Shopify vs Amazon (2023) — Which is Better for Your Online Store?

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Shopify vs Amazon — which is better for online sellers? In this detailed comparison we walk you through the key features, pros and cons and pricing of these two leading ecommerce platforms in depth — and help you decide which one is right for your business.

There are two ways to use this resource — you can watch our Shopify vs Amazon video below, or alternatively read the whole article (which contains a more detailed comparison). For the best overview of these ecommerce platforms and the differences between them, we recommend doing both.

Let’s kick things off with a look at the main difference between the two platforms.

Shopify and Amazon: the main difference

Shopify and Amazon are absolute giants of the ecommerce world. But although both services let you put your products in front of a huge audience, they are very different platforms.

Shopify is a tool that lets you build your own online store.

By contrast, Amazon IS an online store (and a HUGE one at that: last year, US-based Amazon sellers sold 3.8 billion products, which equates to 7,400 per minute!).

When you sell on Shopify, it’s the online equivalent of renting a space in which to set up your own shop.

And lots of merchants like doing this – Internet stats company Builtwith estimates that around 4.12+ million sites are currently powered by Shopify.

But working with Amazon is more like selling your goods in a massive supermarket.

With Shopify, you’ll have more work to do to configure things the way you want — and find customers.

However, you’ll have total control over everything — because Shopify lets you build your own website, you can decide:

With Amazon, the customer base is already there…but so is the competition.

To continue the supermarket analogy, having a storefront on Amazon is like having some shelf space in the supermarket aisle. Lots of people will walk past it, but will they reach out for one of your products — or choose one from the shelf above?

Both these ways of selling have their pros and cons — I discuss these in depth later on in this comparison.

But first: how easy are both platforms to use?

Ease-of-use

Amazon and Shopify are both designed to be fairly easy for ecommerce beginners to get going with.

When you sign up for an account on either platform, an onboarding setup process is provided that walks you through the key steps needed to start selling.

Additionally, a range of online resources and video tutorials is available to further support you.

However, the learning curves — while not especially steep — are quite different for both platforms.

With Amazon, you basically need to learn how to use a database — “Amazon Seller Central” — in the most effective way possible.

So, the key challenge new Amazon merchants face involves ensuring requirements about product name, details and catalogue numbers are met. There can be quite a lot of form-filling involved in setting up product listings on Amazon.

And there are quite a few hoops to go through to actually get an Amazon seller account in the first place.

In order to get started, you’ll need:

With Shopify, you are building a new website. Adding products to your store is a simpler affair — creating them takes seconds, and you can enter as much or as little information about them as you like.

And all you need to get started with Shopify — initially at least — is an email address and basic contact details. You just enter these when starting a free trial.

However, with Shopify, you will have to become comfortable with web design tasks like:

Although the platform has been designed to facilitate this in as easy a way as possible, if you’re totally new to web design, there is still quite a bit to learn.

(Our new guide to building a Shopify store can help here).

Now, let’s take a look at branding and user experience.

Control over branding and user experience

When you sell on Amazon, you are fairly limited in terms of how you can present your business.

Although a few customizations are possible (you can add your business logo, for example), in general your storefront is going to look very ‘Amazony’ and you won’t be able to create much of a bespoke shopping experience using the platform.

Now in many ways, this is a good thing, because Amazon users expect a certain type of experience — and deviating too far from this wouldn’t necessarily be good for sales.

Shopify, by contrast, gives you a lot of control over your brand and user experience. A wide range of templates is available (137 at time of writing) and these can be tweaked to match your branding.

You can browse all these Shopify templates here.

And, if you have the relevant technical skills to do so, you can adjust your store’s HTML and CSS code to further customize its layout and the user experience you provide.

Multi-currency and multilingual features in Shopify allow you to further customize the user experience — so the bottom line is that if you’re after a very bespoke shopping experience tailored to a particular buyer persona, market or location, Shopify offers this in a way that Amazon doesn’t.

Shipping and dropshipping

A particularly important area to zoom in on in the Amazon vs Shopify debate is shipping.

Shipping products with Amazon

With Amazon, you basically have 2 ways to ship products. You can either:

Amazon FBA can be a brilliant option for some businesses, because it offers product storage to merchants and opens up super-fast ‘Prime’ delivery to shoppers (this is a delivery method that many consumers love).

It does, however, bring with it some additional fees.

Shipping products with Shopify

If you want to ship your own goods with Shopify, you can set your own shipping rates based on product weight, price, quantity and more — a very flexible range of options is available to you.

If you don’t want to fulfil your products yourself, you can connect your Shopify store to a third-party fulfilment service (including FBA — more on this shortly).

Alternatively, you can consider dropshipping.

And speaking of which…

Dropshipping with Amazon and Shopify

Dropshipping is a way of selling goods where you don’t make, store or fulfil any products. You simply take an order via your online store, send it to a supplier, and they deliver the goods to your client. Your ecommerce site becomes, in effect, a middle man of sorts.

Although you can technically dropship with either Amazon or Shopify, Shopify is a much better solution for this type of online selling — and in many ways has been designed with it in mind.

With Shopify, you can connect your store to a very large number of dropshipping apps and suppliers (at time of writing, 451 in total); and there’s no sizeable investment involved with this.

You can, in fact, use Amazon’s FBA service to fulfil items sold via Shopify — you’ll need to use a paid-for third-party integration to do so (see screenshot below).

While dropshipping with Shopify is extremely straightforward, this is not the case with Amazon. You can dropship using Amazon to a certain extent, but some key limitations and additional costs apply:

So all in all, Shopify generally works out as a better dropshipping solution than Amazon — especially if you’re aiming to dropship a high volume of goods.

Attracting customers to your store

There’s no doubt about it: if you’re looking for a ready-made customer base, Amazon is the clear winner in a Shopify vs Amazon shootout.

Because of its 300+ million user accounts in over 180 countries, its 2.73 billion monthly visits and its multi-billion dollar revenue ($514 billion net sales in 2022), having a storefront on Amazon technically gives you a shop window to the world.

This is the major benefit of using the platform over a store builder like Shopify.

That’s not to say that you will immediately experience a rush of customers the moment you start selling on Amazon — but your products will be immediately available on a hugely popular platform that generates enormous amounts of revenue.

And, so long as you’ve identified a niche correctly and put work into creating quality product descriptions and a strong pricing strategy, you do stand a pretty good chance of generating sales.

Amazon’s algorithmic “customers also viewed” and “customers also bought” recommendations can also help boost views of your products — and if you start generating a number of sales, these automated recommendations can really help scale up your business.

(Marketing exercises like ‘Amazon Prime Day’ and Black Friday promotions can also help drive existing Amazon customers your way too.)

When you set up a Shopify store, you are basically starting from scratch — and because of this you’ll need to put a lot of effort into SEO, content marketing, online advertising and online PR in order for your store to start gaining visibility and customers. This can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavour.

On the plus side, if you succeed in it, you will have a powerful online asset that you control fully. Amazon can change its terms of business or its recommendation algorithms any time it likes, which can — in extreme cases — sink a successful business.

Although operating a Shopify store is not without risks either (the impact of Google core updates on your store’s performance in search results is probably the thing you have to worry about the most), there is a lot to be said for the relative independence, control and stability that running your own ecommerce site provides.

But overall, because of its ready-made customer base that you can tap into, Amazon definitely wins the ‘ease-of-attracting-customers’ battle.

Local selling and point of sale

The COVID-19 pandemic made ecommerce a sudden necessity for millions of ‘physical’ businesses that were forced to close their premises during lockdowns.

Many of them turned to Shopify, and for good reason — the platform offers a really wide range of ways to sell online, facilitate Covid-safe pickup and offer local delivery services.

Additionally, because Shopify is a customizable solution that lets you create your own store — rather than just display a product catalogue — local businesses can use it to create online presences that really encapsulate the essence of their physical store.

As discussed earlier, you can use Shopify to create a presence that is entirely consistent with your existing brand; and, by running a site on your own domain, you can take advantage of local SEO techniques that can raise visibility of your business in your area too.

Amazon doesn’t really offer you a similar way to cater specifically to a local audience; it’s more about getting goods to as many people as you can, as quickly as you can.

This of course can be a very good thing, but if your business has a particular local focus, then Shopify is usually the better bet.

Additionally, thanks to its extensive point-of-sale (POS) features, Shopify can also be used to process payments in physical locations too.

This lets retailers use one system to manage all their offline and online sales, and keep inventory synced — no matter where a sale has taken place.

Although various workarounds and integrations are available for Amazon that let you sell at point of sale, Shopify’s POS features are currently considerably more extensive and much more ‘baked in’ to the platform.

(You can learn more about Shopify’s point-of-sale features here.)

That said, Amazon is working on a new POS system (currently labeled ‘Project Santos’) which aims to take on the likes of Shopify, Square and PayPal — so the current edge Shopify has over Amazon when it comes to Point of Sale may, in time, change.

Project Santos also looks like it might lead to the development of an online store builder that will compete with Shopify in lots of other ways too — so Shopify vs Amazon debate may soon get a lot more interesting, and heated.

According to the online payments resource Pymnts.com,

So, it will be very interesting to see how Project Santos develops — but for now, Shopify still whens when it comes to POS.

SEO — a tale of two search engines?

A crucial part of success on either Shopify or Amazon boils down to your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts — and setting up a storefront on either platform means familiarizing yourself with how different search engines work.

With a Shopify store, the main search engine you’ll need to worry about is Google — when you run your own store on your own domain, it’s the main search engine that will be presenting your products to the world (others like Bing and Duck Duck Go will also do so, but Google currently gobbles up 93% of all search engine queries).

When you sell on Amazon, you’ve got to primarily focus on a different search engine — Amazon’s own one (this is often referred to as the “A9” or “A10” algorithm, depending on which blog you read!).

Amazon’s search engine is in fact, the second-biggest in the world, used for 50% of all product searches.

According to Moz (a key provider of SEO tools and data), it helps to think of the differences between the two search engines as follows:

So, to get the most out of your Shopify or Amazon store, you will need to conduct quality research into the best search engine optimization techniques for both. I’d recommend checking out the Style Factory Shopify SEO guide as a starting point for Shopify, and Moz’s guide to Amazon vs Google SEO for Amazon.

(You’ll also need keyword research tools to find out what sort of search terms you’ll realistically be able to rank for: try apps like Ahrefs and Semrush for use with Google, or Sellzone for Amazon).

One thing to remember about Amazon stores is that — unlike Shopify’s — they present two SEO opportunities.

Not only can you optimize your storefront for Amazon’s search engine, but — because your Amazon store is indexable by other search engines — Google too.

This means that technically, an Amazon store presents you with more opportunities to get your products in front of a ‘search audience’ than a Shopify one.

Customer support

Customer support for Amazon is available — but it’s not something that the company really shouts about.

Support is not listed as a key feature of plans on the Amazon Sellers’ website, and contact details for Amazon’s support team are not particularly prominent on any of the company’s online material for merchants.

You are mainly encouraged by Amazon to use the resources provided — help pages, community forums and video tutorials — to solve your own problems.

That said, you can request a callback from Amazon by logging into your account and locating a ‘contact us’ section.

By contrast, support is a key feature of all Shopify plans and it’s easy to find contact details for Shopify’s support team.

Live chat, email and phone support are available for the platform, as are support web pages in 21 different languages.

Ethics of Shopify vs Amazon

Something you don’t often see in Shopify vs Amazon comparisons is a discussion on ethics.

But Amazon’s approach to paying its fair share of tax and treating its workers fairly has raised a lot of question marks over the years.

So, depending on your political outlook, dealing with this ethical dimension may raise dilemmas for you.

On the one hand, if you’re running an online business, it’s extremely hard to ignore Amazon as a sales channel — it is now the main way of purchasing goods for millions of consumers. By not offering your goods on the platform, you will be cutting yourself off from a huge customer base and the world’s second most popular search engine.

But by listing your products on Amazon, you are effectively buying into the company’s ethos and helping them to make money — and from a moral standpoint, you will need to be comfortable with doing that.

So if you do have sensitivities around this area, and want to take a more ethical approach to doing business, then setting up a Shopify store may be a good way to do so.

(Interestingly, in recent years Shopify has been actively positioning itself as something of a ‘good shop to Amazon’s bad shop‘ — whether or not this is entirely accurate depends on how its customers use the platform, but there’s no doubting that Shopify does at least give you the option to sell online in a way that more closely matches your values and moral approach to conducting business.)

Pricing

We’ve discussed how Shopify and Amazon work, and their respective ecommerce features — now it’s time to look at how much they cost to sell with.

Shopify costs

Shopify offers five monthly pricing plans:

A free trial is also available; it last for three days and you can access it via this link. If you choose to purchase a Shopify subscription when your trial ends, you will only be charged $1 per month for the first 3 months (note, however that this offer is not widely available — you’ll need to use the below button to access it).

All these plans give you access to core ecommerce functionality (including unlimited digital and physical product catalogues, credit cart processing, gift cards, abandoned cart recovery, discount codes and an SSL certificate) — but there are some key differences to watch out for between Shopify plans.

These are as follows:

Amazon costs

To sell online with Amazon, you need to set up a ‘seller account.’ This comes in two flavours:

(These are US prices; pricing elsewhere varies a bit by territory, but the plan types are consistent).

In terms of the key differences between these payment options,

On top of the costs associated with the plans highlighted above, Amazon takes a referral fee on every sale. These vary significantly according to the type of product you’re selling — but most selling fees are between 8% and 15%.

Now, because of the quite different nature of the Shopify and Amazon platforms, it’s hard to say which pricing structure is the ‘best value.’

However, if you are thinking of using Shopify, then I normally recommend the ‘Shopify’ plan as the ‘sweet spot’ option; and if you want to go down the Amazon route, the ‘Professional’ plan is really the only one that power users or professional merchants should consider.

Finally, if you are hoping to avoid referral fees altogether, the better option is Shopify.

Using Shopify and Amazon together

Although this comparison has so far looked at the differences between Shopify and Amazon, it’s really important to understand that you don’t have to use them in a mutually exclusive way.

You can actually integrate Shopify pretty tightly with Amazon via third party apps, for example ‘Amazon by Codisto’ and ‘CedCommerce Amazon Channel.’

These apps let you:

You will need to pay for these sorts of apps (for the examples given, plans cost $15 to $249 per month, with some more expensive ‘Enterprise’ plans also available), but these apps do give you the best of both worlds — a brand and website of your own via Shopify, and access to the huge Amazon marketplace too.

The video below highlights some of the features of the ‘Codisto’ integration.

Ultimately, by having a presence on both Shopify AND Amazon, you’re giving yourself the most ways to grow your ecommerce business.

Shopify vs Amazon: the verdict

At Style Factory, when we compare two different ecommerce platforms, we usually find ourselves declaring a ‘winner.’

However, because Shopify and Amazon are quite different beasts, in this case it’s probably more useful to highlight the contexts where it might make more sense for you to use one over the other.

So, below you’ll find a summary of our main reasons for using Shopify or Amazon. And if you have any feedback on this post, or thoughts of your own regarding Shopify vs Amazon, do leave a comment below! We read all contributions and will do our best to answer any questions you may have.

Pros and cons of Shopify vs Amazon

Alternatives to Shopify and Amazon

When it comes to alternatives to Shopify, there’s no shortage of ecommerce platforms available that claim to offer similar functionality.

Of these alternatives, we generally recommend BigCommerce as the most obvious competing hosted store builder; it’s similarly priced and offers a broadly comparable feature set. You can check out our BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison review here or read our full BigCommerce review here.

Other competing hosted solutions include Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy and Big Cartel. Check out our Squarespace vs Shopify, Wix vs Shopify, Shopify vs GoDaddy or Big Cartel vs Shopify comparisons to see how all these products stack up against Shopify.

(You might also find our Squarespace pricing guide and Squarespace free trial guide helpful).

A lot of professional merchants also use WordPress as their ecommerce solution (in conjunction with a third-party plugin like WooCommerce or Ecwid). Using this platform generally requires more configuration than Shopify or Amazon, but you can ultimately put a great ecommerce solution together with WordPress (and one that can work particularly well from an SEO point of view).

Check out our video below for more information on how WordPress stacks up against Shopify (our Woocommerce vs Shopify and Wix versus WordPress comparisons may also be of interest).

As for Amazon, its online marketplace is fairly unique in its scale, and new businesses will be hard pressed to find a similar space where they can reach quite so many customers.

That said, there are quite a few other online marketplaces that might work well for your niche — Etsy and eBay are two obvious ones. (Our Shopify vs Etsy comparison and our Shopify vs eBay comparison will be of relevance here.)

You might also like to investigate more ethical alternatives to Amazon like EarthHero — more of these are appearing all the time.