When to Move From Etsy to Shopify
Most Etsy sellers do not ask whether Shopify is cheaper. They ask the question that keeps coming back: at some point, do I outgrow this? The fee gap is easy to calculate, and it is real — on a $29 order, about $3.21 on Etsy without offsite ads, against $1.14 of Shopify Payments on the Basic plan. But the monthly plan is a fixed bill you pay whether or not you sell, and the percentage Etsy takes is buying you traffic that Shopify never sends. Moving is therefore not a fee decision, it is a demand decision. This guide lays out the signals that make migration the right move, the signals that make it a trap, and the middle path most growing sellers actually take: running both.
What you are actually swapping
Etsy's fees are variable: a share of every sale — $0.20 per listing, 6.5% of the order plus payment processing, and 15% or 12% on orders from offsite channels. Shopify's fees are mostly fixed: a plan of $39 a month on Basic, plus 2.9% + $0.30 per order with Shopify Payments in the US, a rate our data marks as estimated, so confirm it in your own admin before you model a price on it.
The swap is not 'smaller percentage for a bigger fixed bill'. It is 'I stop paying for discovery and start paying for ownership'. On Etsy, the platform sends you buyers and keeps a share of each one. On Shopify, the platform sends nobody, and gives you the customer's email address, order history and the ability to sell to them again without an introduction fee. Migration makes sense only if you can produce that demand yourself.
What the fee math says — and where it stops
On a $29 order — a $25 item with $4 shipping, sold to a US buyer — Etsy without offsite ads takes about $3.21; with an offsite-attributed order, $7.56. Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments takes $1.14. Fee by fee, the saving is $2.07 to $6.42 per order, and the $39 plan pays for itself somewhere between seven and nineteen orders a month depending on your offsite share.
That break-even is the number people cite, and it is also the number that misleads. It compares the cost of one order, not the cost of getting it. On Etsy the orders arrive from the platform's own search; on Shopify you are paying $39 a month for software and bringing the buyers in yourself. If your cost to acquire an order through social, email or ads is higher than the $2 to $6 you save in fees, Shopify is the more expensive channel even though its percentage is lower.
Signal one: your traffic already comes from outside Etsy
Ask where your last hundred orders came from. If a meaningful share arrived from your Instagram, a YouTube video, a newsletter, a local market or a customer telling a friend, you are already generating demand that has nothing to do with Etsy's marketplace. On those orders, Etsy's fees are a tax on traffic you created, and the marketplace is collecting a commission for the privilege of processing the payment.
The test is concrete: if you stopped appearing in Etsy search tomorrow, how many orders would you still make? The more of your demand you already own, the less the marketplace is doing for you, and the faster the fixed plan of a storefront pays for itself.
Signal two: repeat buyers
A marketplace is a one-way street by design: the buyer's relationship belongs to the platform, and what you can do to market to past buyers is limited. Shopify has no such constraint — the email list is yours, and a second order from a returning customer costs you only the payment fee and the product, no introduction.
If your product is bought more than once — consumables, refills, seasonal ranges, anything a customer reorders — repeat revenue is where a storefront earns its $39. A customer who buys four times a year at $25 is $100 of revenue per year where you paid one acquisition. That value compounds in a way the fee comparison never shows.
Signal three: margins that can carry a fixed cost
The monthly plan is a fixed cost, which means it is affordable only at a volume you can defend. If you are doing 40 orders a month at $30 with a healthy margin, $39 is under a dollar per order and the question is easy. If you are doing 10 orders a month at $20, the plan is nearly $4 per order before a single fee, and the fee savings do not close that gap.
Run it as a ratio rather than a feeling: monthly plan divided by monthly revenue. Above roughly 10% of revenue, the fixed cost is eating the margin you moved platforms to improve; below about 5%, it is a rounding error. The numbers in between depend on how confident you are in your growth.
What you lose when you leave
The most common migration mistake is treating it as a cutover. Etsy's search is a demand source that does not transfer: buyers on Etsy are searching for handmade and personalised products, and a store on another domain is invisible to them the day you close your listings. Sellers who shut down completely frequently describe the drop in orders as a cliff, not a slope.
There is also trust. A marketplace name carries buyer confidence for a new customer, and a small store on an unfamiliar domain starts from zero of it. The pattern that works for most growing sellers is not 'leave' but 'add': keep Etsy live for discovery, put the storefront in front of buyers who already know you, and let the traffic mix — not a single percentage — decide how much of your business sits on each platform over time. The fee gap between the two platforms is real, but it is the smallest of the variables in this decision.
The checklist
Migration is the right move when several of these are true, not just one — and if none of them are, staying on Etsy is not a defeat: it is the cheaper channel for your stage.
- A growing share of your orders already comes from channels you control — social, email, word of mouth.
- Repeat purchases are a real part of your revenue, and you want the customer list to go with them.
- The plan costs under about 5% of your monthly revenue at your current volume.
- You are hitting marketplace limits a storefront removes: brand presentation, product range, customer data.
- Your margin per order comfortably carries $39 a month plus the payment fee.