The Etsy vs Shopify fee calculator on our tools page asks for three numbers: your revenue, your number of orders and your number of listings. It gives back one, an estimate of your yearly fee savings on your own store. It compares fees, and only fees. Apps, a theme, a domain, advertising, sales that do not follow you and your own time are not inputs, so none of them are in the answer.
That is less a flaw than a boundary, and this page is about working inside it. Below is what each input means and where to find it, the published rates you can use to check the result by hand, and a short worksheet for the costs the calculator cannot see.
Last checked: September 11, 2026. Rates below were read that day from Etsy’s and Shopify’s own US pages.
What the Etsy vs Shopify fee calculator asks you for
The tools page puts it plainly: “Enter revenue, orders and listings. See your yearly fee savings on your own store.” Each of those three inputs is there because a different part of the fee stack depends on it.
| Input | What to enter | Why the calculator needs it |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | What buyers paid you over the period, including shipping you charged | Etsy’s percentage fees scale with it |
| Orders | The number of orders in the same period | Both platforms add a flat amount to each card payment |
| Listings | Your active listings | Etsy charges per listing, per four months |
Revenue. Etsy’s own sell page, read September 11, 2026, describes its 6.5% transaction fee as applying to the sale price including shipping. So the revenue figure that matches Etsy’s fee is the one with shipping in it, not your item prices alone. If you enter item revenue only, the Etsy side of the comparison comes out lower than your real bill.
Orders. The order count matters because each card payment carries a flat amount on top of the percentage: $0.25 on Etsy and 30¢ on Shopify’s plans, per each company’s page on the same day. On a shop with many small orders, those flat amounts take a larger share of revenue than the headline rates suggest. The whole Etsy fee stack on a single sale shows how they add up order by order.
Listings. Etsy lists its listing fee as $0.20, with listings “active for four months, or until they sell.” A shop carrying hundreds of slow-moving listings pays that renewal cost whether or not they sell, and a Shopify store has no per-listing charge. This input is often the one that surprises people, because a large catalog can move the result more than a jump in revenue.
Use the same period for revenue and orders. A monthly revenue figure paired with a yearly order count produces a confident number that means nothing.
The published rates to check it against
A calculator is only as current as the rates behind it, and platform fees change. These are the figures each company published for the United States on September 11, 2026. If you bank in another country, both companies publish different numbers, and Etsy’s page says so directly: “Payment processing fees vary by bank country.”
From Etsy’s sell page, read September 11, 2026:
| Etsy fee (US) | As published |
|---|---|
| Listing fee | $0.20 per listing, active for four months or until it sells |
| Transaction fee | 6.5% of the sale price, including shipping |
| Payment processing | 3% + $0.25 when an item sells through Etsy Payments |
| Offsite Ads | 15% on sales that come from those ads |
| Currency conversion | 2.5% where your listing currency differs from your payment account currency |
From Shopify’s pricing page, read the same day with the region set to USA:
| Shopify plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing | Online card rate (Shopify Payments) | Fee if you use another payment provider |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $25/mo | $19/mo | 2.9% + 30¢ | 2% |
| Grow | $65/mo | $49/mo | 2.7% + 30¢ | 1% |
| Advanced | $399/mo | $299/mo | 2.4% + 30¢ | 0.6% |
The last column is easy to misread. It is not a commission on every sale. It is the charge Shopify adds when you process payments through a provider other than Shopify Payments, and that provider’s own card fees come on top of it.
Check the result by hand in five minutes
You do not have to take any calculator’s word for it, ours included. Here is the same comparison done on paper, as an illustration. The inputs are invented round numbers, not a real shop and not a prediction for yours.
Assumptions: $2,000 a month in revenue including shipping, 50 orders a month, 100 active listings, all sales in USD through each platform’s own payment processing, no Offsite Ads, and Shopify on the Basic plan billed monthly. Rates as read September 11, 2026.
| Line | Etsy | Shopify Basic |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | $0 | $25.00 |
| Transaction fee (6.5% of $2,000) | $130.00 | $0 |
| Card processing, percentage | $60.00 (3%) | $58.00 (2.9%) |
| Card processing, flat amount (50 orders) | $12.50 | $15.00 |
| Listing renewals (100 listings, four-month cycle) | $5.00 | $0 |
| Monthly fees | $207.50 | $98.00 |
On those assumptions the fee difference is $109.50 a month, or $1,314 a year. On the Grow plan billed monthly, the Shopify column becomes $134.00 and the difference falls to $73.50 a month. That calculation is mine, from the published figures above.
Two things stand out once it is laid out. First, card processing is nearly a wash: $72.50 on Etsy against $73.00 on Shopify Basic. The gap comes almost entirely from Etsy’s 6.5% transaction fee set against Shopify’s plan price. Second, the listing line is small here but grows in direct proportion to your catalog, which is why the calculator asks for it. The break-even between Etsy’s fees and Shopify’s plans works through how that crossover moves with listing count and billing period.
If the calculator’s figure for the same inputs sits close to yours, good. If it sits far away, the difference is an assumption somewhere, and finding it is worth more than either number.
What the fee calculator does not include
This is the section that matters most, and I would rather you read it than skip to the result. Every item below is outside the calculator for a simple reason: there is no input for it.
- Apps. A store rebuilds, one subscription at a time, several things a marketplace bundles into its fee, such as reviews, email and shipping tools. Shopify publishes no app price because each developer sets its own. What a Shopify store really costs per month covers that line and why it is so often underestimated.
- Theme and domain. Both are real costs with no universal price, so neither can be a sensible default in a calculator.
- Offsite Ads. Etsy charges 15% on sales from its offsite ads and says the program “may be required based on how much you make in sales on Etsy in a 12 month period.” The calculator has no field for the share of your sales that come from those ads, so if that share is large, the Etsy side is understated.
- Currency conversion. If you list in a different currency from your payment account, Etsy adds 2.5%. There is no input for it.
- Sales tax tools. Shopify’s Help Center page on Shopify Tax pricing, read September 11, 2026, lists Shopify Tax as free for stores created on or after May 13, 2026 until a lifetime threshold of $100,000 USD in global sales. After that it costs 0.35% per order in the US on Basic, Grow and Advanced, capped at $0.99 per order. That is a small line until the store is large, and then it is not.
- Traffic. This is the big one. Part of what Etsy’s percentage buys is a place where buyers are already searching. A Shopify plan buys a store with no visitors. Whatever you spend to replace that discovery, whether on ads, email or content, comes out of the fee saving. Where customers come from after you leave a marketplace is the honest version of that question.
- Sales that do not follow you. The calculator assumes the same revenue on both sides. In a real move, some of it may not carry over for months.
- Your time and the migration itself. Setting up, moving listings, rewriting pages and learning a new admin all cost hours that never appear on an invoice.
A worksheet for the lines it leaves out
Take the yearly figure the calculator gives you, then adjust it with your own estimates for each line below. Subtract the costs, and add back any Offsite Ads fees you pay today, since those would stop. Use numbers you have looked up, not numbers you hope for.
| Line | Where the real number comes from | Direction | Your yearly figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apps | The pricing block on each App Store listing you would install | Subtract | |
| Theme and domain | The theme listing and your domain registrar | Subtract | |
| Replacing marketplace traffic | Your planned ad, email and content budget | Subtract | |
| Revenue you might not carry across | Your own conservative guess, written down | Subtract | |
| Offsite Ads fees you pay today | Your Etsy payment account history | Add back |
What is left after those adjustments is closer to the question you are actually asking. If it stays comfortably positive, the fee case holds up. If it goes negative, the fees were never the deciding factor.
How to read the number it gives you
A fee saving is a budget ceiling, not a profit forecast. It tells you how much room you have to spend on everything a marketplace used to provide before owning the store stops being cheaper. It says nothing about whether your buyers will find you, or how long that takes.
I should be plain about my position: I am a Shopify partner and this site earns from Shopify referrals. That is exactly why the calculator stops at fees, and why this page spends more words on what it leaves out than on the result. Fees are the part of this decision that arithmetic can settle. Most of the rest cannot be settled by a tool.
If the adjusted figure still looks worth pursuing, you do not have to bet the shop on it. Opening a store while you are still on Etsy lets you test the traffic and conversion lines with real numbers before the fee line matters at all.
FAQ
How do I use the Etsy vs Shopify fee calculator?
Why does the calculator ask for my listing count?
Does the fee calculator include Shopify apps and advertising?
Why do different Etsy vs Shopify calculators give different answers?
Last checked: September 11, 2026. Etsy figures from etsy.com/sell (US), Shopify figures from shopify.com/pricing (USA, USD) and Shopify’s Help Center page on Shopify Tax pricing, all read that day. Both companies change fees and publish different figures in different countries.