Last update November 12, 2023
Overview
Many sellers start their businesses by signing up on marketplaces where they can sell products to a broad customer base. As you probably already know, Etsy is a marketplace used for selling handmade, craft supplies, and vintage products.
Even if marketplaces could be the perfect springboard for your business, you might be interested in scaling up by starting your own branded online store.
If you’re still juggling to understand whether to sell on Etsy or Shopify, read this article to understand which are the benefits you can take advantage of by using both these two selling channels.
Important: Nembol allows you to migrate listings and sync inventory across Etsy and Shopify. This applies as well to:
Does Shopify integrate with Etsy?
To clearly understand the pros and cons of using Etsy and Shopify, let’s start by spotting the main differences and similarities between those two types of selling platforms.
Pros of selling on marketplaces, like Etsy
Online marketplaces, such as Etsy, Amazon, and eBay, are selling channels that already have an online built platform designed for selling and buying online. Therefore, those platforms are user-friendly and, by the seller-side, are provided with several tools and services useful to grow visibility and sales.
Moreover, all the technical aspects, issues, and support are up to the marketplace itself, which offers you the opportunity to show your product offer to a broad customer base ready to pay to put another tick on their wishlist.
That’s definitively a huge pro, considering that marketplaces save you lots of time and effort. Nevertheless, there is always another side to the coin!
Cons of selling on Etsy
The popularity of those selling platforms and the number of clients interested in buying make marketplaces a highly competitive environment, making it for sellers challenging to stand out from the crowd.
Another significant aspect that needs to be taken into account are commissions and fees. Marketplaces are trustfully and, hence, frequently chosen as purchasing platforms precisely because of their reliability. This fosters people to choose to buy products online. However, in return for all those services and selling opportunities, marketplaces expect you to pay a number of different fees:
- Subscription fees
- Listing fees
- Commission on sales
- Adv fees
- Logistic fees (e.g. Amazon FBA)
- High Etsy Pattern fees
All those commissions could be very costly for an overall little degree of control and personalization of your shop.
Pros of selling on your own website
On the other hand, e-commerce platforms allow sellers to have their own branded online store. Here sellers can sell their products without having to care about competitors’ offers and pricing. Moreover, having an entire website dedicated to your products will, of course, foster both your own brand recognition and reputation, promoting long-term purchasing and customer loyalty.
Having a personal online shop, you might have access to a high degree of personalization and control of your website, saving commission money and having access to customer data to run tailored advertising campaigns.
Discover which eCommerce platform is the best fit for you
Cons of selling on Shopify, WooCommerce, or other eCommerce platforms
Despite several pros, having e-commerce means also providing on your own to drive the traffic to your website, taking care of website maintenance, high level of customer satisfaction, and even of technical issues and platform glitches resolution.
In a few words, having e-commerce means taking care of the whole aspects of a website, from the marketing to the simplest technical aspects. That’s why all of this might be burdensome, especially if you’re short-staffed or if you’re running a small business.
Reasons to use Shopify
And it is precisely in the challenging context of managing an e-commerce platform that Shopify was conceived.
Shopify allows sellers to have their user-friendly e-commerce platform by relying on website automatization and giving access to a set of valuable features and tools.
Shopify has what it takes to let your business scale up. Subscribing to this channel, you can have access to:
- An already coded and customizable website
- Marketing and SEO features
- Store management tools
- Online technical support
- Store Performance and customer Analytics
All you need to start your e-store by using Shopify is choosing the pricing plan which better suits your needs.
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Can I sell on Etsy and Shopify?
Like we explained before, while deciding whether use a marketplace or e-commerce you should consider if you want to take advantage of a built-in audience or built-in website platform.
But, using both can help you take the best from both those selling platforms.
Use Etsy to attract buyers
In particular, using Etsy to sell your own branded products will help you to attract traffic to your products, creating more awareness around you. Moreover, by following some SEO best practices, you will easily place your insertions in firsts page results, fostering interest in your product offer.
Use Shopify to nail more sales
Of course, you will need to cheese your competitors’ pricing strategies to rank up Etsy search results, but by starting a Shopify e-store, you will finally create your personal space where to drive traffic and sell without caring about the competitive dynamics.
This is just one of the main advantages of becoming a multichannel retailer, which basically means taking the best from every channel, attracting customers located all around the globe.
How to link Shopify and Etsy
Although the benefits of using Etsy jointly with Shopify are now clear, you’re probably wondering if there’s a way to link those two channels saving time and without doubling the effort. Well, you will be glad to hear that it actually exists! You need to use a third-party app to connect your different channels.
Start using Nembol to bulk-list your products both on Etsy and Shopify, keeping quantities and listing updates synced.
Nembol is an app designed to help retailers sell on multiple channels effortlessly, relying on a set of tools and features useful to accelerate and simplify each stage of their business, from the publication to the quantity restock. Moreover, thanks to the integration with Shopify, you will be able to transfer all the orders received on Etsy and your other channels in your Shopify backend!
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Link Etsy to Shopify
Connecting Etsy and Shopify using Nembol is really simple! All you need to do is:
- Access the Channels Tab.
- Click on the “Connect channels +” button and then select Shopify or Etsy.
- After a few seconds, you will be redirected to the marketplace/ e-Commerce page to link your account to Nembol and authorize the use of third-party apps.
- Repeat with your other account.
Read more on how to Set-up Etsy
Read more on how to Set-up Shopify
Import Etsy products to Nembol
Once you connected both channels, you should start your first product import. Here are the steps to follow:
- Open the Channels Tab.
- Click on the Etsy icon.
- Access your Etsy “Import settings” and adjust them.
- Now, click on the “Get products” button top left.
Wait a few moments and refresh the product page to let all your Etsy products appear. The import may take a while, depending on how many products you have on Etsy. You can check your Dashboard to see how the import is proceeding.
Bulk-list Etsy products on Shopify
Once your products have been correctly imported, you will be able to publish them in batches with just a few clicks:
- Check on your Shopify “Publish settings” in Nembol, and if you use manual collections on Shopify, make sure to select the collection you want to publish your products on. While, if you use the automatic ones you don’t need to do anything.
- Open the Product Tab.
- Select the products you want to push into Shopify (up to 500 at the same time).
- Click on the “Publish” button.
- Select the channels you want to publish on (e.g on Shopify, or on more channels) and confirm.
- Check the publication status on your Nembol Dashboard.
- Listings that have been correctly published will show the Shopify icon.
Sync inventory between Etsy and Shopify
Nembol is provided with smart syncing automation, which runs in real-time, automatically keeping quantities synced upon orders or edits. Nembol can improve your Etsy and Shopify inventory management.You can also choose to sync available listing stocks according to Shopify quantities. Nembol will synchronize inventory from Shopify to Etsy, Amazon, eBay, WooCommerce, and more, every time you get an order into Shopify or whenever you make updates or edits.
Import Etsy orders to Shopify
When using the inventory sync, you can also have Nembol transfer your orders into your Shopify backend for a better order management. Learn more here: import Etsy orders to Shopify