On Shopify nobody takes a cut of your sales. Nobody brings you buyers either.

The comparison everyone makes is between a percentage and a monthly fee, and it makes Shopify look cheap. The line that never appears in that comparison is the one that decides whether anyone ever sees your product.

Put the two bills side by side and one of them looks obviously better. A marketplace takes a percentage of every sale, forever. Shopify takes a monthly fee and, if you use its own payment system, no commission on your sales at all.

That comparison is accurate and it is also the wrong one, because it leaves out the thing you are actually buying from a marketplace.

What the numbers actually say

Start with the part that is easy to check. Shopify's plans run €19 for Basic, €56 for Grow, €289 for Advanced, and from €2,100 for Plus. On top of the plan you pay to take money: standard online cards cost 1.9% + €0.25 per transaction on Basic, dropping to 1.6% + €0.25 on Advanced.

And there is a fee most people discover late: if you don't use Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a transaction fee of its own — 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. So the «no commission» is conditional on using their payment rails.

Against that, a marketplace charges a percentage — and charges it on more than you think. eBay calculates its final value fee on the total the buyer pays, which «comprende le spese di imballaggio, le spese del servizio di spedizione, l'IVA e qualsiasi altra tassa applicabile», plus €0.35 per order. Etsy takes 6.5% of the listing price «più l'importo relativo al costo di spedizione».

The line that is missing from the table

When you list on eBay or Etsy, people are already there. They arrived for their own reasons, typed something into a search box, and your product was among the answers. You did not pay for that visit as a separate item — it is folded into the percentage.

A Shopify store opens with nobody in it, and stays that way until you do something about it. There is no search box that anybody is typing into. Every single visitor arrives because you paid for an ad, built an audience over months, or ranked for something in a search engine — and the first of those three is the only one that works on day one.

That is the trade, stated plainly: a marketplace sells you traffic and charges by results. A shop platform rents you a building and leaves the traffic to you. Neither is a scam. They are different products that happen to be priced on the same page.

Why the bill feels smaller and often isn't

Because of when it arrives. Marketplace fees come out of money you have already received: you sold something, they took their share, the rest is yours. It stings, but it is never a loss.

Advertising works the other way round. You pay before you know whether anything sells, and you pay for the visits that buy nothing exactly as much as for the ones that do. On a marketplace a bad month costs you nothing in fees. On your own store, a bad month costs you the plan, the ads, and the time.

What a shop of your own does give you

This is not an argument for staying on marketplaces. There are things you only get on your own store, and some of them matter more than the fees.

• The customer is yours. On a marketplace, the buyer belongs to the marketplace: you generally cannot email them next season. On your own store you can build a list, and a list is an asset that keeps working.
• Nobody can suspend you at nine in the morning. Marketplace rules change, accounts get restricted, categories get pulled. Your own shop has your own rules — and your payment provider's, which is not nothing, but it is a shorter list.
• The shop looks like you. On a marketplace every listing looks like every other listing, and the only variables you really control are price and photos.
• Nobody takes a percentage of your growth. The monthly fee is flat: selling twice as much does not double what you pay the platform, only what you pay to process cards.

The way most people actually get this right

They don't choose. They start where the buyers already are, and open the shop once they know which products people actually want — because that is the expensive thing to learn, and a marketplace teaches it to you without an advertising budget.

Then the shop stops being a bet on traffic and becomes a second home for products that have already proven themselves somewhere else. The order matters more than the choice.

Where DropMind fits

It publishes to both, which is the point: the same catalogue can sit on the marketplaces and on your own store without being built twice. And prices are set per channel, working backwards from the profit you want to keep — which matters here, because as the fees above show, the same price does not leave you the same margin in the two places.

What it will not do is bring people to your shop. No listing tool does, and anything that promises you traffic as a feature is selling you advertising with a different name.

Where this comes from

From Shopify's pricing page and from the official fee pages of eBay and Etsy, opened on 4 September 2026. The eBay and Etsy quotations are in Italian because that is the language those pages are published in; translating them inside the quotation marks would make them false quotes, so the English is in our own words alongside.

Two things this article does not contain, on purpose. No cost per click, no cost per acquisition, no return on ad spend. Those numbers change by industry, country and season, and we have not verified any of them. And no eBay percentage: the final value fee varies by category, and quoting a single figure would be wrong for most sellers.

Prices on all three platforms change without notice. Before you decide anything, go and read them on the pages below.