Etsy vs Shopify fees: which one is actually cheaper?

On a £30 order, a UK seller pays Etsy about £3.65 and Shopify about £0.85 plus a monthly subscription. On the Basic plan at £25 a month that means Shopify is the cheaper of the two from nine orders a month onwards, which sounds like the argument is over. It is not, because the £2.80 gap per order is not a saving — it is a budget. Etsy charges it for putting a buyer in front of you, and on your own store you have to spend it yourself. The rest of this page works both fee stacks in full from the platforms’ own published pages, read on 25 September 2026, and then works out exactly how much you can afford to spend attracting a customer before the cheaper platform becomes the dearer one.

The two fee stacks, from the platforms themselves

Etsy and Shopify do not charge for the same thing, which is why comparing them with a single percentage never works. Etsy takes a cut of every sale and charges almost nothing to be there. Shopify charges a fixed sum every month and takes almost nothing from a sale. Everything that follows comes out of that one structural difference.

Every figure in the two tables below was read from the platform’s own published pages on 25 September 2026, and each page is linked at the foot of this guide. These are the United Kingdom numbers. Both companies publish different rates for different countries, and Etsy’s payment processing rate in particular changes country by country, so if you are not selling from a UK account, open your own country’s page and read the figures off that before using any arithmetic here. All fees are quoted exclusive of VAT; both platforms apply VAT to seller fees separately where it is due, and what that means for you is a question for your accountant rather than for this page.

What Etsy charges a UK seller

Add the three that land on every ordinary UK order and the percentage block is 6.5% + 0.48% + 4% = 10.98%, plus a flat £0.20, plus the listing fee. Hold that number; it does most of the work below.

What Shopify charges a UK seller

There is no commission line in that table, and that is the whole point of it. Shopify does not take a percentage of the sale for being Shopify; the 2% is a card processing rate, which every seller pays to somebody. The same pricing page lists the Amex and international online rates on Basic at 3.1% + 25p rather than 2% + 25p, which is what the phrase “card rates from” on the plan cards is doing.

The third-party transaction fee is the one that turns this comparison upside down if you trip over it, and it gets its own section further down.

The same 30 pound order, both ways

One order. The buyer pays £26.00 for the item and £4.00 for delivery, so £30.00 in total. No advertising attached on either platform. UK seller, UK bank account, buyer paying with an ordinary UK-issued card.

The listing fee is charged in US dollars and converted into your payment account currency, so 0.16 pence is an illustration rather than a fact about your shop. Take the real figure off your own Etsy payment account, and note that a listing is charged again every four months whether or not it has sold.

The per-order gap is £3.65 − £0.85 = £2.80. That is the number every argument about these two platforms is really about, and it is worth being precise about what it is. Etsy is not charging £2.80 more for processing a payment; the processing lines are £1.40 against £0.85 and the difference there is 55p. Etsy is charging 6.98% of the order — the transaction fee plus the regulatory fee — for something Shopify does not supply at all: a buyer who was already on the site.

What each platform leaves you

Say the goods cost £9.40 to make and £4.60 to pack and post. On Etsy the order leaves £30.00 − £3.65 − £14.00 = £12.35. On Shopify, before the subscription, it leaves £30.00 − £0.85 − £14.00 = £15.15. Over a month of 40 such orders that is £494 against £606, and the Shopify figure still has £25 of subscription to come out of it: £581. So at 40 orders a month Shopify is ahead by £87, or £2.18 an order.

The crossover: how many orders make Shopify cheaper

The subscription is a fixed cost and the fee gap is a per-order saving, so the crossover is a single division:

Crossover orders per month = monthly subscription ÷ (Etsy fee per order − Shopify fee per order)

At our £30 order that is £25.00 ÷ £2.80 = 8.93, so nine orders a month. On yearly billing at £19 a month it is £19.00 ÷ £2.80 = 6.79, so seven orders. Those are startlingly low numbers, and they are the reason the internet is full of people saying Shopify is obviously cheaper.

The crossover moves with the order value, because Etsy’s charge is mostly a percentage and Shopify’s is mostly not. Writing the two as formulas, with V for the order value:

Etsy per order = 0.1098 × V + £0.36
Shopify per order = 0.02 × V + £0.25
Gap = 0.0898 × V + £0.11

The £0.36 is the £0.20 processing charge plus the illustrative £0.16 listing fee. Run that across a range of basket sizes:

Read the top and bottom rows together. A seller shifting £10 impulse items needs 25 orders a month before the subscription pays for itself; a seller shifting £100 items needs three. That is not a small difference in degree, it is a difference in kind: at a high average order value the subscription is a rounding error and the commission is the main event, while at a low one the subscription is the main event and the commission is almost bearable.

The same arithmetic prices the plan ladder. Moving from Basic to Grow costs £40 a month more on monthly billing and cuts the card rate from 2% + 25p to 1.7% + 25p, a saving of 0.3% of turnover. The extra £40 is repaid at £40 ÷ 0.003 = £13,333 of monthly turnover, before any of Grow’s features are counted. Below that number you are buying features, not payments, and it is worth being honest about which.

What the fee crossover leaves out: the buyer

Nine orders a month is the answer to a question nobody actually has. It assumes the same nine orders exist on both platforms, and they do not. Etsy has buyers on it already. A Shopify store, on the day it opens, has a domain name and no visitors at all, and finding them is a cost that arrives on a different invoice from a different company, which is exactly why it gets left out of the comparison.

Put it back in and the sum becomes useful. The real question is not which platform charges less, it is how much you can afford to spend attracting one customer before your own store stops being the cheaper option.

Acquisition budget per order = Etsy fee per order − Shopify fee per order − (monthly subscription ÷ orders per month)

At our £30 order on Basic monthly billing:

So at a hundred £30 orders a month, your own store gives you £2.55 per order to find each customer before it is worse than simply staying on Etsy. Notice how little the number moves between 50 and 200 orders: it converges on the fee gap of £2.80 and can never exceed it. The subscription is not the constraint. The commission gap is the whole budget.

Whether £2.55 is a lot or nothing depends entirely on what it costs you to put a buyer in front of a product, and there is no honest general answer to that. The way to find your own is to divide what you spend in a month on getting visitors — advertising, a marketplace of a different kind, anything with an invoice — by the orders it produced. If that figure is under £2.55 your own store wins on arithmetic. If it is over, Etsy is cheaper even though its fee table looks twelve times worse, and no amount of annoyance about the 6.5% changes it.

One more line belongs in the same column and almost never gets there: your own time. If building and running the store costs six hours a month that you would otherwise have spent making or selling, price those hours at a rate you would accept and divide by the orders. Six hours at an illustrative £14 an hour is £84, which across a hundred orders is £0.84 — a third of the entire budget, spent before a single advert runs.

Three lines that quietly reverse the answer

Everything above assumes a plain order on a plain setup. Three common situations move the numbers far enough to flip the conclusion, and all three are visible in the platforms’ own published rates.

Offsite Ads on Etsy

Etsy charges 15% on orders it attributes to an off-Etsy ad click, falling to 12% for the life of the shop once the shop has passed 10,000 USD of sales in the prior 365 days. On our £30 order the 15% rate adds £4.50, taking Etsy’s total from £3.65 to £8.15, or 27.2% of everything the buyer paid. The gap against Shopify widens from £2.80 to £7.30 and the acquisition budget at a hundred orders a month goes from £2.55 to £7.05.

Two things make this less alarming than it sounds and one makes it worse. It only applies to attributed orders, not all of them; it is capped at 100 USD on a single order; and it is not optional once the shop has passed the 10,000 USD threshold. A shop below that threshold can opt out, which means the 15% rate is a choice and the 12% rate mostly is not.

The third-party transaction fee on Shopify

Shopify’s published rate card lists a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. That is charged when you take payment through somebody else’s gateway instead of Shopify Payments, and it is charged on top of whatever that gateway charges you. On Basic, at an illustrative outside gateway rate of 1.5% + 20p, our £30 order costs 1.5% × £30 + £0.20 = £0.65 to the gateway plus 2% × £30 = £0.60 to Shopify, so £1.25 rather than £0.85. The gap against Etsy falls from £2.80 to £2.40 and the crossover rises from nine orders a month to eleven. It is the single largest thing a seller can do to their own cost per sale without noticing they have done it.

Listing fees on a large catalogue

Etsy’s 0.20 USD listing fee is charged when a listing is created and again every four months when it renews, sold or not. A shop with 500 live listings therefore pays for roughly 1,500 listing charges a year, which is 1,500 × 0.20 USD = 300 USD, or about £240 at an illustrative 0.80 GBP to the dollar. That is £20 a month, charged whether or not anything sells — almost exactly a Shopify Basic subscription, arriving in a form that never looks like a subscription. A seller with fifteen listings pays about 60p a month for the same thing. The catalogue size, not the sales, decides which of those two you are.

Put the three together and the honest summary is that neither platform is structurally cheaper. Etsy is cheaper for a small catalogue at a low order count with no ads attached. Shopify is cheaper for anyone doing meaningful volume who can find buyers for under the fee gap, and dearer for anyone who cannot. The arithmetic decides, and it decides differently for different shops.

What this comparison cannot tell you

This page is fee arithmetic. Fee arithmetic answers one question well and several others not at all, and being clear about which is which is the difference between a useful number and a confident mistake.

• It cannot tell you how many orders you would get. Everything above holds the order count still and compares costs. In reality the order count is the variable that matters most, and moving a shop from a marketplace to its own domain changes it — usually downwards at first, sometimes permanently. No cost comparison can forecast that, and anyone who claims otherwise is guessing.
• It cannot price your traffic. The £2.55 acquisition budget is a ceiling, not a cost. Whether you can acquire a customer for less than it is a question only your own advertising account and your own analytics can answer, and the answer differs by product, by season and by month.
• It is a snapshot of one day. Every rate here was read on 25 September 2026. Both companies change their prices, both publish separate rates per country, and Shopify was running an introductory offer on that date which makes the first few invoices unrepresentative. Check the live pages before you decide anything.
• It ignores tax entirely. All fees are quoted exclusive of VAT, both platforms apply VAT to seller fees where due, and your own VAT position changes every price on this page. That is a conversation for your accountant, not for an arithmetic guide.
• It does not cost the apps. A Shopify store frequently ends up with several paid apps attached, each charged monthly on top of the plan. Those belong in the subscription line and they are not in the table above, because there is no published figure for what a typical store spends and inventing one would be worse than leaving it out.
• It says nothing about which is a better shop. Search behaviour on a marketplace, control of your own customer list, how a brand looks on its own domain, what happens if an account is suspended — these are real and they are not arithmetic. This page is only the money.

If you want the full fee stack for either platform on its own, with more orders worked line by line, there is a dedicated page for each: what Etsy takes from a sale and what Shopify costs per sale. And once you know what each channel leaves you, the next question is what to charge, which is how to price a product so it actually makes money.

Arithmetic and general information only — not financial, tax, legal or investment advice. Your own figures, and your own accountant, decide what any of this means for you.

Frequently asked questions

Is Shopify cheaper than Etsy?

On fees per order, yes, by a wide margin. On a 30 pound UK order Etsy takes about 3.65 pounds and Shopify Basic takes about 0.85 pounds, so Shopify is cheaper from roughly nine orders a month once the 25 pound subscription is covered. But Etsy charges its extra 2.80 pounds for putting a buyer in front of you, and on your own store you have to spend that yourself. If getting a customer costs you more than 2.55 pounds an order, Etsy is the cheaper channel despite the fee table.

At how many orders a month does Shopify become cheaper than Etsy?

Divide the monthly subscription by the fee gap per order. At a 30 pound order value the gap is 2.80 pounds, so 25 divided by 2.80 is nine orders a month on monthly billing, or seven on yearly billing at 19 pounds. The crossover moves sharply with basket size: about 25 orders a month at a 10 pound order value, and about three at 100 pounds.

What does Etsy actually take from a UK sale?

Three percentage charges and two flat ones. The transaction fee is 6.5 percent of the item price plus postage and gift wrap, the UK Regulatory Operating fee is 0.48 percent, and UK payment processing is 4 percent plus 20 pence. That is 10.98 percent plus 20 pence, plus a listing fee of 0.20 US dollars charged when a listing is created and again every four months. Offsite Ads, where they apply, add 15 percent or 12 percent on top.

Does Shopify charge commission on sales?

No. Shopify charges a subscription and a card processing rate, published for the UK at 2 percent plus 25 pence on Basic, and there is no commission line. There is one important exception: if you take payment through a gateway other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee on top of whatever that gateway charges, published at 2 percent on Basic falling to 0.2 percent on Plus.

Should I sell on both Etsy and Shopify?

That is a demand question rather than a fee question, and the fee arithmetic does not answer it. What the arithmetic does say is that the two channels have different cost shapes, so the same product at the same margin needs a different price in each, and that running both means paying the subscription and the commission rather than one or the other. Work out what each channel leaves you per order first, then decide whether the second channel can produce enough orders to be worth its own costs.

Sources

• Etsy Fees and Payments Policy (listing fee, 6.5 percent transaction fee, Offsite Ads rates and the 10,000 USD threshold, currency conversion) — checked 2026-09-25
• Etsy Payments Policy, payment processing fees by country of bank account (United Kingdom 4 percent plus 0.20 GBP) — checked 2026-09-25
• Etsy Help, What is a Regulatory Operating Fee (United Kingdom 0.48 percent, and the rates for other countries) — checked 2026-09-25
• Shopify UK pricing page (plan prices monthly and yearly, online standard, Amex and international card rates, third-party transaction fees) — checked 2026-09-25
• Shopify Help Centre, Shopify Payments fees (which payment methods are exempt from the third-party transaction fee) — checked 2026-09-25

Other guides

• How much does Etsy take from a sale?
• How to build a cash flow forecast
• Agency utilisation rate: the formula, and the denominator that decides it