Moving from Etsy to Shopify (or running both)

This is a different kind of migration from the others. Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify swaps one shop for another. Moving from Etsy means leaving a marketplace that brought you customers and opening a shop with no footfall.

That's the whole trade, and it should decide how you sequence it.

What you gain and lose

Gain: your own brand, your customer list, no marketplace fees per order, control over the experience, no competitor products beside yours, and no dependence on a platform's search algorithm.

Lose: the traffic. Etsy's buyers arrive because they're on Etsy. Your Shopify store starts at zero and you now own acquisition.

That's not an argument against moving. It's an argument for not switching off Etsy the day the new store launches.

Run both, at least at first

The sensible sequence for most sellers:

1. Build the Shopify store while Etsy keeps trading.
2. Point your marketing at Shopify — social bios, packaging inserts, email.
3. Build an email list from both channels. This is the asset you're actually acquiring.
4. Watch the split. When Shopify carries a meaningful share, decide whether Etsy still earns its fees.

Plenty of sellers keep both permanently, treating Etsy as a paid acquisition channel with a known cost per order.

What transfers

Products. Etsy's export gives you the basics. Expect to improve it — Etsy listings are written for Etsy's search, and the titles in particular tend to be keyword-stuffed in a way that reads badly on your own site.

Customers. You can access buyer contact details, subject to Etsy's terms and applicable privacy rules. Be careful here: adding past buyers to a marketing list requires consent, and "they bought from me once" generally isn't it. Invite them rather than enrolling them.

Reviews don't transfer. This is the real loss. Etsy reviews are Etsy's, and starting a new store with none is a genuine conversion problem. Plan to collect reviews from day one with a post-purchase request — email marketing setup.

Rewrite the listings

The highest-return work in this migration.

Etsy titles are optimised for Etsy's internal search — long, comma-separated, keyword-heavy. On your own site they read as spam and they don't help you in Google.

Rewrite for a human: what it is, who it's for, what makes it different. Then set proper handles, SEO titles and meta descriptions, and put materials, dimensions and care into typed metafields — product page SEO.

Redirects don't apply

One relief: your Etsy listing URLs stay on Etsy. There's no redirect map, no ranking transfer to protect. That's the main technical work of every other migration and here it simply doesn't exist.

The flip side is that you also inherit no rankings. Your Shopify store is a new site to search engines.

Set the store up properly

Nothing exotic — follow the standard build, with attention to:

• Catalogue structure. Etsy has no real hierarchy; you need one.
• Shipping, which you now own entirely rather than inheriting marketplace defaults.
• Policy pages — Etsy provided a framework; now you write them.
• Reviews collection from the first order.

The cost comparison

Run the numbers before deciding, because they surprise people in both directions.

Etsy: listing fees, transaction fees, payment processing, plus advertising if you use it.

Shopify: monthly plan, payment processing, apps, and — the big one — acquisition. Marketplace fees are expensive per order and cheap compared with buying traffic from scratch.

What a store really costs to run covers the Shopify side.

Consider feeds

If you keep both, or add other channels, product feeds let one catalogue serve several places. Google Shopping in particular is worth setting up early — product feeds.

Leaving Etsy isn't a technical migration, it's an acquisition problem. Build the store, keep Etsy running, and switch it off when your own traffic has replaced it — not before.