When Your Etsy Shop Outgrows Etsy: The Move to Shopify

Etsy built a lot of real UK businesses, and for discovery it is still hard to beat: millions of buyers arrive looking for exactly the kind of things its sellers make. But somewhere between the fee rises, the crowding and the inbox you do not own, a question starts nagging at every seller doing steady numbers: how much of this business is mine?

This post shares the actual maths, the trade-offs, and the point at which your own store stops being a nice idea and starts being cheaper.

What is selling on Etsy costing you in 2026?

The individual fees look small; but when volumes increase, they begin to stack up. For a UK seller, each sale currently carries a 6.5% transaction fee, payment processing at 4% plus 20p, and the UK Regulatory Operating Fee, which Etsy raised from 0.32% to 0.48% in June 2026. That is roughly 11% of every sale before listing fees, and before Offsite Ads, which take a further 12% on attributed sales once a shop passes 10,000 US dollars of sales in a rolling year, roughly £640 a month, a threshold every row of the table below clears (smaller shops can opt out, at 15% when they opt in).

One more line most comparisons skip: sellers who are not VAT registered pay 20% VAT on Etsy's fees themselves, which pushes the stack to roughly 13% (a Shopify store's costs carry VAT too, so the comparison stays fair either way). In pounds, ignoring ads, listing fees and VAT:

A Shopify store is the opposite cost shape: mostly fixed rather than percentage-based, a monthly plan plus card processing pence-and-low-percent per order. Our ecommerce cost guide puts realistic running costs for an established store at £150 to £400 a month all-in. Sit that against your row of the table: at £5,000 a month the percentage stack alone comfortably covers the running cost of a good store, and at £20,000 a month it pays for one several times over. Below £1,000 a month it usually does not, and we come back to that below.

Why are sellers restless beyond the fees?

Three reasons, all structural rather than temporary.

The crowd you compete with changed. This summer's seller backlash is about AI-generated listings flooding Etsy search, with long-standing makers reporting handmade work drowning under mass-produced content. Etsy tightened its rules; enforcement is the argument. Whatever your view, the direction is clear: standing out inside Etsy's search gets harder every year, and you are renting visibility in a room that keeps filling up.

The platform's take of each sale keeps climbing. Etsy's marketplace contracted through 2024 and 2025 before returning to growth this year, but the platform's take rate continued to rise - Etsy's revenue as a share of everything sold, reached 25.9% in the second quarter of 2026, up again year on year (Etsy investor results).

The customer list was never yours. This is the one that matters most and shows up last. Years of orders, and you cannot email any of those buyers about your new range: the relationship belongs to Etsy. Every repeat purchase runs back through the fee stack and back past every competitor Etsy shows beside you. Owning a store is really about owning this: the list, the brand, the repeat sale at full margin.

Should you leave Etsy, then?

No, and this is where we part company with most articles on the subject. Etsy is a discovery machine you cannot rebuild on your own: buyers go there to browse in a way they will never browse your standalone store. Walking away from that traffic would be a bad move.

What works is running both, with each channel doing the job it is good at. Etsy stays as the shop window where new buyers find you; your own store becomes where the relationship lives: the customer emails, the full range, the repeat orders, the margins without the stack. Etsy integration apps on the Shopify App Store (CedCommerce's Etsy Integration is the longest-established) sync listings, stock and orders between the two, so you are not running parallel shops by hand. Over time, packaging inserts, your email list and your social point buyers to the store, and the mix shifts on its own.

What does moving involve, and what does not come with you?

The mechanics are smaller than most sellers fear: products export from Etsy and import to Shopify in an afternoon, and photography, descriptions and pricing carry straight over.

Two things do not transfer, and it is better to know now. Your reviews stay on Etsy. Years of five-star history cannot be imported as store reviews, which is the strongest argument for starting the store while your Etsy shop is thriving rather than after you have wound it down; run both, and start collecting reviews at your own address early. Your Etsy search position stays on Etsy too. Your store starts fresh with Google, earning its visibility over months; our guide on how long indexing takes sets those expectations, and if you want help, an Etsy move sits at the simpler end of the tiers in our migration cost guide, because there are no old page addresses or rankings to protect.

Plan for the store's first months to be quiet while Etsy carries on paying the bills. That is the whole point of not burning the shop down behind you.

When is staying Etsy-only the right call?

Stay put, for now, if you are under roughly £1,000 a month and the fee stack is still cheaper than running a store properly; if your sales come almost entirely from Etsy browsing rather than people seeking you out by name; or if you have no appetite for even light marketing, because a standalone store without any promotion is a shop on a quiet street. Etsy's fees are, at that stage, a fair price for the footfall.

The tipping signals worth watching for: repeat customers keep asking if you have a website; your fee statement has become your biggest monthly cost after materials; you are building a following on social that you are sending to Etsy, where it browses your competitors; or wholesale and press enquiries want somewhere credible to land that is not a marketplace listing. Two or more of those, and the both-channels move is overdue.

The practical first step

Pull your last three months of Etsy fee statements and put a real number on what the stack costs you; count the repeat buyers you have no way of contacting; then price the alternative against it. If the maths says move, the both-channels version starts smaller than most sellers expect: a focused store with your bestsellers, synced with Etsy from day one.

We build Shopify stores for product businesses at exactly this stage, including brands that started on marketplaces, and the fee statement usually makes the decision before we say a word: see how we approach Shopify builds and ecommerce, or get in touch to have a conversation about what's involved in setting up your own dedicated store.