Shopify vs. Etsy: Which eCommerce platform is right for you? [2025]

"Should I stay on Etsy or move to Shopify?"

Browse any creative business community and you'll find sellers endlessly debating this question. If you're wondering the same—whether you're planning your very first listing or watching your Etsy shop notifications blow up with orders—you're facing a decision that will shape everything from your daily workflow to your long-term growth potential.

Etsy offers immediate access to millions of shoppers but keeps you within its marketplace framework, while Shopify provides complete brand control but requires you to drive your own traffic. Behind the standard comparison points—fees, features, and design options—lies a deeper question about your creative business: are you building a shop within a marketplace, or developing an independent brand?

In this article, I've compared Etsy and Shopify head-to-head to help you navigate this decision. Whether you're a complete beginner or you're considering moving an established shop from Etsy to Shopify, I'll help you figure out which platform makes sense for you.

Table of contents:

• Etsy vs. Shopify at a glance

• Etsy is for handmade and self-designed items—no dropshipping

• Etsy makes it easier to start a shop and get your first sale

• Etsy's marketplace helps buyers discover your products

• Shopify is better for brand building and repeat customers

• Shopify is far more scalable

• Shopify and Etsy have dramatically different fee structures

• Shopify offers more integrations, including Zapier

• Shopify vs. Etsy: Which should you choose?

• Using both Etsy and Shopify

Etsy vs. Shopify at a glance

Before diving into specifics, here's a quick overview of how these eCommerce platforms differ:

Etsy is best for smaller shops looking for immediate exposure. If you create your own products and want to start selling quickly with minimal setup, Etsy's marketplace connects you to millions of ready buyers. While customization is limited and fees can add up with higher sales volume, the low barrier to entry and built-in audience make it perfect for testing products or running a creative side hustle.

Shopify is best for brand-focused entrepreneurs. If you want complete control over your online presence and customer experience, Shopify gives you the freedom to build a distinctive brand with your own domain, custom design, and powerful eCommerce tools. While it requires more setup effort and marketing to drive traffic, its scalability makes it ideal for sellers planning serious long-term growth.

Etsy is for handmade and self-designed items—no dropshipping allowed

Etsy specializes in unique, handmade, and vintage items. If you sell this sort of item—or are in another of the categories that's especially popular on Etsy, like printables or activity kits—Etsy should get an extra dose of consideration as you choose your platform.

But there are certain categories of products and activities that don't work for Etsy. For example, if you're selling something you haven't made or designed yourself, forget about it: Etsy doesn't allow it. (Dropshipping, a popular Shopify business model, is a no-go on Etsy.)

Etsy makes it easier to start a shop and get your first sale

Etsy is full of shop owners like Olivia Wang, who launched an Etsy site selling handmade floral iPhone cases as a side hustle: "Etsy was really straightforward to set up. I took some pictures of my products, uploaded them to Etsy, added a cute shop banner, wrote two paragraphs of the story behind my shop, and that was it."

Etsy's ease of setup—and its built-in audience, which I'll talk about shortly—makes it perfect for non-technical creators who want to focus on their craft rather than on design or marketing. Etsy's interface guides you step-by-step through adding photos, descriptions, pricing, and tags, and Etsy handles all technical aspects of hosting, security, and checkout (all things beginners would rather not touch with a ten-foot pole).

Even if you have experience with websites and marketing, Etsy is still a low-risk first step to validate that there's actually a market of paying customers for your idea. Since you only pay when you actually make sales, the financial risk is minimal compared to investing in a standalone website that might generate no traffic.

Shopify also presents a steeper learning curve for beginners. Its dashboard offers many more options and settings to navigate, and when you set up your store, you need to make decisions about theme selection, page layouts, payment gateways, and shipping rules—all before publishing. Shopify's setup wizard helps, and there are definitely positive aspects to having this higher level of customization, but the sheer number of features can feel overwhelming compared with Etsy.

Etsy makes ongoing management of your shop easier too: your focus is solely on maintaining listings and fulfilling orders. With Shopify, you're also responsible for website maintenance, marketing strategies, and managing any apps and integrations you choose to add. Shopify provides documentation and 24/7 support if you get stuck, which helps offset the learning curve. Still, there's simply more to worry about with Shopify. For complete beginners or those wanting the fastest path to selling, Etsy's plug-and-play simplicity is unmatched.

Etsy's marketplace helps buyers discover your products

With approximately 95 million active buyers browsing the marketplace, new Etsy sellers have a chance to be discovered simply by listing products with accurate keywords and tags. There's traffic for almost any crafty term you can think of, from soy candles to dinosaur-shaped crayons. (For example, I stumbled upon a shop selling crocheted vegetables with 18,000+ sales.) Thanks to Etsy's internal search engine and category browsing, even the most niche listings can start getting seen immediately.

As with Etsy's easy setup process, its built-in audience means there's one less thing to worry about for crafty sellers who'd rather focus on creating than design and marketing. Let's say you have a side hustle selling handmade cutting boards, for example. Since you're already using your limited time to handle production, shipping, and customer service, being able to rely on Etsy to drive customers to you is a big plus.

However, this built-in audience comes with competition. Your products appear alongside many similar items, and Etsy's search algorithm determines whose listings show up first. Etsy has recently updated its search to emphasize listing quality—good photos, thorough descriptions—to help surface the best items. You can also opt to pay for ads on Etsy to boost the visibility of your products. Still, you're inevitably one fish in a very big pond, competing for attention in a crowded space.

Despite how crowded Etsy can be, it has more built-in traffic potential than Shopify, where discoverability is entirely up to you. Shopify requires you to spend time and effort to draw people in through other marketing channels like search engine optimization, social media, paid ads, or influencer marketing. Without proactive marketing, you're nearly guaranteed to get zero views and zero sales.

Shopify is better for brand building and repeat customers

Olivia Wang—who, as I mentioned earlier, started a floral iPhone case business on Etsy—eventually moved her shop, Floral Neverland, to Shopify. The main reason? "Building brand loyalty on Etsy is hard. Most of the time, a customer's loyalty is to Etsy, not to your brand."

While Etsy makes it easy to get started, long-term growth is a different story. Customers often remember they bought something "on Etsy" rather than from your specific shop.

Getting repeat customers to your Etsy store is hard because, in most cases, you're not allowed to contact them again unless it's specifically related to their initial order with you. That means you're dependent on them finding you again, which—with millions of vendors on Etsy—is no sure thing. Attempting to boost growth by driving traffic to your Etsy page is risky, too, because Etsy promotes related items from other shops at the bottom of every product page.

With Shopify, your customers are yours, and you can contact them (as long as they've opted in) with discounts and offers to boost repeat business. You can also design your store in a way that reflects your brand's personality and makes your products memorable. There are dozens of free and premium themes, and you can customize layouts, colors, fonts, and imagery using Shopify's drag-and-drop editor. Shopify also offers the option of a custom domain, meaning your URL will be yourbrand.com rather than etsy.com/shop/yourbrand.

For example, Pela, a Shopify-powered phone case brand, has a level of polish and brand presentation that's simply not possible on Etsy.

Etsy's options for customization are minimal. All Etsy shops follow a standard format: a banner at the top, profile picture, listings in a grid, and sections like About and Reviews. While you can upload your own banner and logo, you can't change the overall layout, colors, or style.

With Pattern, Etsy's $15/month website building tool, you can create a Wix-style standalone website that connects with your Etsy inventory. This solves some of Etsy's brand-building challenges: you can use a custom URL and design a unique look and feel for your site. It's not the most advanced website builder out there, but it's a decent halfway point for sellers who don't need the full capabilities of Shopify.

Still, Pattern doesn't solve one of the other reasons to establish your own website: Etsy has a reputation for banning stores without notice or explanation. Anecdotally, many brand new Etsy sellers are reporting a "ban first and ask questions later" approach, but even long-time sellers report seemingly random shop suspensions. (One Etsy seller says that after six years of selling on Etsy, they were permanently suspended after updating their shop profile pic; another went through a year-long review process before being told their account was deactivated in error.)

Shopify is far more scalable

Etsy, while excellent for starting out, has inherent scaling limitations. The economics that make Etsy so attractive at lower volumes—no monthly fee, just a percentage of sales—start to break down at higher revenue levels. A business doing $10,000 monthly in sales would pay $950 in Etsy fees and payment processing charges, making Shopify's flat subscription fee more economical.

High-volume shops also tend to need more sophisticated tools than Etsy can provide. For example, let's say you have dozens of customers browsing your store each day and want to invest in a chatbot to handle the inquiries and support requests. With Etsy, you're stuck doing everything manually, while with Shopify, you can use the built-in Shopify Inbox tool—or browse Shopify's app store and choose from 300+ chatbots.

Fulfillment can be a huge headache at high volumes. Shopify has a lot to offer sellers in this area: Shopify Flow, an automation tool, can hide products when they're out of stock and automatically reorder supplies when they're low. And with the Shopify Fulfillment Network, you can send all of your inventory to a central location and let Shopify's partners handle distribution—they'll even move your products to warehouses that are closer to your customers to speed up delivery times.

As you grow your store, you'll naturally want to sell on more channels. Shopify Marketplace Connect makes it easy to sync your product catalog with Amazon, Target, Walmart, eBay, and even Etsy. Shopify also lets you drive sales through social selling on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and Snapchat. You can measure the results of all of this cross-channel activity from your Shopify dashboard.

Decisions that don't matter much when your shop is small have a big impact on revenue as you grow. For example, Shopify's fine-tuned checkout process has a 15% higher conversion rate than most competitors. It's also highly customizable: you can add product upsells, tipping options, customer loyalty programs, and the option to pay in installments.

Marketing to past customers—which is prohibited on Etsy—is easy on Shopify. You can segment your customers and send personalized email campaigns that are likely to resonate. Templated emails let you create new campaigns quickly, and Shopify's express checkout buttons make it easy for customers to buy again.

Shopify and Etsy have dramatically different fee structures

Shopify charges upfront fixed costs with lower transaction fees, while Etsy has no monthly fee but higher per-sale charges.

Shopify's Basic plan costs $39/month, giving you an online store with unlimited products. Using Shopify Payments, you'll pay 2.9% + $0.30/transaction with no additional fees. Optional costs include apps and premium themes. If you want to give team members access to your Shopify account, you'll need to upgrade to the $105/month plan (five accounts) or the $399/month plan (15 accounts).

Etsy charges a $29 shop setup fee, $0.20 per listing, and a 6.5% transaction fee on the total order amount. You'll also pay another 3% + $0.25 for payment processing, though this is a standard cost you'll incur anywhere if you accept credit cards.

For low sales volume, Etsy is typically cheaper since you only pay when you sell. If you sell nothing, you only lose listing fees, while Shopify still charges its monthly subscription. However, as sales grow, Shopify becomes more cost-effective. The breakeven point is around $600 in monthly sales. At $2,000 in sales, you'll pay ~$190 with Etsy versus ~$97 on Shopify Basic—roughly half the cost.

Remember that Etsy's fees also pay for marketplace exposure. With Shopify, you might save on fees but need to invest that difference in driving your own traffic.

Shopify offers more integrations—and connects to thousands of apps via Zapier

With 15,000+ apps available, Shopify's App Store offers apps for nearly any purpose: email marketing, social media integration, dropshipping, print-on-demand, subscriptions, customer support, and more. Shopify also natively supports multi-channel selling through Shopify Marketplace Connect.

Etsy has limited official integrations. While it provides an API for services like QuickBooks and Printful, Etsy doesn't have an app store to extend its functionality. That means there's a limit to what you can do if the capabilities you want aren't built into the platform.

Plus, using Zapier, you can connect Shopify to thousands of other apps, so you can automatically track sales, send notifications, create inventory and performance reports, keep track of offline conversions, chase down abandoned carts, and anything in between. Learn more about how to automate Shopify, or get started with one of the automation workflows below.

Shopify vs. Etsy: Which should you choose?

Choose Etsy if you're just starting out, especially if your products are handmade, one-of-a-kind, or vintage, and you want to try selling online with minimal cost and hassle. If you don't have marketing experience or budget, Etsy lets you quickly set up a shop and potentially get sales from day one. It's perfect for hobbyists, testing product ideas, or selling a small volume without committing to monthly fees.

Choose Shopify when you're ready to build your own brand and scale. If having full control over your store and customer experience is important—you want a custom website, your own domain, the ability to market to past customers, and complete design freedom—Shopify is the better choice. It also offers advanced fulfillment and customer service options that help you provide a consistent experience at high volumes.

There's also a third option: use both platforms. 

Using both Etsy and Shopify—why it's not an either/or choice

Instead of viewing Etsy and Shopify as competitors, many businesses use them as complementary tools—especially as they're first getting started.

Here's a quick playbook:

1. Start on Etsy to validate products and build initial sales with minimal risk.

2. Launch a Shopify store once you have proven products and some customer data.

3. Send repeat customers to your Shopify site using incentives like exclusive discounts.

4. Keep your Etsy shop to continue capturing new customers from marketplace search.

5. Gradually shift marketing efforts toward building your independent brand.

With this approach, you get the best of both worlds: Etsy continues to bring in customers through marketplace search, while your Shopify site can be where you drive social media followers, paid ad traffic, and email subscribers, establishing repeat business without extra fees.

Related reading:

• 5 sales channels to consider for eCommerce

• How to start an eCommerce business: A step-by-step guide

• The best Shopify alternatives