A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Shopify vs Etsy: Your Own Store or a Marketplace, and What Each Costs," Kin Lane, November 14, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/11/14/shopify-vs-etsy-your-own-store-or-a-marketplace-and-what-each-costs/
Marisol cleans teeth four days a week and throws mugs on the fifth. She found the post on a Saturday, with clay still under her nails, because a friend had asked whether she should move her shop off Etsy. She had never thought of her shop as a choice. It was just where the mugs went.
The framing stopped her first. The post calls it a choice between running your own store and "renting a stall in a busy market". She bristled a little. Her stall had sent her real people, strangers who typed the word stoneware and found her. But the post wasn't sneering. It said Etsy brings you shoppers, and she had to admit that was the whole reason she was there.
She skimmed the API sections quickly. She doesn't write code, and the numbers about OpenAPI files and webhooks slid past her. The Kin Score paragraph she read twice. Shopify at 84.6, Etsy at 50.3, and Shopify ahead on every facet. It felt like a verdict on her platform, and she didn't love it. Then she reached the line saying none of that makes Etsy the wrong place to sell, only that Shopify has invested far more in the people who build on it. She decided that was fair. She was a seller, not a builder, so the score measured something she had never needed.
The money part was what she wanted. She had never actually added up what Etsy took. The post gave her the pieces: a listing fee of $0.20, a transaction fee of 6.5%, and payment processing of 3% plus $0.25. For a $40 order it came to about $4.25 in all. She did the sum herself in the margin of a glaze recipe and got the same answer, which was oddly comforting. Then she read the Shopify side, a $1.46 card fee plus her share of a $29 monthly subscription, and felt the pull of it. A flat fee sounded calm.
But the post wouldn't let her off easily. "At low volume, Etsy is cheaper, because you pay nothing until you sell." That was her, most months. And a few lines later: "At some point the subscription is cheaper." The post didn't say where that point was, because it depends on the seller. She was annoyed that it couldn't just tell her. Then she saw that it was right.
What she took from the end was a small instruction. Prices change, the post said, and these had been read on November 9, so check before you commit.
She didn't open a Shopify account. She didn't message her friend a recommendation either. She pulled up Etsy's fee page, compared it against the post's figures, and wrote her three most common mug prices on a sticky note. Next to each she wrote what Etsy would keep. She stuck the note to the kiln shelf, where she would see it the next time she packed an order.