Amazon vs. Shopify: Which Is Better in 2023?

In the eCommerce arena, there’s one big bout that remains undecided: selling on Amazon vs Shopify.

Both have a huge share of the eCommerce market, and both represent a compelling proposition for those who want to take their first steps into online selling – but is it better to sell on Amazon or Shopify?

That depends on your requirements and preferences. With Amazon, you get instant access to millions of shoppers, but very little control over your store and brand identity. With Shopify, you have complete control over your online store but you’re starting your customer base from scratch.

However, it’s a little more complicated than that…

In this article, we’re going to weigh up these two titans of eCommerce to help you decide which platform you should sell on, covering their key features, pros, and cons, and how you can use them together.

At a glance: Amazon vs Shopify comparison table

Amazon’s pros and cons

Pros

• Instant access to billions of global customers
• Ship products yourself or use FBA
• Ready-made selling platform – no need to build your own store
• Amazon FBA can deal with returns and customer service
• Useful in-built marketing and advertising tools

Cons

• 8-15% referral fees on every sale
• Fulfillment fees can be 40% of sales if you use Amazon FBA
• At the mercy of Amazon’s terms of service
• You’re competing with millions of other sellers
• You’re competing with Amazon’s private-label brands
• You can’t customize the design of your storefront

Read more: Competing With Amazon: It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds!

Shopify pros and cons

Pros

• Complete control over your online store
• Sell on your own domain
• Highly customizable
• Great for dropshipping
• Low selling fees
• Tons of apps and add-ons available through the Shopify App Store

Cons

• Building your own store can be tricky and time-consuming
• No in-built audience to sell or market to
• Subscription fees to apps can add up
• Transaction fees for third-party providers

The differences between Shopify and Amazon

Both Amazon and Shopify allow you to sell online, so it doesn’t matter which you use right?

Not necessarily. Amazon is a global marketplace that allows sellers to sign up and start selling to millions of customers instantly. Shopify is an eCommerce platform that you can use to build your own online store from scratch, which gives you complete control over your business and brand.

Amazon is currently the 13th most visited website in the world, receiving more than two billion visits every month. It also has more than six million sellers globally. But in those statistics lie its main advantage and disadvantage: while you have a huge market of potential buyers, you have a lot of competition from rival sellers.

With Shopify, you might have more freedom and control, but you’ll be building your customer base from the ground up, which can be time-consuming and expensive.

Want to get an edge over your competition? With Shopper Intelligence, you can uncover your competitors’ top-performing products and optimize your own portfolio.

Amazon fees vs Shopify fees

Both Amazon and Shopify offer premium features on a subscription basis.

Amazon has two premium plans: Individual, which charges you 99¢ for every item sold, and Professional, which costs $39.99 per month. The Individual plan only represents good value up to about 40 units per month, after which you’d be better off on the Professional.

Shopify has three plans: Basic ($29 per month), Shopify ($79 per month), and Shopify Advanced ($299 per month).

While Shopify has the more expensive plans, that’s not where the story ends. Amazon demands a pretty hefty cut of your takings – the referral fee is roughly 8-15% of every single sale you make. And if you use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) for your shipping needs, it could be as much as 40%.

That said, FBA manages the picking, packing, and shipping of products, as well as returns and customer service, so you’re getting a lot for your money. Fees are based on the weight and dimensions of your product and can range from $2.35 to $150 plus a small surcharge.

In contrast, Shopify doesn’t charge transaction fees provided you use Shopify payments – if you don’t, your transaction fee will be between 0.5% and 2% depending on your plan – and although it does still charge a small percentage on each card transaction (between 2.4% and 2.9%), this still represents a much smaller proportion of your overall sales than Amazon.

You may also be charged some additional seller fees by Amazon if your items fail to sell. Prime example, if your products are stored in an Amazon fulfillment center for more than 365 days, you’ll be charged a long-term storage fee of $6.90 per cubic foot or 15¢ per unit (whichever is greater). Likewise, Amazon applies a high-volume listing fee of 0.005¢ per listing if you have a high volume of stock that you haven’t managed to sell within a year.

So, in terms of fees, is it better to sell on Shopify or Amazon? That just depends on how much of your profits you’re willing to sacrifice for the convenience of Amazon’s platform and in-built audience.

Other costs

Amazon includes a lot of its most helpful features in the cost of its professional plan, but there are some optional Amazon services, including Advertising, that you can use to boost your brand awareness and increase sales. For example, sponsored ads, (aka Amazon PPC) operate on a cost-per-click basis, so you only pay when a customer clicks on the ad. You can choose how much you want to bid per click and how long you want the campaign to run for.

Shopify’s additional costs are mainly optional add-ons and extras, which cover everything from video creation to product reviews and analytics. There are plenty of excellent free apps, but some can cost you hundreds of dollars a year in subscription costs. Of course, it’s perfectly possible to run your Shopify online store using the platform’s in-built features, but if you want to really optimize your operation, the premium option can help you win big in the long run.

Shipping

You have two options for shipping with Amazon: There’s FBA, where Amazon takes care of everything, including packing, posting, and dealing with returns for a fee. Or you can fulfill orders yourself, with shipping rates ranging from around $3.99 for domestic standard, to $46.50 for international. Every time a customer buys a product, you receive a shipping credit from Amazon that matches the shipping rate.

While it doesn’t have its own warehouses or fulfillment centers, Shopify does give you a lot of shipping functionality that’s pre-built into its platform. From your shipping dashboard, you can create shipping options, set rates, track parcels, and even integrate with your carrier’s app. Supported carriers include USPS, UPS, and DHL. You can even buy postage and print shipping labels from Shopify.

Design flexibility

Amazon’s design flexibility is extremely limited compared to Shopify. It does offer a limited range of storefront templates, but these just alter the layout of your products. Once you’ve chosen a template, you’re free to edit text and images on the page and add video, to show off your products, though it will still look like an Amazon page.

Pro tip: Use Amazon EBC in order to customize the look of your listing.

In contrast, Shopify allows you to choose from over 70 templates, and you can customize every element – including the colors, layout, logo, font, and banners – to match your brand image exactly. Like Amazon, you don’t need any knowledge of HTML or CSS to edit your store pages, though some may still find the store-building process unnecessarily time-consuming and complicated.

Marketing

Amazon has a host of advertising and marketing functions and support built-in. You can kick things off with Perfect Launch, a revenue-boosting combo of key programs, including A+ Content, Fulfillment by Amazon, Automated Pricing, and Advertising.

These programs allow you to create sponsored ad campaigns and deals, enhance your product pages, and quickly adjust prices against your competition, with a lot of the hard work taken off your shoulders.

However, you should be aware that only stores enrolled in the Brand Registry can access these features. There are country-specific eligibility requirements, but essentially, you have to have an active registered trademark.

Shopify also has a few decent in-built marketing tools. You can create, track, and manage email marketing campaigns using templates and a drag-and-drop editor, integrate with Google as a sales channel to boost the exposure of your products, and automatically sync your Shopify products to Facebook and Instagram to create ads and shoppable posts. And of course, if you can’t find the function in-built, you can access hundreds of marketing apps through the Shopify app store.

As always, with Shopify, you have to pay for the best apps and you’re responsible for driving website traffic, while Amazon has a ready-made audience to market to.

SEO

When it comes to product search, Amazon is king. While Google dominates for almost every other query on the internet, many shoppers come straight to Amazon if they have a specific product in mind. And as Amazon stores are also indexed by Google, Amazon sellers have the chance to be discovered in multiple SERPs, while Shopify users will have to make do with Google.

But what SEO support do Amazon and Shopify actually offer?

Amazon’s main SEO support comes in the form of A+ Content, a feature that helps you enhance your product listing with rich and detailed information and unique image and text layouts. When used effectively, A+ Content can help to boost conversions, traffic, and sales. Again, you have to be enrolled in the Amazon Brand registry to access this feature.

Shopify doesn’t offer much in-built SEO support – other than some useful guides in the help center – but there are loads of free and paid for SEO tools available in the App store. Yoast SEO ($19 per month) is one of the most well-known and can help optimize your content, upgrade technical SEO, and boost your rankings. Shopify certainly gets points for SEO support options, but it’s unfortunate that you have to pay for the good stuff.

Need more Amazon SEO support? Find out everything you need to know about getting your Amazon SEO right and learn how to use Similarweb’s Shopper Intelligence platform to optimize your search strategy and boost your brand visibility.

Data and insights

Brand-boosting efforts are nothing without the data. Crucial insights help you to build, measure, and improve your marketing efforts on an ongoing basis. So, how can Amazon and Shopify help?

Amazon Brand Analytics gives you access to loads of granular data that you can use for conversion funnel optimization and strategic decision-making. For example, you can use the Amazon Search terms report to see what shoppers are searching to find your and your competitors’ products, and edit your listings to feature these terms. Or you could use the Alternative Purchase Report to see which five products were most frequently purchased instead of yours. Then you can use that information to assess where they’re succeeding and how you can compete.

Shopify also offers excellent analytics on all its premium plans. You can check changes in sales value over time, track average order value, discover where your online store visitors are coming from, and monitor customer behavior to get actionable insights. You can also access all sorts of invaluable reports on everything from finance to inventory and marketing.

For even more store-optimization insights, check out Similarweb’s Shopper Intelligence platform. You can use it to monitor consumer demand, analyze shopper behavior, and optimize your retail search strategies.

Help and support

Unlike many of the other categories we’ve investigated, Shopify is the clear winner when it comes to help and support. With Shopify, you can get help in pretty much any way you want. Phone and live chat are available 24/7, you can email or contact through social media, and there’s a forum, video tutorials, and a help center full of articles if you don’t want to talk to someone directly.

In contrast, it seems Amazon would rather its sellers stick to the help center and forum for support – it’s quite difficult to actually speak to someone directly. The only way to speak to someone directly is to request a callback.

That said, Amazon is definitely the more beginner-friendly platform, so you may have fewer reasons to seek support in the first place.

Which is right for my business: Amazon vs Shopify

In short: Amazon is best for smaller-scale online sellers or resellers who are willing to sacrifice a significant portion of their takings to make use of pre-existing infrastructure and an enormous in-built global market of buyers.

Shopify is best if you’re trying to build a brand or selling your own products, as it gives you infinitely more control over your online store, though there’s a much steeper learning curve, and there could be a long road to success.

That being said, if you do choose Amazon, don’t assume that having access to millions of shoppers and supporting services will guarantee sales success – you still need to put the work in, and there’s a lot of competition.

Whichever you use, you can increase the performance of your online store by using Similarweb’s Shopper Intelligence platform, which can give you insights into everything from customer behavior to category performance and more.

Can I use Amazon and Shopify together?

Can’t decide on Shopify or Amazon? Then why not get the best of both? You can set up a Shopify eCommerce site and then integrate with Amazon for free so that your products are discoverable on both your site and Amazon’s global marketplace. You can use our Amazon Seller tool to get more insights and data directly from the marketplace.

There’s a variety of third-party apps available on the Shopify app store that can automatically sync your inventory across both platforms and will deliver notifications in Shopify for Amazon orders. That way you can have your own fully-branded site and make use of Amazon’s vast base of users.

Further reading

Check out some of our other blogs on top eCommerce marketplaces to learn more:

• Shein vs. Amazon – Is Fast Fashion Dressed for Success?
• Amazon vs. Walmart: The Race to the Top
• AliExpress vs. eBay: The Battle for Global Market Share
• Ulta vs. Sephora: Which is the Best Fit for Your Brand? (+ Top Brands Ranked)
• Furniture Retailer Showdown: Overstock vs. Wayfair vs. Amazon vs. Ikea
• Top Dog Food Marketplaces for Better Sales Paw-tential
• Target vs. Walmart: What Every eTailer Needs to Know

FAQ

What is the difference between Shopify and Amazon?

The key difference between Shopify and Amazon is that Shopify is an eCommerce platform you can use to build your own fully customizable store, while Amazon is a vast online marketplace where you can list and sell products to a pre-existing audience.

Is it cheaper to use Shopify or Amazon?

While Amazon’s individual plan lets you start selling for just 99¢ per item, you can only sell 40 items per month before it makes sense to upgrade. Shopify actually offers the cheapest subscription plan at $29, compared to Amazon’s $39.99, and the fees for selling on Shopify are much lower.

Will I make more money with Shopify or Amazon?

When people ask the question ‘is it better to sell on Amazon or Shopify?’ often what they really want to know is: which will make me more money?

It’s a hard question to answer because, despite their very different but equally effective approaches to supporting online sellers, you still have to put the work into making your online store a success.

If you want to start making sales as quickly as possible, Amazon is probably your best bet, though you may find that your growth is limited by the sheer volume of competition. If you want to forge your own path, and slowly grow brand awareness and sales with fewer restrictions on how you make your sales, then Shopify is the way to go.