Costs · Margins · The business of ecommerce
Etsy charges nothing monthly and takes a cut of everything; Shopify charges monthly and takes almost nothing per sale. We priced one identical order on both and found the crossover point.
Etsy and Shopify price the same activity with opposite philosophies. Etsy is pay-per-sale: no required monthly bill, a cut of every order. Shopify is pay-for-the-building: a flat subscription, then keep what you sell minus card processing. Which one costs less is not a matter of opinion, it is a function of two numbers you already know: your average order value and your monthly order count.
| Fee | Etsy | Shopify (Basic) |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | none required | $29/mo annual ($39 monthly) |
| Listing fee | $0.20 per item, renews every 4 months or on each sale | none |
| Transaction fee | 6.5% of order total incl. shipping and gift wrap | none on Shopify Payments; 2% surcharge on outside gateways |
| Payment processing | varies by country; 3% + $0.25 in the US | 2.9% + $0.30 (US online) |
| Advertising cut | Offsite Ads: 15% under $10k trailing sales (optional), 12% above (mandatory), capped at $100/order | none built in; ads are whatever you spend |
On Etsy, a $50 US order pays $0.20 (listing) + $3.25 (6.5% transaction) + $1.75 (processing) = $5.20, or 10.4%. If that buyer arrived through an Offsite Ad and your shop is under the $10,000 threshold, add $7.50, taking the total to $12.70, or 25.4% of the order.
On Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments, the same order pays $1.75 in processing, or 3.5%. The subscription sits on top as a fixed cost: spread over 100 monthly orders it adds 29 cents per sale; over 10 orders, $2.90 per sale. That fixed-versus-variable difference is the entire comparison.
Per $50 order, Etsy costs about $3.45 more than Shopify’s processing. Shopify’s subscription costs $29 flat. Divide one by the other and the crossover lands at 8.4 orders a month: below that, Etsy’s structure is cheaper; above it, Shopify’s is, and the gap compounds.
The table above assumes your orders exist either way, and that assumption favors Shopify unfairly. Etsy’s 6.5% buys placement in a marketplace where buyers already search; a new Shopify store buys a building on an empty street. If acquiring a customer costs you $10 in ads, the $3.45 per-order difference stops mattering fast in the other direction.
So the honest reading is narrower but more useful: Etsy is cheap distribution at low volume and an increasingly expensive tax as you grow, especially once mandatory Offsite Ads take 12% of ad-attributed orders past the $10,000 mark. That is why the common path is not either-or but a sequence: start where the buyers are, and when your repeat customers and order volume clear the crossover, move the repeat business to a storefront where each additional sale costs 30 cents plus a percentage, not a tenth of the order. Our per-sale fee breakdown prices the Shopify side of that math in detail.
At low volume, yes. Etsy has no required subscription, so five $50 sales a month cost about $26 in fees versus about $38 on Shopify Basic once the subscription is counted. The ranking flips at roughly 8-9 orders a month at that order size, and the gap keeps widening with volume.
A $0.20 listing fee per item, a 6.5% transaction fee on the order total including shipping and gift wrap, and payment processing that varies by country (3% + $0.25 in the US). Sales attributed to Etsy's Offsite Ads carry an extra 15% fee for shops under $10,000 in trailing 12-month sales, or 12% above that, where participation becomes mandatory.
Not if you use Shopify Payments; then your only per-sale cost is card processing (2.9% + 30 cents US online on Basic). A fee on the sale itself only appears if you process through an outside gateway: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced.
Because Etsy's fees buy traffic. The marketplace brings buyers; a Shopify store starts with zero visitors and has to pay for its own marketing. The honest comparison is Etsy's extra fees versus your customer-acquisition cost, not Etsy's fees versus zero.