Shopify vs Etsy — Which is Better for Selling Online?

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In this Shopify vs Etsy shootout I compare two of the most popular solutions available for selling products online. Which platform is right for you? Or can you use both?

Let’s find out…

The key differences between Shopify and Etsy

Shopify and Etsy are two big names in the ecommerce world — and both platforms let you put your products before a large online audience. But they are very different tools.

There are two key differences between Shopify and Etsy you need to be aware of:

Let’s dig into these.

HOW you sell goods on Shopify and Etsy

Shopify is a popular website building platform that lets you build your own online store. Over 5.4 million stores are powered by it.

Etsy, by contrast, is an existing online store (and a big, well-known one at that, with recent statistics indicating that around 9 million merchants use it to sell to around 91.5 million customers).

When you sell on Shopify, it’s like renting a space where you set up your own shop — but selling on Etsy is more like selling your goods in a supermarket.

With Shopify, you’ll have a lot more work to do to configure things the way you want — and find customers. However, you’ll also have a lot more say over everything. For example, you can control:

With Etsy, the customers are already there — but so is your competition. To continue the supermarket analogy, hosting a store on Etsy is like having some shelf space in an aisle. Lots of customers will walk past it, but will they reach out for one of your products — or grab one of your competitors’?

Both these ways of selling online have their pros and cons — I discuss these in more depth later on in this comparison. But first, a look at the other main difference between the two solutions — what you can actually sell.

WHAT you can sell on Shopify and Etsy

Shopify lets you sell pretty much anything — so long as it’s legal to do so in the country you’re based in.

By contrast, Etsy only lets you sell certain types of products — items that are:

In practice, this generally restricts you to selling your own handmade goods, vintage items, craft supplies and digital products.

So, if you’re not going to be selling these type of products, then Shopify — or another ecommerce platform — is the more obvious choice.

If you are selling these types of products, then either platform will work fine — with Etsy bringing the added advantage of an existing audience that particularly likes handmade and crafty items.

(Note: Etsy does let you sell other types of goods if you use its ‘Pattern’ product — more on that in a moment).

Now that we’ve looked at the basics of how Shopify and Etsy work, let’s move onto how easy they are to use.

Ease-of-use

Etsy and Shopify are both designed to be easy for ecommerce novices to start selling with.

When you sign up for an account on either platform, an onboarding process is provided that takes you through the key steps needed to start selling. Additionally, a range of online resources and video tutorials is available to further support you.

(Shopify’s are more extensive however — and some of the Etsy ‘how to’ videos are a bit old).

The learning curves for both platforms, whilst not terribly steep, are different, though.

With Etsy, you are basically adding listings to an existing online marketplace. This isn’t quite as easy as it sounds — you’ll need to give a fair bit of thought to copy, imagery and pricing of products. But it’s a relatively straightforward process (as the video below demonstrates).

With Shopify however, you are building an entirely new website. So, in order to get your Shopify store off the ground, you will need to familiarize yourself with tasks like:

(And all that’s before you get to adding products!).

Although Shopify has been designed to facilitate this in as easy a way as possible, if you’re new to web design, there is still a fair bit to learn.

Control over branding and user experience

When you sell on Etsy, there are limits to how you can present your business online. You can add a logo and a banner to your storefront — but that’s more or less it.

So in general, your online presence is going to look very ‘Etsy-like,’ and you won’t be able to create much of a bespoke shopping experience using the platform.

Now, because Etsy users expect a certain type of look and feel, this is probably a good thing — moving too far away from the Etsy shopping experience might actually have a negative effect on sales.

Shopify works very differently when it comes to customization: it gives you a huge amount of control over your brand and user experience.

A wide range of templates for Shopify is available (215 in total); and these can be extensively tweaked to match your branding requirements (and via CSS and HTML too, if you have the relevant technical skills).

You can browse all the available Shopify templates here.

Sophisticated multi-currency and multilingual features in Shopify allow you to customize the user experience further — so ultimately, if you want to create a bespoke shopping experience tailored to a particular buyer persona, market or location, Shopify offers this option in a way that Etsy doesn’t.

What about Etsy’s ‘Pattern’ platform?

This Shopify vs Etsy comparison is mainly looking at the differences between Shopify and the main, ‘catalogue’ based version of Etsy.

However, it’s important to note that Etsy has a separate product available, ‘Pattern,’ that does let you create a standalone online store.

There are two ways to use Pattern. First, you can use the main version of Etsy to ‘power’ your Pattern store — this means adding a product catalogue to Etsy which populates your site with products (with inventory data being synced between the two platforms).

Alternatively, you can just add items directly to a Pattern store and sell these separately (i.e., these products won’t appear on ‘normal’ Etsy). Unlike the main Etsy platform, these don’t have to be handmade, vintage or crafting items.

Pattern costs $15 per month — $24 cheaper than the Shopify ‘Basic’ plan (the cheapest Shopify plan that lets you build a fully-customizable, standalone website). The first 30 days of your Pattern account are free (and if you cancel before this period is up, you won’t be charged).

It’s important to note, however, that Pattern by Etsy lacks many of the ecommerce features provided by Shopify (for example, abandoned cart savers, native email marketing, advanced search engine optimization features and dropshipping).

That said, it’s cheap and cheerful, integrates well with the main version of Etsy, and will suit some users.

Shipping and dropshipping

A particularly important area to look at when comparing Etsy and Shopify is shipping.

Shipping goods with Etsy

Given the emphasis on handmade and ‘one-off’ items, many Etsy merchants simply ship their own products. The platform makes this easy by allowing you to print postage labels from within the tool — you won’t need to go to the post office to buy stamps!

And Etsy offers some pretty generous discounts on postage labels too. For example, you can save up to 30% on postage when you print USPS, FedEx, and Canada Post labels using Etsy.

If you don’t want to ship your own goods, and you sell enough products to justify using a fulfilment service, the good news is that quite a lot of them work with Etsy — including Shipstation and, interestingly, Amazon’s popular FBA service.

Shipping goods with Shopify

If you want to ship your own goods with Shopify, you can set your own shipping rates, rules and based on product weight, price, quantity and more — a very flexible range of options is available to you.

Depending on your country of operation, significant shipping discounts are available to you too, via ‘Shopify Shipping’ — a real-time carrier quotation system (this only works with certain carriers, but the discounts it provides are extremely generous — up to 88% in some cases).

If you don’t want to fulfil your products yourself, as with Etsy you can connect your Shopify store to a third-party fulfilment service.

Alternatively, you can consider dropshipping. And speaking of that…

Dropshipping in Shopify vs Etsy

Dropshipping is a way of selling goods where you don’t make, store or fulfil any products. Rather, you take an order via your store, send it to a supplier, and they deliver the goods to your customer.

Now, Shopify is a much better solution for this type of online selling — and in many ways has been designed with it in mind.

With Shopify, you can connect your online store to a very large number of dropshipping apps and source goods from a huge number of suppliers (I count 604 in total, at time of writing) — and there’s no big investment involved with doing so.

Now, given the restrictions on what you can actually sell on Etsy (handmade items, vintage goods, craft supplies and digital goods), it’s probably not a surprise that it’s not really a platform that facilitates dropshipping easily. You can get other businesses to fulfil products sold on Etsy, but only if you have designed them.

It is however possible to use Printful and Printify in conjunction with Etsy — these are print on demand services that manufacture and deliver products to your customers based on images and artwork uploaded by you.

(Our guide to connecting Etsy and Printful may be of relevance here).

Attracting customers to your Shopify or Etsy store

If you’re looking for a ready-made customer base, Etsy is the winner in a Shopify vs Etsy shootout. Because of its 91.5 million customers and $13+bn USD in annual sales, having a storefront on Etsy technically puts you in front of a large audience that spends a lot of money.

And, if you’re selling handmade goods, vintage items or craft supplies, it’s hard to think of a ‘warmer,’ more relevant audience for you. This existing customer base is the major advantage of using Etsy over an online store builder like Shopify.

That’s not to say that you will encounter an immediate rush of customers the moment you start selling on Etsy — but your products will be quickly listed on a very popular platform.

And, so long as you’ve…

…you do stand a pretty good chance of generating sales.

By contrast, when you set up a Shopify store, you are starting entirely from scratch — so to generate a customer base, you’ll need to put a lot of effort into things like:

This can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavour that involves a significant learning curve.

On the plus side, if you succeed in this, you will have a very powerful online asset that you — more or less — control fully. And Shopify has a couple of tricks up its sleeve when it comes to attracting customers that you won’t get from Etsy.

Let’s look at these.

Blogging features

The success of many ecommerce businesses is often tied to successful blogging — where interesting blog posts are used to get eyeballs onto a store.

And, thanks to its built-in blogging tool, Shopify makes it easy enough to do this sort of content marketing. Now, based on my usage of Shopify’s blogging features, it has to be said they are more basic than those of competing platforms — don’t expect the flexibility or sophistication of a WordPress blog. But that said, they do the job — you can definitely get content ranking highly using a Shopify blog.

If you want to do content marketing for an Etsy product catalogue, you’ll need to set up a separate blog first (using a platform like Wix or WordPress) and insert links to your Etsy products in your posts. This can generate sales, but it involves running two distinct online presences — and is not the best way of going about things.

So it’s definitely a win for Shopify here.

Email marketing

When you subscribe to Shopify, you get access to its ‘Shopify Email’ app — a marketing tool that lets you capture email addresses, create e-newsletters and program basic autoresponder cycles. This can actually be used for free, with fairly generous send limits applying (the tool lets you send 10,000 emails per month without charge).

Etsy doesn’t offer any email marketing features — but on the plus side, you can capture and export email addresses using the platform. These can then be used in email marketing campaigns performed using third-party tools (like GetResponse or Mailchimp).

Local selling and point of sale

Selling in your local area with Etsy and Shopify

The Covid pandemic made online selling a sudden necessity for millions of ‘physical’ businesses — lockdowns meant they were forced to close their premises and embrace ecommerce overnight.

Many physical store owners turned to Shopify, and for good reason — the platform offers a very wide range of ways to sell online, facilitate product collection and offer local delivery services.

Now, because Shopify is a highly-customizable solution that lets you build your own website — rather than just list products — local businesses can use it to create fully-fledged digital presences that really reflect the essence of their physical store.

And by running a standalone site on your own custom domain name — i.e., a Shopify site that lives at yoursitename.com — you can take advantage of local SEO tactics that raise the visibility of your business in your area too.

To a degree, you can use Etsy’s Pattern product to cater to a local audience too — but in general, Etsy is more about selling niche goods to an online market.

So, if your business has a particular local focus, then due to its extensive range of SEO and customization features, Shopify is usually the better bet.

Point of sale (POS)

Thanks to its extensive point-of-sale (POS) features, Shopify can be used not just as a store builder, but as a payment processor in physical locations too.

This lets retailers use one platform to manage all their offline and online sales, and keep inventory data from both accurately synced — no matter where or how a sale has occurred.

Although an integration with Square does let you use Etsy in certain point of sale contexts, this only works in certain countries (US, Canada, UK and Australia), and the sales hardware options are limited.

So Shopify is definitely the stronger product when it comes to selling in person — you can learn more about Shopify’s point-of-sale features here.

SEO in Shopify vs Etsy

Whether or not you eventually choose Shopify or Etsy for your ecommerce site, making a success of it will heavily depend on your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts — and setting up a storefront on either platform means familiarising yourself with how two different search engines work.

With a standalone Shopify store, the main search engine you’ll need to focus on is Google — it’s the search engine that most of your potential customers will be using to search for products like yours. (Google currently handles around 90% of all search engine queries).

Unsurprisingly this means that Shopify gives you a flexible range of SEO tools that you won’t really find in Etsy. In Shopify, you get full control over all key SEO components (titles, headings, meta descriptions, alt text, robots.txt, redirects etc.) plus access to a lot of SEO apps too (including, significantly, Yoast).

Etsy does give you access to some SEO settings, but only the basics are catered for really (i.e., item titles, descriptions and image alt text).

This is probably because when you sell on Etsy, you’re primarily focussing on a different search engine — Etsy’s own one. This works in a different way to Google’s — it aims to present search results to people who are ready to buy, rather than people who might buy.

Ultimately, to get the most out of your Shopify or Etsy store, you will need to conduct quality research into the best SEO techniques for both. I’d recommend checking out our Shopify SEO guide as a starting point for optimizing a Shopify store for search engines, and Printful’s guide to Etsy SEO for Etsy.

Perhaps the main SEO advantage of an Etsy store is that unlike a Shopify one, it presents you with two SEO opportunities. Not only can you optimize your product catalogue for Etsy’s search engine but, since your Etsy catalogue can be crawled by other search engines too, you can get them indexed by Google as well.

This means that technically, an Etsy shop provides you with more opportunities to get your products in front of a search audience than a Shopify one.

Customer support for Shopify and Etsy

Shopify offers customer support by chat and email, while Etsy goes one further by providing phone support too. Additionally, a variety of searchable online resources and community forums are supplied to help you learn more about the product.

As is typical with a lot of ecommerce platforms these days, when you look for contact details, you are prompted by both Shopify and Etsy to search the help pages for an answer first.

Only after doing so will you get access to contact details for the support team (something that I always find rather annoying).

In terms of the number of languages you can receive support in, Shopify provides it in 21 languages; Etsy offers it in 11.

Shopify and Etsy pricing

We’ve discussed how Shopify and Etsy work, and their respective key features — now it’s time to look at how much they actually cost to use.

Shopify fees

There are five Shopify pricing plans to consider:

A free Shopify trial is also available — you can access this via this link.

All the Shopify plans give you access to core ecommerce functionality (including unlimited physical and digital product catalogues, credit cart processing, gift cards, abandoned cart recovery, discount codes and an SSL certificate).

That said, there are some important differences to watch out for between Shopify plans. These are as follows:

Etsy fees

There are two main fee types to consider in Etsy:

Etsy listings expire after 4 months, but you can set a listing to auto-renew. An auto-renew fee of $0.20 applies, meaning that it costs $0.60 to list a product on your store for a year.

You can also subscribe to a service called ‘Etsy Plus,’ which involves a monthly fee of $10. For this you get 15 listing credits and $5 credits for Etsy Ads per month (Etsy Ads let you advertise your products in Etsy search results and other pages).

Etsy Plus brings a couple of other benefits: a 30% discount from the printer MOO, and depending on your country of operation, discounts on shipping boxes too.

And, as discussed earlier, you can pay $15 per month to create a ‘Pattern’ store with Etsy — a basic standalone, ecommerce site.

From a pricing perspective, the main advantage of using Etsy over Shopify is that — so long as you’re using the ‘listings’ version of the platform — it lets you avoid monthly fees. The main disadvantage is that its transaction fees are very high compared to Shopify’s.

Using Shopify and Etsy together

Although so far in this comparison I’ve highlighted the many differences between Shopify and Etsy, it’s important to understand that you don’t have to use them in a mutually exclusive way.

The Shopify app store is well-stocked with integrations and third party apps that let you connect a Shopify store to Etsy and list, manage and sync your products across both platforms (see screenshot below for a few examples of these).

Additonal fees will usually apply to install these apps and integrations, but the point is that you can use them to get the best of both worlds — a brand and website of your own via Shopify, and access to a large online marketplace via Etsy.

By having a presence on both platforms, you’re giving yourself the most ways to grow your online business.

Shopify vs Etsy: conclusion and pros and cons summary

When I compare two different ecommerce platforms, my aim is usually to declare a ‘winner.’ However, because Shopify and Etsy are quite different tools, in this case it’s more useful for me to highlight the contexts where it makes more sense for you to use one over the other.

So, below you’ll find a summary of my main reasons for using Shopify or Etsy. And do leave a comment if you have any questions!

Shopify and Etsy alternatives

When it comes to alternatives to Shopify, there’s no shortage of ecommerce platforms available that claim to offer similar selling functionality.

Of these, I usually recommend BigCommerce as the most obvious alternative to Shopify; it’s similarly priced and offers a broadly comparable feature set. Check out our BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison here, our BigCommerce YouTube review here or read our full BigCommerce review here.

Squarespace is also worth investigating — while its ecommerce features are not quite as comprehensive as Shopify’s, it’s very easy to use and comes with some outstanding templates. You can check out our Shopify vs Squarespace comparison here (our guide to the Squarespace free trial and our Squarespace pricing plans overview might also be of interest).

Users on a very low budget might also want to consider Big Cartel. While not as fully-featured as Shopify, it does nonetheless let you build a standalone online storefront, and quite cheaply too.

Wix is another reasonably low-cost option — you can watch our Wix vs Shopify video below to get a sense of the main differences between it and Shopify.

As for Etsy, its online marketplace is fairly unique, and new businesses will be hard pressed to find a similar space where they can reach quite so many customers with an interest in creatively-produced goods.

That said, there are quite a few other online marketplaces that might still work well for your niche — Amazon and eBay are two obvious ones. (Our Shopify vs Amazon shootout and Shopify vs eBay comparison will be of relevance here).

You might also like to take a look at EarthHero, an ethical online marketplace that often appeals to users of sites like Etsy.