Etsy vs Shopify Fees (2026) — The Exact Sales Volume Where Shopify Gets Cheaper

Two costs of completely different shapes

Etsy and Shopify are not two prices for the same thing. Etsy charges a percentage of every sale and nothing at all in a month where you sell nothing. Shopify charges a subscription every month regardless, and a much smaller percentage on top. Comparing "6.5% versus $29 a month" is comparing a rate to an amount, which is why so many answers to this question end at "it depends on your volume" and stop there.

It does depend on your volume, and the dependency is exactly solvable:

Two straight lines, one with a y-intercept and a shallow slope, one starting at the origin with a steep one. They cross once. Everything below is Etsy's; everything above is Shopify's.

A worked example with real numbers

The crossover is a revenue figure, not an order count

This is the part worth taking away, and it is the reason "once you're doing about fifty orders a month" is bad advice: it is only true for whoever's average order value it was calculated at.

Watch what happens to the crossover as the order value changes. The order count collapses; the revenue it represents hardly moves at all:

As the order value grows, the per-order fixed components stop mattering and the crossover converges on the plan price divided by the gap in percentage rates — $29.00 ÷ 6.60% = $439.39 of monthly revenue. Etsy's all-in percentage is 9.50% and Shopify's is 2.90%; the whole decision sits in the 6.60 points between them.

So the useful sentence is "a storefront starts paying for itself somewhere around $439 a month in sales", and it holds whether you sell $12 candles or $400 furniture. On monthly rather than annual billing the plan costs more, and the threshold moves up with it — the toggle is on the Shopify calculator.

What the fee difference is not telling you

Everything above prices one side of the decision precisely and the other side not at all.

Etsy's 10.80% is not purely a payment fee. It is the rent on a marketplace with buyers already in it, a search engine those buyers already use, and a checkout they already trust. Shopify's $29.00 buys hosting and a card rate, and an empty shop that no one has any reason to visit. The moment you have to buy traffic to fill it, the ad spend lands on the same line of your accounts that the Etsy fee used to.

Read the crossover as a price tag on Etsy's audience rather than as a recommendation. At the current settings Etsy is charging you $44.80 a month more than self-hosting would. If you could reliably buy the same number of orders for less than that, the move makes sense; if you could not, the fee is doing real work.

Which is why the common answer among sellers who have run both is not a switch at all. The marketplace keeps doing discovery, the storefront takes the repeat buyers who already know the name and would have come back anyway, and the fee saving on those returning orders — the ones the marketplace was charging full rate for but no longer finding — covers the subscription on its own.

What this does not account for

• Etsy Offsite Ads. Charged at 12–15% on ad-attributed orders on top of everything here, and mandatory above $10,000 of trailing sales. It only fires on some orders, so it raises your blended rate rather than this one.
• Apps and themes. Shopify's ecosystem is a real recurring cost for most shops and none of it is in the plan price.
• Third-party gateways. Shopify penalises them at up to 2.00% on Basic. This comparison assumes Shopify Payments.
• Domain, email and the rest of running a shop — small, but not zero.
• Your time. A storefront is a thing you maintain.
• Income tax. These are payout figures, not profit after tax. See the self-employment tax calculator.

Who this is for

Etsy sellers wondering whether they have outgrown the fees, and anyone weighing a first sales channel who has been told "Shopify once you're big enough" without being told what big enough means. If you are already running both, the useful reading is the per-order gap: it is what each order routed to the storefront rather than the marketplace is worth to you.