Is Etsy or Shopify cheaper for handmade sellers?

At low volume Etsy is cheaper because there is no monthly fee. On a $29 order Etsy takes $3.21 without offsite ads and $7.56 with them, against $1.14 for Shopify Payments on the Basic plan plus $39 a month. Shopify only wins on fees once you are doing roughly 7 to 19 orders a month, depending on how much of your Etsy traffic comes from offsite ads.

How much does Etsy take from a $25 handmade sale?

A $25 item with $4 shipping sold to a US buyer pays $3.21 in fees and leaves $25.79 if the buyer found you on Etsy. If the order came from an Etsy offsite ad, the 15% fee adds $4.35 and total fees are $7.56, leaving $21.44. Rates checked 2026-11-02.

Do I need a Shopify store if I already sell on Etsy?

Not until Etsy profit covers the plan and you have a reason to own the customer. The reason to add Shopify is repeat business and a mailing list, not lower fees — the monthly plan is a fixed cost you carry whether or not you sell anything that month.

Should I sell handmade products on Amazon?

Only if your product is standardised enough that a buyer could search for it by name. Custom sizing, made-to-order lead times and one-off designs are hard to sell on Amazon because the listing format assumes a fixed product. Amazon Handmade is an application-only category with its own terms.

What is the most common pricing mistake handmade sellers make?

Charging less for shipping than it costs to send, while Etsy charges its 6.5% transaction fee on the shipping you collected as well as the item price. The seller absorbs the postage shortfall and pays a fee on top of it, which turns a profitable-looking sale into a small loss.

Best Platform for Handmade Sellers

Handmade sellers usually ask which platform is best as if there were one answer, and the honest answer is that two different products are being sold. Marketplaces like Etsy, Amazon and eBay sell you access to buyers who are already shopping; a store like Shopify sells you a shop and expects you to bring the buyers yourself. Those two models have completely different cost curves, and the right choice depends on how many orders a month you expect and whether you can name where your next hundred visitors will come from. This guide compares them on published fee structures and on the decisions that actually change your take-home pay.

Two business models, not four platforms

Etsy, Amazon and eBay are marketplaces. The buyer arrives on their own, often from a search engine, and you pay the platform a percentage of each sale. There is no monthly bill and no traffic obligation, which is why almost every handmade seller starts there.

Shopify is a storefront. You pay a monthly plan plus payment processing, and the platform sends you no buyers at all. What you get instead is the customer: their email address, their order history, and the ability to sell to them again without paying for the introduction.

Once you frame it that way, the comparison stops being about which platform has lower fees. It becomes a question about which cost you can afford right now — a percentage of sales you already have, or a fixed monthly bill you have to earn back.

What Etsy costs a handmade seller

Etsy charges a $0.20 listing fee per item, charged again every time the listing renews automatically after four months. It then takes a 6.5% transaction fee on the item price plus shipping and gift wrap, so raising your shipping charge raises the fee as well.

Payment processing depends on the country of your bank account: about 3% + $0.25 in the US, 4% + £0.20 in the UK, 3% + C$0.25 in Canada, 4% + €0.30 in the EU and 3% + A$0.25 in Australia. A regulatory operating fee applies in some regions — 0.25% in the UK and 0.4% in the EU — and is zero in the US, Canada and Australia.

The fee that surprises people is offsite ads: 15% of the order, including shipping, on any sale that arrived through an Etsy offsite ad. Sellers who billed $10,000 or more in the previous 365 days pay 12%, and the fee is capped at $100 per order.

A worked example, rates checked 2026-11-02: a $25 item with $4 shipping sold to a US buyer pays $0.20 listing, $1.89 transaction, $1.12 payment processing and $4.35 offsite ads — $7.56 in total, leaving $21.44. The same order that did not come from an offsite ad pays $3.21 and leaves $25.79.

What Shopify costs

Shopify's Basic plan is $39 a month, or $29 a month billed annually. Grow is $105 ($79 annually), Advanced is $399 ($299 annually), and Plus is a negotiated contract. Those are the plan prices in our configuration; confirm them on Shopify's pricing page before you commit to a year.

On top of the plan, Shopify Payments in the US is 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic, 2.6% + $0.30 on Grow and 2.4% + $0.30 on Advanced. Our data marks those card rates as estimated rather than confirmed, because Shopify localises its pricing page by visitor location; check the rate in your own admin before you price a product around it.

If you use a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Market sync, used to push products to other channels, is free for the first 50 orders a month and then 1%, capped at $99 a month.

The same $29 order on Basic with Shopify Payments costs $1.14 in processing. The gap against Etsy is $6.42 per order when offsite ads applied, and $2.07 when they did not.

Amazon and eBay for handmade sellers

Amazon and eBay both charge category-based fees rather than one flat percentage, and both revise their schedules more often than Etsy does. We deliberately do not print a number for either here: this site only quotes rates it has configured and verified, and Amazon and eBay rates are not configured yet. Look up the current referral or final value fee for your own category on the platform's official fee schedule.

What can be said without numbers is how they behave. Amazon rewards standardised products that buyers search for by name and punishes anything that needs explaining — custom sizing, made-to-order lead times, one-off designs. Amazon Handmade is an application-only category, so check its current terms for the selling plan and category fees rather than assuming the standard seller plan applies.

eBay works best for single pieces, vintage and supplies rather than a repeatable product line. Buyers there search for a specific item at a specific price, which suits one-off work and suits a brand story badly. Its fee structure is category-dependent and has been revised repeatedly, so treat any percentage you read on a blog as unverified.

For a handmade seller the practical reading is: Etsy is the default marketplace because its buyers are shopping for handmade and personalised work, Amazon is a channel for a standardised hero product, and eBay is a channel for clearance and one-offs.

The break-even calculation people get wrong

The arithmetic looks simple. On a $29 order Etsy takes $7.56 with offsite ads and Shopify takes $1.14, so Shopify saves $6.42 per order and the $39 Basic plan pays for itself at about seven orders a month. Run the same comparison without offsite ads and the saving is $2.07, so the plan needs about nineteen orders a month.

That number is real but it is not the decision, because the two fees buy different things. Etsy's percentage buys demand: buyers who were already looking for your product. Shopify's monthly fee buys software. If you replace Etsy's offsite ad fee with paid social and your cost per acquired order is more than $6.42, Shopify is the more expensive channel, not the cheaper one.

The comparison that does favour Shopify is customer ownership. On a marketplace you generally cannot email buyers to market to them again; on your own store the mailing list is yours. If your product is bought more than once — consumables, refills, seasonal ranges, gifts for the same customer — repeat orders are where the monthly plan is actually repaid.

Where handmade sellers quietly lose money

The first leak is shipping priced below cost while the 6.5% Etsy transaction fee is charged on shipping as well as the item. A seller who charges $4 for a parcel that costs $7 to send loses $3 on postage and pays a fee on the $4 they collected.

The second is the fixed part of payment processing. $0.25 or $0.30 looks trivial until your average order is $8, where it is roughly 4% of the order on its own, before any percentage fee is applied. Low-ticket items carry a structurally worse fee ratio on every platform.

The third is treating offsite ads as optional. It is 15% of the order including shipping, it applies after any discount you offered, and it is charged on orders you may not have known were ad-driven. A 20% discount code on an offsite ad order can take more than a third of the gross before your own material costs.

The fourth is renewals. A hundred active listings renew at $0.20 every four months, which is $60 a year in pure overhead on inventory that may never sell. Pruning dead listings is a fee decision, not just housekeeping.

Which platform fits which seller

Use this as a starting point, not a rule. The variables that matter are your monthly order count, your average order value, and whether you can produce traffic without paying for it.

No audience yet, under about 20 orders a month: sell on Etsy. There is no monthly bill and the buyers are already there.
An audience you already own — Instagram, YouTube, a mailing list, a local market following: open a Shopify store and move repeat buyers onto it.
One-off, vintage or clearance pieces: list on eBay alongside your main channel.
A single standardised product that buyers search for by name: consider Amazon, but only after the product is proven elsewhere.
Both: run Etsy for discovery and Shopify for retention, with the same photography and the same product names so buyers recognise you.

A first 90 days that does not waste money

Spend the first month on one marketplace with twenty to thirty listings, and measure which ones get views rather than guessing. Fees on a listing that never sells are pure cost, so the fastest saving available to a new seller is deleting the listings nobody looks at.

In the second month, re-price using real numbers: your actual postage cost, your packaging, your material cost, and the fee breakdown for your own average order value rather than a round number. Most sellers discover their margin is thinner on their cheapest product than on their most expensive one.

Only in the third month, and only if the first channel is profitable, add a second one. A second channel multiplies the work — listings, customer service, returns — and it does not multiply the traffic unless you actively build it.