Shopify vs Etsy – Which Platform Should You Sell on?

so Shopify versus Etsy which is the better platform to use as an e-commerce seller we're going to go over a number of different categories in this video looking at Shopify some of the pros and cons of it and then compare it to Etsy both of these are really prominent platforms for selling online and you want to make sure that you are using the right one to sell your products on now there's going to be a lot of things we're talking about in this video first of all we're looking at some of the differences between the two and then I want to share some of the uh features that I think are really important to understand from both of them looking at the ease to start on both Shopify and Etsy comparing some of the customization capabilities of both platforms then we're going to talk about pricing which is something that's very important to a lot of sellers which one is going to be the best for pricing how much is it going to cost you we're going to look at the differences between those two and then we're also going to talk about things like SEO and marketing which one is going to be the better platform overall to build and scale your online business so let's go ahead and get started with this video right now we're going to start off with understanding first of all the differences between both Shopify and Etsy Shopify and Etsy these are two very different platforms so with Shopify it is a standalone store this is going to be your own website you'll have your own domain and you're going to sell your products on there now with that it means that you have to go out and find your customers because you're building your own website you're building your Standalone website that you own you can customize so many things in there with Etsy Etsy is actually what we call an online Marketplace similar to things like Amazon and eBay where there are already about 500 million monthly visits to etsy's website and so you can sell on that Marketplace I kind of think of these two as like Etsy is kind of like selling at a farmers market where there's already an established like area that people are going to they're walking by your table where you're selling things and Shopify is your own store that you have to like find customers and get them into the door now there are big differences between the two and we'll talk about these because Etsy does charge more fees and you know there are some downsides to it that I think are really important to go over and by the way we have a full tutorial on how to set up and run a Shopify store it's over an hour long I'll leave a link to that down below in the description if you want to check it out uh you can also get Shopify for $1 for the first month when you sign up using the link below in the description or you go to sandal media.com Shopify I'll leave those links down below if you want to get started with that and just start building out your store right now so let's start off actually with talking about the ease to start which one is going to be the platform that's easier to use for beginners if you have really no experience of selling anything so first of all let's look at Etsy and then we'll look at Shopify on Etsy the beauty of this is that because it is an online Marketplace they already have a lot of things that are built out for the tens of thousands of other sellers on the platform and so this is very similar to if you've ever sold anything on eBay it's pretty similar so it's really easy to set up you can just go through their flow of opening your Etsy Shop I'll leave a link to that down below as well or you can just go to etsy.com / sell and to open up your Etsy Shop you just need to put in your details and you can get up and running with that today it's pretty easy to get that started but with that you also don't have a lot of customization features but it is pretty straightforward and they do have a lot of resources showing you how to set up your store so I would say Etsy is very easy you're probably not going to get too confused when you start selling on that I will also make a full tutorial on how to sell on Etsy if that's something that you would like to see please let me know Down Below in the comment section Shopify is going to be a little bit more difficult to get up and running and that's just because they have so many different features and customization capabilities and so because Shopify is a little bit more difficult to get started with because you're building out your own store your own website they also do have this resources page on Shopify if you're on shopify.com you can see all these different things they have 24/7 support for you if you have trouble building your store they can help you out with that and then they also have these how-to guides that are really useful for setting up your store like I said we also have like over an hour long to tutorial showing you how to set up a Shopify store so if you are worried about the difficulty of it don't worry like you can do it you don't need to have coding experience you don't need to be like super Highly Educated to make your own Shopify store it's just a little bit more difficult than Etsy I think it's worth it to go through that little bit of difficulty cuz I think overall this is going to be something that if you use Shopify you can really build a large professional brand off of it on your own website so that's the differences between both of those in terms of the ease to start on that the winner on this would probably be Etsy it's just easier and more straightforward to get started now let's talk about category number two which is customization okay so which one has more customization features this one is definitely Shopify so the beauty of Shopify is that we can choose from hundreds of different themes on the theme store and so you can make your store look like any of these different themes there are hundreds of these and so you have really an incredible amount of customization capabilities this is why some of the largest e-commerce brands in the world use Shopify I'm talking like Lulu Lemon some like multi-billion dollar companies they use Shopify and you don't really see them selling on Etsy as much and that's because it's just probably the most legit way to be an e-commerce seller is using Shopify so we have themes this has so many different options here you can see there's over 200 different themes there's 13 different free themes as well that you can use and so that is one of the features then also on top of that we have things like Shopify apps not to confuse you here but this is these are all these different things you can add into your store so you can have marketing integration into your Shopify store you can have reservations so like if you have any type of site and you want to you know build out like all these different features on here we have something called the Shopify app store which has thousands of different features and customization capabilities that you can add onto your site now you go back to what I said in the first point about ease of use this is why people get a little bit concerned about it because it's like overwhelming but we show you how to sell all of that up in the Shopify tutorial that I said earlier is going to be linked Below in the description so Shopify is really there's so many customization features on Etsy in terms of customization you really don't have much now if you do sign up for the premium version as an Etsy seller you do get a few more options for customization but you're really you're kind of limited on what you can do your storefront it's going to be pretty limited and that's just because you're selling on etsy's platform and they want it to look like all of the other listings that's the differences between Shopify and Etsy in terms of customization the winner here is definitely with Shopify and sometimes it can be just some simple little customization things that are going to completely put Shopify way higher of a category than something like Etsy for example on Shopify you can download Shopify apps on your store that will help you to have upsell so that when someone clicks on an item they add it to a cart you can upsell them some other type of item you can't really do that with Etsy like you can with Shopify so that's really a great benefit to it now let's talk about pricing which one is going to be better pricing for sell Shopify or Etsy now let's first of all look at the pricing on Etsy Etsy has a 20 listing fee for every item that you are listing on the platform now they also have a 6.5% transaction fee for every sale that you are making uh and then there's a payment processing fee of about 3% plus 25 for every purchase that's made through your Etsy store now when you add up all of these different fees you're coming out to probably around 10% of the total selling price goes towards fees on Etsy That's not including shipping that's literally just fees that Etsy is taking for selling on their platform now the reason why they're able to charge these very high fees is because well there's already people searching for products on Etsy and so maybe you don't have to do as much marketing on the platform because there's already customers coming in so they charge some pretty expensive fees now if you think about this if you're selling $500 a month in your products on Etsy you might be spending upwards of $50 a month on fees when it's all said and done between payment processing and Etsy fees and everything else so Etsy while it does look cheap it only says it's 20 cents plus you know 6.5% when you do add it up it does get pretty expensive I would say that Etsy is probably better for people who are selling a couple of items per month but now let's look at Shopify pricing which starts out at $29 per month for the basic plan now with this you're getting so many different features you have all those themes you can choose from you have a lot of different features that you're getting in here that you can use with Shopify for $29 a month now I know this can seem kind of expensive for some people but when you factor in how expensive these Etsy fees are when you are selling more than a few items per month Shopify actually ends up being a lot cheaper so this is what I said earlier about any like very large business almost all of them are using Shopify for selling their products and that's because you know they have all those customization features but pricing is actually really not bad when you're doing high volume now you still do have to deal with Payment Processing fees where which are going to come out to you know about 3% give or take a little bit but you don't have to deal with that 6.5% platform fee that Etsy would be charging and you don't have listing fees for every product that you're listing as well so that's the benefit to using Shopify so which one is the winner here Shopify or Etsy in terms of pricing well the answer really does depend if you're selling more than a few items per month then Shopify actually probably would end up being cheaper I would say if you're selling more than three4 $500 a month in total products then Shopify can end up being cheaper if you're doing low volume and you're only selling a few items per month then Etsy might be cheaper because you're not paying that $29 per month so that's up to you to decide which one is going to be better I know a lot of sellers who use both they use Etsy and they also use Shopify and it works pretty well okay so now another category that I think is really important to look at is search engine optimization and marketing basically how are you getting your customers to buy your product and on these platforms it's actually going to be very different so with Etsy like I said there's over 500 mill monthly people visiting the site and so because of this there's a lot of people coming in looking at your Etsy listings and you probably didn't have to pay any marketing expenses to get them there they just organically searched it up and found your product on Etsy and sometimes they end up buying it and so your marketing cost when you're selling an Etsy can be a lot lower because you don't have to go out and find as many customers a lot of them are coming directly to you kind of like what I said earlier about how I view it like selling at like a farmers market there's people going by and they see your product and they buy it so that's with Etsy you can rank in Etsy search and if you rank well on some of those terms you can just sell products without having to do very much now there all also is more increased competition because they can compare your product to dozens of other products inside of etsy's dashboard so that can be a positive and a negative but with Shopify in terms of marketing you're going to have to do more on your own so I would recommend Shopify for people who maybe you already have a social media presence like you've built up an Instagram following for your brand or you're starting to make Tik toks for your brand and you can directly drive those viewers those fans to your Shopify store that can be a really great method for doing that you can also learn how to run Google ads Facebook ads Instagram ads we actually have videos for all of these different ads platforms so I will link to those down below if you want to run Pinterest ads Snapchat ads like we have ads tutorials on pretty much every platform it's really useful to know when you are selling products how to run ads because they can be very effective and really useful for if you're selling on Shopify now also you can rank on Google with your Shopify store so if you write blog articles on your Shopify store you can actually start to rank in Google when someone searches something up and they can find your online store and that is going to be organic free traffic for you to get to your site now also with Shopify I would say that it really legitimizes your brand because you're going to have your own custom domain and so instead of you know if someone asks you what is your store like where can I buy your product instead of telling them you know it's uh etsy.com you know know whatever my store name is you can just tell them you know it's my store name.com it can be like NES cool t-shirts.com right and that could be my Shopify domain that I can send people to so it's a lot easier to Market that and you know it does really legitimize your brand when you have a Shopify store now overall pros and cons some other just pointers and the important things I think are important to understand before you make a decision on whether you want to use Shopify or Etsy is that one of my biggest concerns with Etsy or one of the downsides to Etsy is that you don't own your store and so I've seen this happen before you can get kicked off of selling on Etsy or if there's any type of dispute between you and the buyer of a product they usually side with the buyer and so I've seen this happen a lot on Etsy and on eBay and on Amazon for people who are selling on Amazon where because you don't own your store like you're selling on a third-party Marketplace there's a lot of cases where yeah you just don't own your store and they can kick you off you can be doing a million dollar a year in sales on Etsy and maybe if you violate their terms of service or there's some disputes they can just kick you off whenever they want they don't aren't not legally obligated to have you selling on their platform I've seen it happen to people and it's just because you don't own your store you're you're you're basically on rented land you want to use that terminology there instead of actually owning your store so that's one of the biggest downsides to Etsy I just say be careful with that and I think if you want to build a really legitimate very large business then I really would suggest figuring out how to sell on Shopify some of the largest companies in the world multi-billion dollar companies sell on Shopify so I'll leave a link to that down below like I said for the Shopify tutorial so you can get started with that we really try to help you out as much as possible to make sure that you set up a successful store and I will also create an SD tutorial if that's something you would like to see please let me know and maybe if you're watching this video I've already made it by now so I'll link to that down below as well okay so hopefully this video was helpful for you in deciding which platform to use as an online seller a lot of people choose to use both Etsy and Shopify uh you can use both of them at the same time I think overall what I think is really important to understand is that longterm I think Shopify should be a goal for most people that's how you're going to build the biggest brand there are people who sell millions of dollars on Etsy but there's not anyone who sells billions of dollars with the product on Etsy that's not the case with Shopify there are multi-billion dollar companies on Shopify and so I would say really the sky's the limit with Shopify you can scale to infinite levels versus Etsy which is a little bit harder to get to the millions of dollars so it really just depends on your goals and what you're looking for both are great platforms I hope this video was valuable to you in a number of ways if it was make sure you subscribe to the channel let me know your thoughts or questions Down Below in the comment section and don't forget to check out that full Shopify tutorial I think it should be helpful for a lot of people trying to get started so thanks for watching and I'll see everybody sometime in a future video

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