"Should I move off Etsy to my own Shopify store to stop paying fees?" It's one of the most common questions sellers ask — and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on your sales volume. The two platforms charge in completely different ways, so one can be far cheaper than the other depending on how much you sell. Here are the real 2026 numbers.
The core difference: pay-per-sale vs pay-per-month
Etsy has no monthly subscription — you pay a cut of each sale. Shopify is the opposite: you pay a fixed monthly fee whether you sell one item or a thousand. That single difference decides which is cheaper for you.
Etsy's fees in 2026 (per sale)
- Listing fee: $0.20 per item, renewed on every sale.
- Transaction fee: 6.5% of the order (item + shipping + gift wrap).
- Payment processing: varies by country — 3% + $0.25 in the US, 4% + £0.20 in the UK, 6.5% + 14 TRY in Türkiye.
- Sometimes: Offsite Ads (12–15% when a sale is attributed), a regulatory operating fee in some countries, currency conversion (2.5%), and VAT charged on the fees themselves.
For a typical US seller, the baseline bite is roughly 10–11% of each order. For a small-value order from a Türkiye- or EU-based seller, it can climb past 30% once the fixed processing fee and VAT-on-fees stack.
Shopify's fees in 2026 (per month + per sale)
- Basic plan: $39/month ($29 if you pay annually).
- Payment processing (Shopify Payments): 2.9% + $0.30 per online order on Basic.
- Extra transaction fee: $0 if you use Shopify Payments; about 2% extra if you use a third-party gateway like PayPal instead.
- No listing fees, no 6.5% transaction cut.
So on Shopify Basic, the per-sale cost is just the ~2.9% + $0.30 processing — much lower than Etsy's per-sale cut. But you pay that $39 every month before you sell anything.
Where the lines cross
Think of it as fixed cost vs variable cost. Etsy takes roughly 10% of every sale with nothing up front. Shopify takes about 3% per sale but charges $39/month flat.
Rough math on a US shop with an average order around $30: Etsy's extra cut over Shopify is about 7% of $30, or ~$2.10 per order. To cover Shopify's $39 monthly fee you'd need about 19 sales a month just to break even on the switch. Below that, Etsy is cheaper. Well above it, Shopify's flat fee gets cheaper per sale the more you sell.
But fees aren't the whole story
The real trade-off isn't just cost — it's traffic. On Etsy, buyers are already searching and Etsy's marketplace sends them to you. On Shopify, the store is yours but you have to drive every visitor yourself through ads, social or SEO. Many sellers who "escape Etsy's fees" end up spending far more than $39/month on marketing to replace the traffic Etsy gave them for free. For a lot of small shops, Etsy's fee is effectively the cost of its built-in audience.
That's why most sellers don't pick one — they keep Etsy for discovery and add Shopify once they have repeat customers worth owning directly.
The number that actually matters
Whichever platform you're on, the fee percentage isn't your real question — your profit per product is. A 10% Etsy fee is fine on a product with a 40% margin and fatal on one with an 8% margin. You can pressure-test a single Etsy product with our free Etsy fee calculator: enter your price and costs and see exactly what's left after every fee.
And to see it across your whole shop — with the fees Etsy actually charged rather than an estimate — that's what Seller Profit Lens does. It connects to your Etsy shop read-only, reads the real per-product fees to the cent, subtracts your costs, and shows true profit per product so you know which items actually make money on Etsy in the first place. It's in free beta now. Join the waitlist →