Etsy and Shopify: How To Use Both To Grow Your Business (2025)

If you’re taking your first steps into the world of ecommerce, there’s loads to study.

You may need nice merchandise, however are you aware pack an order, assist a annoyed buyer, or create a marketing campaign?

Etsy is interesting to makers as a result of it comes with a built-in viewers. You don’t have to design a website or know something about attracting site visitors.

Nevertheless, as your small business grows, it’s possible you’ll need to open your personal online store. Having a retailer offers you extra management over your buyer expertise, and lets you create a memorable brand.

For a lot of sellers, an Etsy Store and Shopify store work collectively, offering the very best of each worlds.

Forward, discover the variations between Etsy and Shopify—and how one can combine the 2 platforms, with examples from profitable companies.

Why promote on Etsy and Shopify?

You don’t have to shut down your Etsy profile to open a Shopify store. Holding each channels will improve your on-line presence and provide the greatest likelihood to develop your viewers.

Key variations between Shopify and Etsy imply every platform has its personal set of benefits. Listed below are the key alternatives supplied by Shopify versus Etsy:

Full customization

Shopify customers personal the client expertise. You’ve full management over the appear and feel of your retailer, with customizable no-code store designs.

Your retailer options and again workplace instruments are additionally versatile, due to hundreds of tailor-made apps.

Decrease charges

Etsy’s transaction charge of 6.5% per sale can have an effect on your income. Preserve extra income out of your gross sales with Shopify’s decrease transaction fees.

Personal your viewers

Shopify unlocks extra methods to handle your viewers. Outline your target audience, develop an electronic mail record, and segment your customers for customized campaigns. And, in contrast to Etsy, you possibly can port your buyer record to different platforms.

On the identical time, selling on Etsy brings its personal advantages. As a result of {the marketplace} is constructed for crafters and classic sellers, it comes with a related viewers and options designed for solo entrepreneurs:

Energetic neighborhood

Etsy’s fame as a spot to search out handmade items makes it a vacation spot for consumers. Sellers can improve their visibility with paid adverts that will create extra direct gross sales than different types of advertising, like email and SEO.

Get began shortly

Stand up and operating with out designing an internet site or branding, and with out a advertising technique. Merely plug your small business data and product particulars into Etsy’s template. 

Evaluate extra Shopify and Etsy options:

How one can promote on Etsy and Shopify

If you happen to personal an Etsy store, contemplate syncing it along with your on-line retailer. It’s easy to combine Shopify with Etsy and handle your entire orders from a single dashboard.

How one can combine a Shopify retailer and Etsy store

If you combine your Etsy Store and Shopify retailer, gross sales are synced so stock may be monitored from one place.

To combine your retailer, add the Marketplace Connect app to your admin.

Utilizing the app, you possibly can import your product catalog from Shopify to Etsy and different well-liked marketplaces, together with Amazon, Goal Plus, and eBay.

3 Etsy and Shopify success tales

Learn these tales from three retailer homeowners who constructed their companies utilizing a multichannel strategy.

1. Utilizing a market to check the market

Olivia Wang, founding father of Floral Neverland, was nonetheless in class when she launched her retailer on Etsy in 2014. She figured promoting on the platform could be an incredible side hustle.

“Etsy was actually easy to arrange,” says Olivia. “I took some footage of my merchandise, uploaded them to Etsy, added a cute store banner, wrote two paragraphs of the story behind my store, and that was it.”

As she graduated right into a profession in digital advertising, Olivia realized she might apply her abilities to search out extra prospects for her enterprise.

To do this, she wanted a promoting platform with the flexibleness to create a model.

“I didn’t need my store simply to be a facet gig. I wished it to be my full-time job sometime,” Olivia says. “So I made a decision it was the time for me to construct a model outdoors of Etsy, develop my very own neighborhood, and inform my very own tales.”

Whereas she nonetheless has an Etsy store, Olivia now dedicates most of her time to her Shopify retailer, which generates extra gross sales.

“Inside a 12 months of opening my Shopify retailer, I constructed a devoted Instagram following in keeping with my model philosophy and aesthetic,” says Olivia of her progress. She additionally developed an viewers on different social media platforms, broadening her attain past Etsy’s aggressive market.

“Constructing brand loyalty on Etsy is difficult. More often than not, a buyer’s loyalty is to Etsy, to not your model.”

After increasing from Etsy, Olivia infused her model via all facets of her enterprise, even utilizing personalized shipping materials to go away a long-lasting impression.

“I consider that packaging is an important a part of a model, and I put time and love into my packaging,” says Olivia. “I get individuals writing emails to me or tagging me on Instagram, thanking me for placing a bit of private contact on the packaging.”

2. Creating area to develop

When Lorena Haldeman, proprietor of HaldeCraft, first dove into the world of constructing and promoting, she was in a position to begin with a strong basis, due to her earlier retail expertise operating a yarn store.

That’s what led Lorena to start out promoting on Etsy in 2010.

“Etsy wasn’t the primary time I’d offered on-line, but it surely was the primary time I offered yarn that I hand-dyed myself and cleaning soap that I made. My predominant focus was the ceramics that I’d had a lifetime of constructing as a pastime,” says Lorena, who realized the craft from her entrepreneurial grandmother.

As her enterprise grew, there have been small issues about Etsy that started to frustrate Lorena. Given her big selection of merchandise, she wanted extra classes to maintain her retailer organized.

“I used to be branching out and making extra and totally different ceramics, and dyeing extra and totally different weights of yarn,” she says. “The extra merchandise I added, the more durable it was making classes on Etsy that helped individuals discover what they wished.”

Subcategories inside every of HaldeCraft’s Shopify collections permits prospects to search out distinctive merchandise. HaldeCraft

On her Shopify retailer, Lorena was in a position to create product categories and subcategories, organizing all her product listings in a means that labored for her and her prospects.

Whereas Lorena was initially apprehensive the prices of constructing her personal retailer would imply closing her Etsy store, she quickly realized it was reasonably priced to maintain each open.

“Once I began my Shopify web site in 2012, the one issues I saved on Etsy have been issues that repeatedly offered there, particularly across the holidays,” says Lorena. “I spent nearly all of my time selling my Shopify web site. Then I’d begin beefing up the Etsy store round August, main into the vacations.”

She was in a position to transfer prospects from Etsy to her Shopify retailer once they have been in search of a wider number of her gadgets.

Crucially, Lorena additionally carries the attraction of supporting a small, handmade enterprise via to her retailer.

“Did you handwrite ‘Thanks, I hope you want this!’ in your packing slips whenever you have been on Etsy? Preserve doing that with Shopify,” advises Lorena.

When promoting on Shopify and Etsy, take note of how every product performs. When you have a blockbuster Etsy product, it’s price holding your retailer open to seize that site visitors and expose your model to new audiences. HaldeCraft’s Etsy presence continues to achieve Lorena new prospects.

3. Constructing a multichannel enterprise from sq. one

When Ross Worden began his enterprise, Conquest Maps, he had no expertise, no thought about potential markets, and no thought ship a bundle.

What he did have was a need to offer his spouse an incredible journey map—however he couldn’t discover something on-line that match his imaginative and prescient.

So he made his personal. When it turned out properly, he made 5 extra and posted them on Etsy to promote. They offered, which was all of the encouragement Ross wanted to maintain engaged on Conquest Maps.

When he began seeking to develop past Etsy, he evaluated various well-liked ecommerce platforms.

Ross initially tried two different ecommerce platforms earlier than discovering Shopify. 

“It was fairly intuitive,” he says, “and earlier than I knew it, I had my web site up.”

By means of a multichannel strategy, Ross continues to function a Shopify retailer and Etsy store.

“Whereas we drive site visitors to our Shopify retailer over different channels, Etsy continues to be a superb place to function,” he says.

One of many causes Conquest Maps prefers to information prospects to its Shopify retailer is the relationships they construct.

“Etsy is an excellent place to start out,” says Ross. “It’s an incredible place to check issues and validate product concepts, as a result of they’ve loads of site visitors already on the positioning that is able to purchase superior stuff. However the draw back is that these prospects aren’t really yours. They’re Etsy’s prospects.”

“If you function a Shopify retailer, your prospects are your prospects. You may contact them and market to them the way you need, so long as they’ve permitted it.”

Conquest Maps tailors its web site with customized sections—one thing the usual Etsy template doesn’t simply accommodate. 

“The fact is that issues will all the time be altering in ecommerce, it doesn’t matter what you do. Reap the benefits of the alternatives you have got now and roll with the punches,” advises Ross.

Multichannel selling helps shield your gross sales. If one channel begins to underperform, you all the time have one other strategy to attain prospects.

Personal your model and viewers with Shopify

If you happen to’ve already constructed a enterprise on Etsy, launching a Shopify store may be the appropriate subsequent step on your model. 

Probably the greatest methods to solidify your small business for the long run is to create a relationship along with your prospects via an internet site that tells your story. With a robust model, you’ll be able to face the challenges of right this moment’s ever-changing ecommerce panorama.