Etsy or Your Own Shopify Store? Comparing Costs for a Garage Maker
Once your first products are ready, one question comes up fast: should you sell on Etsy or build your own Shopify store? Both can work. The right pick depends mostly on how you’ll find buyers.
What Etsy costs (as of October 2026)
Etsy has no monthly fee for a basic shop. Instead, you pay per listing and per sale. We break every fee down in Etsy Fees in 2026: What a Garage Seller Actually Pays per Sale, so here are just the headline numbers:
- $0.20 to list an item (listings run four months)
- A 6.5% transaction fee on the item price plus shipping and gift wrap
- Payment processing of 3% plus $0.25 per order for US sellers
- An Offsite Ads fee of 15% (12% for shops past $10,000 in yearly sales) on sales that come through Etsy’s outside ads, capped at $100 per order
What Shopify costs (as of October 2026)
Shopify charges a monthly plan fee, then card processing on each sale. The Basic plan is $39 a month, or $29 a month if you pay yearly. Grow is $105 monthly ($89 yearly), and Advanced is $399 ($359 yearly).
With Shopify Payments, online card sales on Basic cost 2.9% plus 30 cents. If you use an outside payment provider instead, Shopify adds its own fee (2% on Basic). Shopify says that fee doesn’t apply to orders paid through Shopify Payments or Shop Pay. New stores were offered three free days, then $1 a month for three months.
A quick side-by-side
Take a $40 cutting board with free shipping, ignoring sales tax. On Etsy, the listing, transaction and processing fees come to about $4.25. On Shopify Basic, processing is about $1.46, but you also owe the $39 monthly fee whether you sell anything or not.
That works out to roughly $2.79 saved per sale on Shopify, so you’d need around 14 sales a month at that price just to cover the plan. Plug in your own prices; our pricing guide for handmade products shows how to build fees into what you charge.
The real trade-off: who brings the buyers?
Etsy is a marketplace. Shoppers already search there for handmade goods, and your fees partly pay for that traffic. A Shopify store is yours alone, and nobody finds it unless you send them there through social media, local events, word of mouth or email.
Without an audience yet, per-sale fees are often easier to carry than a fixed monthly bill. If you already have repeat customers, a growing email list or steady craft fair sales, your own store can keep more of each order.
When running both makes sense
Many makers use Etsy to get discovered and their own store for returning buyers. If you do, keep inventory in sync so you don’t sell a one-of-a-kind piece twice.
There’s also a middle step. Etsy’s Share & Save program credits 4% of the order total back to you when a buyer purchases through a link you shared, such as your shop link on Instagram.
More on Garage Business Blueprint
- Etsy Fees in 2026: What a Garage Seller Actually Pays per Sale
- Selling on Amazon Handmade: Fees, Rules and How to Apply
- Product Photos That Sell: A Simple Home Setup for Handmade Goods
