Payments, online, US: 2.9% plus 30¢ per sale on Basic, 2.7% plus 30¢ on Grow, 2.5% plus 30¢ on Advanced. Cards Shopify classes as premium cost more (3.5% plus 30¢ on Basic), and international cards add 1%.
• Third-party payment providers: Shopify adds 2% per sale on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced, on top of the provider's own charges. Shopify Payments only operates in certain countries, so check yours.
• Trial: 3 days free, then $1 a month for the first 3 months on most plans.
• Set-up and listing fees: none. Paid apps, a premium theme and a custom domain are where extra costs pile up.

A worked fee comparison: one order, then a month

These tables count platform fees only: what Etsy and Shopify keep from each sale. No production costs, no shipping labels, no profit claims. Assumptions: a US seller, a domestic card, no sales tax, Shopify Basic on Shopify Payments, and an Etsy sale not attributed to Offsite Ads. The two orders are a $40 physical order ($34 item plus $6 shipping) and a $12 digital download.

Per order, Etsy keeps $2.79 more than Shopify at $40 and $0.94 more on the $12 file. Shopify recovers that through its monthly fee, so the question is how many orders it takes for Etsy's extra cut to pass $39.

For $40 orders the crossover is 14 orders a month (about $560 in sales) on monthly billing, or 11 orders ($440) billed yearly. For $12 downloads it is 42 orders (about $504), or 31 ($372) billed yearly.

In sales terms the pattern barely moves. For orders from about $12 up, Shopify Basic billed monthly undercuts Etsy once you pass roughly $500 to $590 a month, whatever you sell, or $370 to $440 billed yearly. Offsite Ads fees and the $0.20 Etsy charges every four months for unsold listings pull that line lower; paid Shopify apps push it higher. To test your own prices, the Etsy fee calculator runs any Etsy order through the current fees.

What the crossover leaves out

That monthly table assumes the same buyers turn up at your Shopify store as at your Etsy shop. They won't on their own. Etsy's bigger cut is the price of buyers arriving, and Shopify's saving only exists if you can produce those buyers yourself.

At 60 orders of $40, Shopify costs $128.40 less than Etsy for the month, about $2.14 per order. That $2.14 is your whole budget for finding each buyer. Spend more than that per sale getting people to your store and Etsy was cheaper all along.

With paid ads, ask what $2.14 buys and how many clicks a brand-new store needs before one becomes an order. With social posts, a newsletter or search traffic, you pay in hours instead. For scale, Etsy charges 12% to 15% of the order when its own ads bring the buyer: $4.80 to $6.00 on that $40 sale.

The monthly plan is the small Shopify cost. Traffic is the big one, and no fee table shows it.

Control, rules and risk

On Etsy, the landlord can rewrite the lease. Etsy sets the fees, the search ranking and the rules on what can be sold, and can change any of them. Its Creativity Standards require that you made, designed, handpicked or sourced everything you list. Reselling mass-produced goods is out, print on demand is fine when the design is yours and you name the production partner, and AI designs made from your prompts must say so. Break those rules, or draw an intellectual property complaint, and Etsy can pull the listing or suspend the shop. Etsy also keeps the search standing you earned there.

Your line to buyers is narrow too. Etsy's seller policy bars adding a buyer to your email or postal mailing list without their consent. You can invite them, but a sale doesn't hand you a subscriber.

On Shopify, more of it is yours. Your customer list sits in your admin and exports as a CSV, and the domain and brand stay yours if you ever move. Shopify's acceptable use policy is short and puts the weight on you: follow the law, your partners' rules and Shopify's terms. It says most takedown disputes come from outside, from regulators and rights holders, and that Shopify acts on individual products first and whole accounts as a last resort.

Be fair to both. Freedom isn't safety: a Shopify store can still be closed for breaking terms, and a rights holder's complaint can pull a product on either platform. Etsy's control also buys something real, since shoppers already trust its checkout and reviews. On Shopify, persuading a stranger to trust a site they found ten seconds ago is your job.

What about Pattern? Etsy's own website builder still exists: $15 a month after a 30-day free trial, with no transaction fee on Pattern sales (card processing still applies). It's a cheaper halfway house with Shopify's central problem: Pattern brings no shoppers either.

Etsy or Shopify by type of seller

Handmade

Start on Etsy. Handmade is what Etsy shoppers come for, Etsy's brand is built on makers, and a solo maker rarely sells enough for Shopify's lower cut to outweigh the work of finding buyers. The setup steps are in how to start an Etsy shop.

Print on demand

Etsy first, for most people. Margins are thin, so a cut of about 10% hurts, but a store without visitors hurts more. Printful and Printify both connect to Etsy and Shopify, so adding the second platform later is a setup task, not a rebuild. The Etsy half of that setup is laid out in setting up print on demand on Etsy. Go Shopify first only when you're growing a brand with followers, where people buy a design because it's yours rather than because it matched a search.

Digital downloads

Etsy, with one caution: Etsy's fixed fees bite hardest on cheap files. On the $12 download above, Etsy kept $1.59, over 13% of the sale. Shopify's own Digital Products app is free, so a Shopify store sells files fine, but a printable or template usually sells because someone searched for it, and that searching happens on marketplaces. Start on Etsy unless you have an audience; then sell from your own store and treat Etsy as a second shop window. For ideas on what to make, see this list of digital products that sell on Etsy.

A seller who already has an audience

Shopify first, or both from day one. If an email list, a following or a community already buys from you, you're doing the work Etsy charges for, and paying 6.5% on buyers you delivered is hard to defend.

Etsy softens this with Share & Save: when a buyer orders within 30 days of clicking a trackable link you shared outside Etsy, you get 4% of the order back, so the 6.5% transaction fee becomes roughly 2.5% on those sales. On the $40 order, Etsy's take drops from $4.25 to $2.65, still above Shopify's $1.46. Links sent in Etsy messages or placed in listing descriptions don't count, and the fan you send lands on a page full of other shops. With an audience, I'd make Shopify home and keep Etsy as a door for strangers.

Running both without splitting yourself in two

The usual route: open on Etsy, learn from real sales which products people want, then build a Shopify store around those for repeat buyers and a brand you own. Etsy keeps doing discovery; Shopify keeps the people who return.

Syncing two channels means three jobs: keeping listings (titles, photos, prices, variants) aligned, lowering stock on one side when the other sells so nothing sells twice, and either working from two order dashboards or using an app that merges them.

Shopify's own Marketplace Connect app no longer lists Etsy. Its help page names Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Target Plus, and one seller on Shopify's community forum reports being told by the app's support in October 2025 that work on Etsy was frozen. Older guides still send people there. Today the link runs through a third-party Etsy integration from the Shopify App Store.

Print on demand is easier, with no stock to oversell. Each connected store keeps its own products inside your print partner: on Printify's free account you can connect up to five stores, and to sell the same designs in the second you copy the products across and publish them. It won't clone a whole store.

The trap is opening the second front too soon. A Shopify store with no traffic beside an Etsy shop getting half your attention makes two weak shops instead of one decent one. My rule: don't build the Shopify store until Etsy has shown you, in real sales, the three or four products worth building around, and until you have a concrete plan for sending people there.

If neither platform fits, Etsy alternatives compares the other marketplaces and store builders.

The decision table and the verdict

The verdict: for most people asking "Etsy or Shopify", the answer is Etsy first. Not because it is cheaper (past about $500 a month it isn't) but because it supplies the one thing a new seller cannot buy cheaply, which is people already looking. Move to Shopify, or add it, when you can bring your own buyers, when repeat customers ask where else to find you, or when what you sell doesn't fit Etsy's rules. If you are still weighing Etsy itself, my honest take on whether Etsy still pays off lays out the case for and against.

Check that buyers exist before you choose

Both platforms take it for granted that you know what people will buy. If you don't, Etsy tells you slowly, through listings nobody clicks, and Shopify slower still, because from the inside a quiet store and an unwanted product look identical.

From this line on I'm talking my own book: I started Trendlytic, and its revenue is my income. One query looks across Amazon Merch, Etsy, TeePublic and Redbubble and shows whether paying customers exist in a niche, and how crowded that corner has become. Designs on the way up at the moment show a rising badge, which separates the risers from whatever peaked a season ago. When a phrase is about to be printed on something, a click lets you look up that exact wording in the live USPTO register; every tier includes it, and the answer is a coarse screen, not a ruling.

It reads marketplaces and has no view inside anyone's Shopify store, and I want that limit on the record. For a Shopify seller it matters less than it sounds: marketplace sales show what buyers already spend money on, which is the evidence you want before paying to bring visitors to your own site.

There's a trial, and it does want card details at signup. After it, the first plan is $9 a month. Run your next niche through it before you commit a monthly fee to either platform.

FAQ

Is it better to sell on Etsy or Shopify? Without an audience, Etsy is better, because its shoppers are already searching and most of what you pay comes out of sales. Shopify wins if you can attract your own visitors, want to own the customer list, or sell things Etsy doesn't allow.

Is Shopify cheaper than Etsy? Only above a certain volume. As of October 2026, Etsy takes about $4.25 on a $40 US order, while Shopify Basic takes $1.46 in card fees plus $39 a month ($29 billed yearly). Shopify gets cheaper on fees past roughly $500 to $590 of monthly sales, before you count what attracting visitors costs.

Should I sell on Etsy or Shopify if I'm just starting? Etsy, unless people already buy from you. A new Shopify store gets no visitors until you bring them, while Etsy shoppers can find a listing on day one. Add Shopify once you know what sells and how you'll send traffic to it.

Can you connect your Etsy shop to Shopify? Yes, with a third-party integration app from the Shopify App Store, since Shopify's own Marketplace Connect no longer lists Etsy. Print on demand sellers can also connect Printful or Printify to both stores.

Is Etsy or Shopify better for print on demand? Etsy, for most sellers starting out: its buyers already search for designs, and thin margins leave little room for ads. Shopify suits print on demand brands that already have an audience. Printful and Printify work with either.

Does Shopify bring you traffic like Etsy does? No. Shopify supplies the store, checkout and tools, not a crowd of shoppers, so your visitors come from your own social media, email, ads or search rankings. Etsy's per-sale fees are largely the price of the shoppers it supplies.

The short version

Etsy supplies buyers and charges per sale. Shopify supplies ownership, charges per month and leaves the buyers to you, and finding them is the expensive part.

So which are you shorter on right now, buyers or a brand of your own? Reply with what you sell and where it sells today, and I'll say which one I'd open first.