Shopify VS Etsy For Print On Demand | Which is The Best Platform?

i have made a whole bunch of versus videos like teespring versus redbubble and i read a whole bunch of them and i thought today i want to make probably one of the most important ones etsy versus shopify i think these two companies share a lot in common and also you know they have their differences so which one should you focus on more and the reason i'm making this video is because i have a shopify and an etsy store and i want to really focus my attention on one of them and build one of them up rather than split it and kind of have them both average does that make sense so i'm going to share with you all of my findings and research in this video and hopefully we'll be able to kind of pick the best one now i know i always tell you to just post on as many platforms as you possibly can and if print on demand is one of your main sources of income and you focus most of your time on print on demand i stand by that statement definitely post on as many platforms as you can but if print on demand is very much a side hustle and not just a side hustle but one of the bottom side hustles that you're doing and you just don't have that much time and you need to really you know laser focus your attention somewhere then you might not have time to put your designs on as many platforms as possible which is where this video comes in shopify or etsy let's find out in this video we're going to be comparing the most important elements of a print on demand website which one will win in all of these categories and by the end hopefully you will be able to decide which platform you want to go for or if you want to just focus on both of the platforms and upload your designs to both of them the first one is free organic traffic and this one was one of the most important comparisons this is kind of like the staple of the entire print on demand business whether or not you're going to be getting free traffic etsy receive a huge amount of traffic every single month over 400 million visitors every single month now we have to remember that etsy doesn't just sell t-shirts it sells a lot of things and nonetheless 400 million visitors a month is still pretty good comparing to shopify which has a whopping zero number of visitors yep with shopify you have got to send your own traffic from social media from advertising from anything really but you have got to send the traffic yourself because with shopify it's your own website it's not like a a store like etsy or redbubble or amazon it's your own store so yeah you're gonna have to send your own traffic this is a massive added cost and added effort because you're no longer just running a print-on-demand store anymore you're now running a social media campaign and advertising and and everything else involved in actually driving customers to come to your website which takes a lot longer now of course this is slightly different if you already have a social media following you already have a website with traffic maybe an email list then it won't be as hard for you to do shopify because you'll be able to send all of that traffic to your shopify website a lot more simple so in terms of traffic etsy definitely get the win here that's one point for etsy just because of the huge amount of organic free traffic that you get being on etsy's platform number two is competition now with etsy you have a hell of a lot of competition unless you're going for some very tiny obscure niche that hasn't been overrun yet at the end of 2019 there was two and a half million etsy users and by the end of 2020 there were over four million etsy users so it's drastically grown in the last year however there's also over 39 million buyers so there's definitely like a lot of people that can buy a product but at the end of the day there's still a lot of competition it's also really important to note that of these 4.3 million sellers not everyone is doing print on demand not everyone is selling t-shirts and hoodies and mugs so you don't have to worry yourself so much if you want to really find out how much competition you're going to be having to handle search for the specific niche on on etsy so for example if we search dog t-shirts there's over 170 000 results there you go that would be your competition right rather than 4.3 million there's 170 000 now of that 170 000 a lot of those t-shirts will be from the same sellers so that's not 170 000 individual sellers that's just 170 000 individual products however that is still a lot of competition and that's why you want to kind of find niches on etsy that haven't been overrun yet now with shopify there's not much to it there is no competition it's your website you don't have anyone else's products on your site you have no other advertising on your site it is literally your website your product someone comes to the website they only see your stuff and it's as simple as that and for that reason shopify very much get the win here just because they have zero competition when it comes to selling your t-shirts number three is customer service this is also a very big one and i would say this one is very similar for both of them because they both have elements of customer service whereas with etsy etsy also have an image and a reputation to uphold so if you're delivering bad customer service with etsy etsy might you know come down on you hard with shopify you are in total control whether or not you want to do customer service or don't want to do customer service now because they're both going to be using the same printing partner which we'll discuss soon you kind of have the same levels of customer service that you can offer in terms of returns and exchanges and all of these other types of things but just the core concept of customer service talking to your customers etsy and printful are pretty much the same so with this category i'm going to give them both a point just because they are very similar number four is full control do you have full control of your platform now with etsy you don't really have full control because firstly you can get shut down and we're going to talk about that a bit later but as well as that you can only do as much as etsy allows you to do whereas with shopify you can do whatever the hell you want now you also have that very very very unique circumstances of getting shut down on shopify as well and again we're going to discuss that in the last category which is the risk factor category but for now it's it's just good to know that you have a lot more control with shopify than you do with etsy because with etsy you are just a print-on-demand seller on someone else's platform there's very little you can add or do with shopify you have your own platform you can add your own apps you can do your own customer service you can do pretty much whatever it is you want and that level of full control is amazing so for this section of full control i'm going to give the win to shopify just because you can make the website look like whatever you want it to look like you can add whatever products you want to add you can create whatever pages you want to create you can create a blog post if you really want you can literally do whatever it is you want whereas with etsy it's a storefront right it's you're very limited to what you can actually do number five is the printing partner now again i'm going to be using the same printing partner for both companies printful right printful for etsy printful for shopify another reason for that is i kind of like printful i think their prices are cheap i think they deliver really quickly and i think they're a pretty decent company now there are obviously drawbacks to using printful for example their returns and exchange policy is absolutely terrible they kind of only return something if there's a problem like a printing error but if something doesn't fit or they don't like the the feel of it there's there's no returns you could still offer returns on your own website and on etsy but you'll have to fork out the money to do that which is kind of annoying so because they're both using the same printing partner they're both very easy to integrate i would say it's kind of the same again just as click of a button to add it to your etsy store or a click of a button to add it to your shopify store so for this category they are both going to get a point again if you haven't already smash that like button please do so for the youtube algorithm it allows these videos to get a lot more views and it means the world to me and it literally takes two seconds and it's free so why not anyways thank you very much if you have smashed that like button let's get cracking on with the video number six is reviews now reviews play a huge part in social proof and actually getting more customers and maybe even repeat customers so with reviews etsy is brilliant at this it's just there it's just easy it's very simple for a customer to leave a review for you and when you get a review it shows up on all of your products right you have store reviews and it says how many sales your store gets and how many reviews you have and no matter what product you add if it's a brand new product or anything it will show at the bottom of that product all of your reviews even if they're not related to that product now some people don't like that because the reviews are confusing and they don't relate to the product but at the end of the day just having good reviews on your site on your etsy store is amazing now with shopify you can add reviews but you're gonna have to get some form of app and the app i like to use is called looks and looks does cost i think it's also 29 a month but i could be wrong off the top of my head um but looks does cost and it's it's annoying if you think about it because you've got the the cost of the membership of shopify and then you're going to have an added cost to get reviews now saying that the app looks is absolutely phenomenal it's a brilliant app it's very easy to get reviews you can have things pop up on your home page saying this person just bought and left a review and it could show up on all products you can send email reminders it's very very very good however based solely on the fact that getting an etsy review doesn't cost you anything it's much easier and and there's less work involved there's less setup involved on your part it's literally just the customer coming and leaving review for that reason etsy is going to take the win for this category it's just it's just so easy you know getting reviews on etsy number seven is scalability and for scalability that basically just means how far can you take it how far can it grow and unfortunately with etsy it's not nearly as scalable as shopify now the reason for this is with etsy every product you add is going to cost you a bit of extra money and as well as that when you add a product it just is another product in your storefront right you can't really add other things like for example with shopify you can add different categories you can add different ranges of products you can go off and add a course you can add digital products you can you can just add whatever it is you want because your website you can add services you can add anything literally anything your mind can think of you can add to your shopify store because it's fully customizable by you whereas with etsy you can kind of only add what the printing partner will allow you to add now you can integrate many different printing partners many different things you can offer digital products physical products that kind of thing but at the end of the day it's all going to show up on your etsy store and you're not going to really be able to make it look like a website and when it's when it doesn't look like a website it's much harder to scale because all your products are just jumbled up whereas with a website like shopify you can have everything really neatly organized another huge thing with shopify is you can create a newsletter and you can send that newsletter out to customers which will convince or not convince but it will it will help customers come back and buy more from you that's not something you can really do on etsy and that is a huge aspect of shopify having you know email lists and having all of these other elements that go into creating a proper brand and a proper company and i think that is the main difference between etsy and shopify with shopify you're kind of building a brand and with etsy you're building a shop it's a bit different so for this one shopify is going to take the win number eight is tracking and tracking is absolutely vital for a business to grow if you're not tracking where your sales are coming from you know what's happening it's going to be very hard for you to grow and scale up now with etsy they have a very detailed tracking statistic page everything it shall just tells you everything you know where the traffic has come from if it's from etsy if it's from your own stuff if it's from facebook uh like wherever whatever social media platform it's very detailed and it also tells you individual product pages their traffic their sales their revenue all of that it is very very good especially for an all-in-one platform well when i say all-in-one it doesn't have a printing partner but but kind of like an all-in-one platform it's very very concise and it's also very easy to use and that's why i like it now with shopify you can add facebook tracking google tracking and quite honestly it's it's limitless the amount of tracking you can get on shopify is is endless it's it's it's crazy because you can track everything you can track car abandonments you can track people who landed on the product page but didn't buy you can create custom audiences for people that went through the checkout process but didn't actually pay so for that reason i am going to give the win to shopify however i just have to say tracking with shopify is more complicated it's harder it takes more time and it takes some time to get used to but at the end of the day i have got to give the win to shopify just because of the potential that it has in terms of tracking number nine is the cost now the cost is a bit of an interesting one because they both have costs believe it or not etsy does cost quite a bit of money every single time you list an item it will cost you 20 cents now you can get 40 free listings with the link in the description but we're not talking about that now every single time you list an item it will cost you 20 cents as well as that you have a 5 transaction fee and on top of that you could have a tax fee depending on the country or the state that your item is being sold in so all in all it can end up racking up to being quite expensive to actually sell a product on etsy and you have got to factor that in to the price and i've actually got a video coming out very soon talking about the perfect amount you should charge the perfect price point to actually make money when you're considering all of these different elements now for shopify it's more of a membership site so the the most basic cost is 29 a month that is the standard right you've got to pay that regardless of you get sales or you don't get sales or even if you don't bother using the site at all you have to pay 29 a month now on top of that you have a 2.2 credit card transaction fee plus 20p so you do have transaction fees as well and the higher tier your your plan is so if you go for the 79 plan or you go for the even higher plan i don't even know how much that is off the top of my head but that transaction fee gets smaller and smaller so i'm just talking about the most basic fee which is 29 a month however with shopify you can add as many products as you want it's unlimited products so you can add 200 products a thousand products ten thousand products it does not make a difference whereas with etsy if you added a thousand products it would cost you two hundred dollars and with print on demand it's very normal to add tons and tons of different products so if you're adding a thousand products a month that's going to be costing you 200 a month so when adding a product to etsy you've really got to consider is this worth it is it worth it me adding this product but another thing to consider with shopify is as soon as you start adding apps then it gets more expensive like a review app or an email app or a cart abandonment notification app all of these different apps they could very very easily and very quickly get up to over 100 maybe even 200 per month for your subscription so that's another important thing to consider now just for this video we're going to assume you're going to start with etsy with just 40 listings right you're just going to start on the basic and you'll either use mylink or someone else's link i don't mind it doesn't make any difference and you'll get those 40 listings for free right and the reason why is because you'll be able to upload 40 designs it won't cost you a penny and then you can start seeing you can start to see if you get any sales from them and that's how we're going to base this and that's why for this category of course we are going to give the win to etsy as well as that the reason i'm giving the win to etsy is because i haven't factored in the cost of actually advertising that you'll need to do for shopify i didn't want to talk about that in this cost element but that's a huge thing to consider which is another reason why the category of cost is going to etsy number 10 is ease of use right how time consuming is it to use one of these platforms now with etsy it's rather straightforward okay everything is there for you once you've integrated printful and by the way i have a full tutorial on how to do that but once you've integrated printful you pretty much just add products and it's very very straightforward now it's not as easy as other platforms like merch amazon redbubble and you know a whole bunch of other platforms but with etsy you have that added benefit of a lot more traffic and well a lot more benefits but we're not comparing other platforms to etsy right now i am just saying etsy is somewhat user-friendly it does have a couple of complications but it's very easy to get used to with shopify on the other hand shopify is a hell of a lot more complicated than etsy you are building an entire website you're building product pages about me pages contact pages you're building everything all of it literally all of it right and yes it's it's templated and yes it's it's it's somewhat simple you're not like coding or doing anything like that but at the end of the day you'll still building a website and that is what's difficult and it's a lot harder building an entire site on shopify than it is adding a couple of products to your etsy shop so for this category etsy 100 take the win number 11 that's a hard thing to do with 10 fingers number 11 is the risk factor and this is a really really important one as well so with etsy you have that ever looming risk of them just shutting you down with no explanation you've done nothing wrong thankfully that hasn't happened to me yet hopefully it won't ever happen to me but you always have that over your head which is scary and stressful and unfortunately you know there's nothing that can really be done about it with shopify you still have that risk of losing your account and i've read a whole bunch of forums and and threads and stuff of people actually losing their account on shopify it's very very rare but you still have that risk now i wouldn't worry so much about it but the major risks you have with shopify is spending a lot of money sending traffic to your store and not getting any sales now that's a risk that quite frankly a lot of people can't do right if you spend money on on actually having this the membership that's 29 a month if you spend money on sending traffic that's however much a month and if you get no sales that's a huge risk and for me that's a much bigger risk than potentially losing the account the best thing about print on demand is that you can get into it with very little money and if you're now telling me you know you need a whole bunch of money to get started a whole bunch of money to send traffic that is a risk a lot of people don't want to take on so even though you're more likely to lose your account on etsy than you are on shopify i'm going to give the win to etsy here just because of the added risk of all of that money wasted and i know personally i'd rather lose an account and then lose a whole bunch of money and that's just me personally and this is a very personal opinion this one but that's why i'm giving the win to etsy here and if you're new here please hit that subscribe button i'm nearly at 50 000 subscribers and it's just it's been a real journey so if you are liking any of my content or you like this video hit that subscribe button and just keep watching so as it stands shopify has six points and etsy has seven points and it's incredibly close i did tell you at the beginning it was going to be close and i think etsy have just edged that win based on the fact that it's cheaper to use it's easier to use and you have the element of organic traffic which can massively massively change the game for someone those are my thoughts on the two platforms so if you're debating between the two of them then i would say go for etsy first and then down the line integrate shopify into your print on demand business now if you want to go for both of them they are both very good platforms as you've seen in this video they both have their strong points so if you have the time and you have the money and you have the capabilities to be able to go for both of them then go for it thank you so much for watching let me know in the comments down below which one you would pick if you only had one choice

Channel: Shimmy Morris

Views: 6,205

Keywords: handmade business, etsy seller, etsy shop tips, promote etsy shop, how to market your business, selling on etsy, etsy success, how to make money on etsy, etsy 2021, how to sell on etsy, etsy sales, how to sell on etsy successfully, etsy seller tips, etsy marketing tips, sell on etsy, etsy vs shopify, etsy vs shopify for artists, etsy vs shopify 2021, etsy offsite ads, shopify review, etsy ads, etsy advertising, etsy for print on demand, shopify for print on demand

Id: e9A37CicAQc

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021