Plenty of ecommerce sellers run both a Shopify store and an Etsy shop — Etsy for discovery, Shopify for the direct relationship. The problem shows up at reconciliation time: these two platforms don't calculate fees the same way, and treating their numbers as directly comparable leads to a genuinely common miscount.

How Etsy actually charges

Etsy stacks three separate fees on every sale: a $0.20 listing fee (charged whether or not the item sells), a 6.5% transaction fee on the total sale including shipping, and payment processing at roughly 3% + $0.25 for US sellers. Add Offsite Ads — which can be mandatory below $10,000 in trailing annual sales — and the effective rate on an attributed sale climbs another 12-15%, capped at $100 per order.

How Shopify actually charges

Shopify Payments runs 2.9% + $0.30 standard, no listing fee, no forced advertising cut. If you use a third-party gateway instead, Shopify tacks on its own 0.5-2% transaction fee on top of the gateway's cut — a detail that surprises sellers who assumed avoiding Shopify Payments would avoid Shopify's fees entirely.

Where the double-counting trap happens

Sellers who export both platforms' reports and manually total "revenue minus fees" often apply Etsy's simpler headline number (just the 6.5% transaction fee) while forgetting the listing fee and Offsite Ads cut layered on top — or they compare Etsy's stacked total against Shopify's single processing fee as if they were the same kind of number. The result: an inflated sense of Etsy's actual margin relative to Shopify's, or vice versa depending on which detail got missed.

The one number that actually matters

What you want isn't "Shopify's fee rate" or "Etsy's fee rate" in isolation — it's your blended take-home rate across both channels, so you can make an honest call about where to put more of your inventory and marketing effort.

Simeon breaks down Shopify and Etsy fees transaction by transaction and shows your real combined net, so the comparison is apples to apples.