Shopify vs Etsy for digital downloads

If you sell digital downloads, Etsy and Shopify are the two names that come up first, and they are not really the same kind of product. Etsy rents you a crowd: a marketplace with its own search, where you pay per listing and per sale. Shopify rents you a shop: a store builder with a monthly plan, where every visitor is one you brought. Everything else in this comparison follows from that one difference.

All platform fees and rules below were checked on 26 September 2026 on Etsy's and Shopify's own pages. Fees change, and some depend on your country, so check the current numbers before you commit.

The short answer

• Pick Etsy if you do not have an audience yet and want to be found by people already searching for printables, planners and templates. You pay for that search with fees on every sale.
• Pick Shopify if you already bring your own traffic (a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a large social following) and want the store, the customer list and the brand to be yours. You pay a monthly plan whether you sell or not.
• Add a digital-only marketplace if most of what you sell is files and you want a shelf without a listing fee or a monthly plan. That is where Getly fits, and we explain the limits of that honestly below.

What Etsy charges for a digital sale

Etsy's fee policy lists several charges. The ones that apply to almost every digital seller:

• Listing fee: $0.20 per listing. A listing lasts four months. If auto-renew is on, it renews for another $0.20 when it expires, and you pay the listing fee whether or not the item sells.
• Transaction fee: 6.5% of the item price (plus shipping and gift wrap, which a download does not have).
• Payment processing: charged on every Etsy Payments sale and set by the country of your bank account. Etsy's selling page shows 3% + $0.25.
• Offsite Ads: 15% of an order that came from an Etsy ad shown on another site within 30 days of the click. Once a shop has made $10,000 in the previous 365 days, the rate becomes 12% and taking part becomes mandatory. The fee is capped at $100 per order.
• Currency conversion: 2.5% if you list in a currency other than your payment account's.

For a $10 download from a shop whose bank uses the rate shown on the selling page, that works out to $0.20 + $0.65 + $0.55 = $1.40 in fees, leaving $8.60. If the same sale came through an Offsite Ad, add $1.50 and you keep $7.10. On a $3 printable the fixed parts weigh much more: $0.20 + $0.20 + $0.34 = $0.74, about a quarter of the price.

What Shopify charges

Shopify's model is the opposite: a fixed monthly plan (Basic, Grow, Advanced, or Plus for large businesses), cheaper when billed yearly, plus a card processing rate that falls on higher plans. Shopify shows plan prices and card rates in your local currency, and they differ by country, so we do not quote a single dollar figure here. Open the pricing page from your own country before comparing.

One number is the same everywhere: if you use a third-party payment provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of the provider's. On 26 September 2026 that was 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus.

The arithmetic that matters with Shopify is the monthly plan divided by the number of sales you make. At a handful of sales a month, the plan dominates everything. At a few hundred, it almost disappears, and the card rate is what you feel.

How each one handles the file itself

Question	Etsy	Shopify
Files per product	Up to 5 per listing	Files attached to products through the free Digital Products app
File size	Limited per file (check Etsy Help for the current cap)	Up to 5 GB per file
Variations (for example, A4 vs Letter)	Not available on digital listings	Yes, as product variants
Download limits	Buyer downloads right after purchase	Unlimited by default, can be limited per variant
Tags and titles	Up to 13 tags, titles up to 140 characters	Your own store SEO
Who brings buyers	Etsy search, plus you	Only you

Two rows cause the most trouble. The five-file limit pushes Etsy sellers of large bundles into ZIP archives or several listings. And the lack of variations on digital listings means a planner sold in A4 and US Letter either ships both sizes in one listing or becomes two listings, each paying its own $0.20.

Etsy also has rules about what can be listed at all. Its listing guide asks sellers to check that items fit Etsy's handmade, vintage or craft supply categories, and it forbids completing an Etsy sale outside Etsy. Shopify leaves those choices to you, within its own terms.

Taxes, for the seller outside the US

For digital downloads, Etsy says it collects and pays VAT itself in countries whose laws require the marketplace to do it, and it collects US sales tax in almost every state. On your own Shopify store the tax setup is your job. For a single creator selling to buyers in many countries, that difference can be worth more than any fee.

Where Getly fits, and where it does not

Getly is a marketplace for digital products only, so it sits closer to Etsy than to Shopify: buyers browse a shared catalogue, which held 7,198 active listings when we measured it on 26 September 2026. The differences are in the fees and the files:

• No listing fee and no monthly plan. The seller keeps 80% of a sale by default, 83%, 85% or 88% at higher monthly volume, and 90% of sales that come through the seller's own link. On a $10 download that is $8.00 by default. Current rates are on the pricing page.
• Files up to 2 GB. On 26 September 2026, 2.68% of active Getly listings delivered more than five files, which is the kind of product that has to be repacked for Etsy.
• Payment. Buyers pay by PayPal or cryptocurrency; card payments are paused at the moment, which is a real limit for buyers who only use a card. Sellers are paid on the 1st and the 15th in USDT or USDC on BNB Smart Chain (from $5) or USDT on Tron (from $15).

What Getly does not give you is Shopify's control over a whole branded store, or the size of Etsy's buyer base. It is a second shelf for files, not a replacement for either.

Choosing in five minutes

1. Write down how many sales you made last month and your average price.
2. For Etsy, multiply your sales by $0.20 plus 6.5% plus your country's processing fee, and add $0.20 for every listing you keep live.
3. For Shopify, take the plan price shown for your country and divide it by your monthly sales, then add the card rate.
4. Ask where last month's buyers came from. If most came from your own channels, Shopify's fixed cost is buying you ownership. If most came from marketplace search, Etsy's fees are buying you traffic.
5. If your files are large, sold in several sizes or bundled, check the file rules above before you check the fees.

If you already sell on one of them and your best product is a pure download, the lowest-risk experiment is to list that one file on Getly as well and compare after a month.