You have probably already decided you want off Etsy. The real questions are what survives the move, how long it takes, and whether your take-home actually improves. This guide answers all three with real numbers, then shows you the one thing most migration articles skip: what happens to your profit per order after the switch.
Should you migrate Etsy to Shopify?
Migrate when you want a branded storefront you control, lower per-sale fees, and a customer list that is actually yours. Stay on Etsy — or keep both — if you rely entirely on Etsy's built-in search traffic and have no plan to drive your own.
That is the honest trade. Etsy hands you buyers; Shopify hands you a store. On Shopify nobody browses a marketplace and stumbles onto you, so you become responsible for ads, SEO, and email. In exchange you stop paying Etsy's marketplace tax on every order and you own the relationship.
If you are weighing the accounting side of the move — how sales, payouts, and fees line up across two platforms — our guide to reconciling your ecommerce data is the hub for that whole topic.
What actually transfers (and what doesn't)
This is where sellers get surprised. Here is the clean split.
Products — yes, with cleanup
Your listings move. You export them as a CSV from Etsy's Shop Manager and import them into Shopify. Expect to fix formatting: Shopify's importer struggles with listings that have more than three variant options, and prices, weights, and inventory counts all need a verification pass before you go live.
Customers and orders — no, not directly
Your Etsy order history and customer records do not transfer through the standard export. You can pull them in with a third-party migration app, but there is a catch that matters more than the mechanics: under Etsy's terms, you do not own your buyers' email addresses. So even a "successful" customer import gives you names and order totals, not a marketing list you can freely email.
The practical fix is to rebuild that list deliberately. Our walkthrough on how to export Etsy customers to Shopify covers what you can legitimately move and how to re-earn consent on the Shopify side.
Reviews — no, and this one hurts
Your reviews stay on Etsy. Years of star ratings are Etsy's property, not yours, and they are the hardest thing to replace. Third-party review apps can help you collect fresh social proof, but you start that count from zero. Plan for it.
For the full mechanical sequence of moving catalog and history, the step-by-step transfer from Etsy to Shopify guide goes deeper than the summary below.
How to migrate Etsy to Shopify, step by step
- Audit your Etsy catalog. Note listings with more than three variants, digital products, and anything with location-specific pricing — these need manual attention.
- Export your data. In Etsy Shop Manager, download your listings (and, if available, orders) as CSV files.
- Set up your Shopify store. Pick a plan, choose a theme, and configure payments and shipping before you import anything.
- Import products. Use Shopify's free Store Importer app for the CSV, or Shopify's newer Store Migration app if you have access. For a large or messy catalog, a paid service is often faster.
- Verify everything. Check prices, weights, inventory, images, and variants on a sample of products. Fix what the importer mangled.
- Rebuild customers and reviews. Import order history if you want it, then set up email capture and a review app to start collecting fresh proof.
- Set 301 redirects and go live. Redirect old links, connect your domain, and place a test order end to end before you announce.
What it costs and how long it takes
Time: a small shop of a few dozen clean listings is a weekend. A catalog in the hundreds with variant-heavy products is realistically one to two weeks once you include verification and rebuilding email capture.
Cost: the migration itself can be free if you do the CSV import yourself. Done-for-you services are cheap by comparison — LitExtension, for example, starts around $139 for an all-in-one migration, scaling with catalog size. The bigger ongoing cost is your Shopify subscription plus the traffic you now have to generate yourself.
The profit math nobody shows you
Every other guide talks about "brand control." Almost none walk the fee math. Here it is.
Etsy's combined take is roughly 12–15% of each sale, from a 6.5% transaction fee on the order total, a $0.20 listing fee, and 3% + $0.25 payment processing for US sellers, according to Craftybase's fee breakdown. Shopify charges no marketplace transaction fee on its own payment rail; US online processing runs about 2.9% + 30¢ on the Basic plan, dropping on higher tiers.
Say you sell a $40 mug with free shipping. Here is the per-order fee on each platform:
- Etsy: transaction 6.5% × $40 = $2.60, plus a $0.20 listing fee, plus processing (3% × $40 + $0.25) = $1.45. Total ≈ $4.25 per order.
- Shopify Basic: processing 2.9% × $40 + $0.30 = $1.46 per order. No marketplace fee.
That is $2.79 saved on a single $40 order — about 7% of the sale price back in your pocket. On 100 orders a month that is roughly $279 you keep.
But be honest about the offset. Shopify charges a flat monthly subscription that Etsy does not, so say your plan runs $39 a month — you need roughly 14 of those $40 orders each month just to cover it before you are ahead. And Etsy's fees are the ceiling: turn on Etsy Offsite Ads and it takes another 12–15% of the order on top, per the same Craftybase breakdown. The Shopify saving is real, but it is only "free money" once you clear the subscription and replace the free traffic Etsy was feeding you.
That last part is the catch. On Etsy the traffic was baked into the fee. On Shopify you buy it — usually through Meta and Google Ads — and ad spend is now the line item that decides whether a $40 order is actually profitable. Which is exactly why your per-order math has to include ad cost, not just processing fees.
See true profit per order after the move
Here is the trap sellers fall into on Shopify: they check Shopify for revenue, Meta for ad results, and their bank for the payout — three numbers that never agree — and guess at profit. That guessing is where money quietly leaks.
PodVector exists to close that gap. It connects Shopify, Meta Ads, Google Ads, Printify, Printful, and Stripe, and computes your true per-order profit — product cost, processing fees, ad spend, and all. Victor, its AI operator, reads that live data, tells you which products and campaigns actually make money, and — with your approval — acts on the Shopify side to help you act on it. Victor does not touch your ad account; he reads the ad data and proposes the moves, and PodVector is not another dashboard you have to babysit. For a post-Etsy seller who just traded free marketplace traffic for paid traffic, knowing real profit per order is the difference between scaling and bleeding.
Should you keep Etsy as a channel too?
You do not have to burn the boat. Many sellers run Shopify as the brand home and keep Etsy as a discovery channel, syncing inventory between them. If you want to migrate Shopify to Etsy in that direction — pushing your Shopify catalog back onto Etsy to capture marketplace search — sync apps handle it, and you keep both storefronts stocked from one place.
The reason to consider it: Etsy's search traffic is genuinely valuable, and dropping it cold can cost you sales before your Shopify traffic ramps. Running both lets your Shopify ads and SEO grow while Etsy keeps feeding orders. Just watch the fees — every Etsy sale still carries that 12–15% marketplace take.
Watch your numbers after the move
However you split it, the migration is not "done" when products go live. The first month is when you learn whether your new traffic actually converts profitably and whether your fee savings survive contact with ad spend. Reconcile your Shopify sales against your payouts and your ad reports early and often — our deeper guide to the migration from Etsy to Shopify covers what to check in those first weeks.
FAQs
Can I move my Etsy reviews to Shopify?
No. Reviews are Etsy's property and stay on the platform. You can install a review app on Shopify and start collecting fresh ones, but you cannot transfer your existing star ratings. Treat rebuilding social proof as a planned task, not an afterthought.
Will I lose my customer email list when I migrate?
Effectively, yes. Etsy's terms mean you never owned your buyers' email addresses for marketing use, so there is no clean list to move. Import order history if you want the record, but plan to re-earn email consent on Shopify with signup incentives from day one.
How long does it take to migrate Etsy to Shopify?
A small, tidy catalog can be done in a weekend. A few hundred variant-heavy listings, plus verification and email rebuild, is realistically one to two weeks. Most of the time goes into cleanup and verification, not the import itself.
Is Shopify cheaper than Etsy?
Per order, usually — Shopify has no marketplace transaction fee, so on a $40 sale you might pay about $1.46 in fees versus roughly $4.25 on Etsy, using the fee rates cited above. But Shopify adds a monthly subscription and you must fund your own traffic, so "cheaper" only holds once you clear those costs.
Can I sell on both Etsy and Shopify at the same time?
Yes, and many sellers do. Run Shopify as your brand home and keep Etsy as a discovery channel, using a sync app to keep inventory aligned. You keep Etsy's search traffic while your Shopify store ramps — just remember every Etsy order still carries its full marketplace fee.
How do I know if the migration actually improved my profit?
Track true per-order profit, not just revenue. After the move your costs shift from Etsy fees to a subscription plus ad spend, and only per-order profit — sale price minus product cost, processing, and ad cost — tells you whether the switch paid off. Reconcile Shopify sales against payouts and ad reports monthly so the answer is measured, not guessed.