There is no winner here, because the two platforms do not charge in the same units. Etsy costs nothing to exist on and takes a percentage of every sale. Shopify charges a fixed monthly price and takes no commission of its own. So the answer is a crossover point, not a name: the monthly sales figure above which the subscription costs less than the commission. On the figures both companies published on August 24, 2026, Etsy’s 6.5% transaction fee alone matches Shopify’s Basic plan at about $385 a month in sales and the Grow plan at $1,000 a month. Where your own crossover sits depends on your listing count, your billing period and your average order value, all worked through below.
These numbers move. Both companies change fees and plan prices, and they publish different figures in different countries. Everything below is a dated record of what each company’s own page said on the day it was read, not a permanent fact. Check your own account and your own country’s page before you make a decision with money in it.
What Etsy publishes, read August 24, 2026
Read from etsy.com/sell, the US version of the page. Etsy states plainly that “Payment processing fees vary by bank country,” so the processing line below applies to US bank accounts only.
| Etsy fee | What the page says |
|---|---|
| Listing fee | “List your first item for just $0.20.” Listings “are active for four months, or until they sell.” |
| Transaction fee | “6.5 % Transaction fee” |
| Payment processing | “3% + $0.25 payment processing fee” (varies by bank country) |
| Offsite Ads | “15% Offsite Ads Fee” when a sale comes from one of those ads. Etsy says offsite advertising “is optional for most sellers, but may be required based on how much you make in sales on Etsy in a 12 month period.” |
| Currency conversion | 2.5% where your listing currency differs from your payment account currency |
What Shopify publishes, read August 24, 2026
Read from shopify.com/pricing with the region selector set to USA, English, prices shown in USD.
| Shopify plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing | Third-party payment provider fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $25 USD/mo | $19 USD/mo | 2% |
| Grow | $65 USD/mo | $49 USD/mo | 1% |
| Advanced | $399 USD/mo | $299 USD/mo | 0.6% |
| Plus | from $2,300 USD/mo | not shown | 0.2% |
Two things about that table are easy to misread. The third-party payment provider percentage is a penalty for not using Shopify Payments, not a general commission on your sales. And Shopify’s pricing page shows different prices in different countries, so if you are not in the US, the figures on your own version of that page are the ones that apply to you.
What we could not verify today, and therefore left out
This section exists because the fee comparisons that rank for this query all present a complete-looking picture, and a complete picture is only possible if you are willing to fill the gaps with numbers you did not check. We are not.
- Shopify’s own card processing rate per plan. Shopify’s pricing page, as read on August 24, 2026, described card fees only as “These fees vary depending on the plan that you choose” without stating them. So no Shopify processing percentage appears anywhere in this article, and none is used in any calculation below.
- The exact base Etsy’s 6.5% is charged on. Whether shipping and gift wrapping are included is defined in Etsy’s Fees and Payments Policy, which did not return to us on the day of writing. The arithmetic below applies 6.5% to the item price, which means your real Etsy bill is at least what is shown here and possibly a little more.
- Etsy’s Offsite Ads threshold. Etsy’s own wording is that the program “may be required based on how much you make in sales on Etsy in a 12 month period.” We could not retrieve the dollar threshold or the reduced percentage that some shops pay, so neither is stated.
- Any Etsy subscription price. No Etsy subscription plan appeared on the page we read, so none is quoted.
Because Shopify’s card rate is missing, card processing is excluded from both sides of every comparison below. Both platforms charge to process a card, the two charges partly cancel, and leaving both out is more honest than pairing a verified Etsy number against a Shopify number we could not read. Add both back from your own accounts when you run this for real.
Why Etsy vs Shopify fees are not comparable units
Every article on this topic puts the two schedules side by side in one table, and that table is the reason so many sellers reach a wrong answer confidently. A percentage and a subscription are different kinds of cost. A percentage scales with you: it charges nothing on your quiet month and a lot on your best month. A subscription is the reverse, punishing when you are small and almost free once you are large.
So “which is cheaper” is not a question with an answer. “At what monthly revenue does the subscription become cheaper than the commission” is, and it has an answer you can compute. If you would rather put your own figures in than follow the worked examples, our Etsy vs Shopify fee calculator runs this comparison against your own revenue, order count and listing numbers.
The break-even, with the assumptions shown
Start with the simplest version. Ignore listing fees for a moment and ask only what monthly sales make Etsy’s 6.5% transaction fee equal a Shopify plan price. Divide the plan price by 0.065.
| Shopify plan | Monthly billing crossover | Annual billing crossover |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | $385 a month in sales | $292 a month in sales |
| Grow | $1,000 a month in sales | $754 a month in sales |
| Advanced | $6,138 a month in sales | $4,600 a month in sales |
Assumptions, stated: Etsy’s 6.5% transaction fee applied to item price only, Shopify plan prices as published for the USA on August 24, 2026, card processing excluded on both sides, listing fees excluded, apps and theme and domain costs excluded, no Offsite Ads.
That last exclusion list is why published break-even figures disagree so violently with each other. Search this question and you will find one source saying $500 to $700 a month, another saying around $1,350, another framing it as 60 to 100 orders a month. None of them shows what they included. They are not contradicting each other about the arithmetic, they are quietly disagreeing about what counts as a cost.
The crossover moves down as your listing count goes up
Etsy’s $0.20 listing fee is the part every comparison waves away, and on a large shop it is not small. Listings run for four months, so keeping 100 listings live costs about $20 every four months, which is $5 a month. Feed that into the same equation and Shopify Basic on monthly billing breaks even at $308 a month in sales instead of $385.
At 300 active listings you are paying about $15 a month in renewals, and the crossover falls to about $154 a month in sales. At 600 active listings, renewals alone run about $30 a month, which is more than Shopify Basic’s $25 before Etsy has taken a single percentage point of anything. A large catalog of slow-moving listings is the case where the arithmetic favors leaving earliest, and it is almost never the case these articles model.
Annual billing moves it too
Paying Shopify yearly instead of monthly drops Basic from $25 to $19 and Grow from $65 to $49, per Shopify’s own page on the date read. That pulls the Basic crossover from $385 down to $292 a month in sales. It also means committing a year to a platform before you know whether your traffic follows you, which is a real cost that does not appear on any invoice.
Average order value changes Etsy’s real rate more than sellers expect
Etsy’s percentages are not the whole cost. There is $0.25 of payment processing and $0.20 of listing fee attached to each order as a flat amount, and a flat amount is a bigger share of a small order. Applying Etsy’s published US figures to a single sale, with one listing fee per order:
| Average order value | Total Etsy cost on that order | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| $10 | $1.40 | 14.0% |
| $25 | $2.83 | 11.3% |
| $50 | $5.20 | 10.4% |
| $100 | $9.95 | 10.0% |
| $250 | $24.20 | 9.7% |
A sticker shop and a furniture maker with identical monthly revenue are not paying the same rate to Etsy, and the sticker shop is paying meaningfully more. If your average order is under about $25, the flat components are doing real damage, and that is a stronger argument for your own store than the headline percentage ever was. The same effect is why the question of how much revenue you need before leaving Etsy has no single answer.
The line no fee table has: Etsy’s 6.5% buys traffic and Shopify’s $25 does not
Here is the part the tables hide, and it is the reason this comparison misleads sellers who do the arithmetic correctly.
Etsy’s transaction fee is not only a payment for software. It is also, in practice, what you pay for being inside a marketplace where buyers are already searching. Shopify’s subscription buys you a store. It does not buy you a single visitor. Nothing in the crossover math above accounts for that, because it cannot: it is a comparison of invoices, and traffic does not appear on an invoice until you buy it.
Put a number on it from your own side. At $2,000 a month in sales, Etsy’s 6.5% costs you $130. Shopify Basic costs $25. Your saving is $105 a month, and $105 a month is the entire budget you have for replacing Etsy’s discovery with ads, email tools, content or anything else before the cheaper platform becomes the more expensive business. At $5,000 a month the gap is $300 a month, which is more room but still not much of an acquisition budget. A seller who crosses the break-even on paper and moves without a traffic plan ends up with lower fees and less money, which is the outcome nobody’s fee table predicts. If most of your views come from Etsy search rather than from people who know your name, that is marketplace dependency rather than a customer base, and the fee saving will not survive contact with it.
There is also a cost on the Shopify side that the plan price hides: apps, a theme, a domain, and whatever you pay someone to set it up. None of those are quoted here because none of them have a published universal price, but every one of them is real, and they all land on the same side of the ledger as the subscription.
The fee comparison is the easy half
We should be plain about the limits of everything above. Fees are the part of this decision that can be computed, which is exactly why so much has been written about them and so little about the rest. The arithmetic is genuinely useful, and it is genuinely not the decision.
The harder half is whether your sales are portable, whether your product category can be found outside a marketplace, how long you can run at reduced income while a new store finds its footing, and whether you want the daily work that owning the store puts back on you. If you want the fees to be one input among several rather than the whole basis, the broader version of the question is whether you should move from Etsy to Shopify at all, and the honest answer for plenty of shops is no.
Two practical notes to close on. First, you do not have to choose today: opening a store while you are still selling on Etsy turns this from a bet into a test, at the cost of one subscription. Second, if the arithmetic says move but your traffic is almost entirely Etsy search, the crossover is telling you something true about fees and nothing about timing, and it may simply be too early.
Last checked: August 24, 2026. All Etsy figures read from etsy.com/sell and all Shopify figures from shopify.com/pricing on that date, US versions of both pages. Both companies change fees and plan prices without notice and publish different figures in different countries.
FAQ
Is Etsy or Shopify cheaper? Neither, until you say at what revenue. Etsy charges no monthly fee and takes 6.5% per sale plus $0.20 per listing. Shopify charges a monthly plan price and takes no commission. On the figures both companies published on August 24, 2026, Etsy’s 6.5% alone equals Shopify’s Basic plan at about $385 a month in sales and the Grow plan at $1,000 a month.
What is the break-even between Etsy fees and a Shopify subscription? Divide the Shopify plan price by Etsy’s 6.5% transaction fee. For US monthly billing on the date read, that is roughly $385 a month in sales for Basic, $1,000 for Grow and $6,138 for Advanced. Adding Etsy listing fees pulls those numbers down, and paying Shopify annually pulls them down further.
Do Etsy listing fees really change the answer? Yes, if you carry a large catalog. Listings run four months at $0.20 each, so 300 active listings cost about $15 a month in renewals and 600 cost about $30 a month, which is more than Shopify’s Basic plan price before any percentage is taken. Shops with many slow-moving listings hit the crossover far earlier than the headline math suggests.
Why do published Etsy to Shopify break-even figures disagree with each other? Because they include different costs and almost none of them say which. The arithmetic is not in dispute, the inputs are. Before trusting any break-even number, check whether the source states its assumptions about listing fees, payment processing, apps and advertising. If it does not, it has not done your math.
Does saving on fees mean I will make more money on Shopify? Not by itself. Etsy’s percentage is partly what you pay to sit inside a marketplace where buyers already search, and a Shopify subscription buys software rather than visitors. At $2,000 a month in sales the fee saving is about $105 a month, and that is the whole budget you have for replacing Etsy’s traffic before the cheaper platform becomes the more expensive business.