Should you sell on Etsy or Amazon, or open your own online store?

Etsy and Amazon hand you shoppers from day one, and in exchange they take fees from every sale, set the rules, and keep the customer relationship. Your own online store has no marketplace fees and is fully yours, but nobody visits it until you give them a reason to. For most new sellers this is not a forever choice. Start where the shoppers already are, and set up your own store as the home base you point everything toward.

Quick answer

• Marketplaces like Etsy and Amazon come with buyers already searching, so you can make your first sale without an audience of your own.
• In return, they charge fees on every sale, control how your shop looks, and can change the rules at any time.
• Your own online store skips the marketplace fees and keeps the customer relationship, but you have to bring your own visitors.
• Most sellers who last end up with both: the marketplace for reach, their own website as home base.
• An AI website builder can set up your own store from a plain description of what you sell, no code needed.

What is the real difference between a marketplace and your own store?

Selling on a marketplace is like renting a stall in someone else's market. The market brings the crowd, handles the cash register, and takes a cut of everything you sell. It also decides where your stall sits, what it can look like, and what the house rules are.

Your own online store is your own shop on your own street. Everything about it is yours: the name on the door, the layout, the story you tell, and the customer who walks out happy. The catch is the street. Nobody is walking past until you tell people the shop exists.

There is one more quiet difference. On a marketplace, the checkout, the payment, and the order messages all run through the marketplace. Buyers say "I found it on Etsy," not your shop's name. On your own website, the sale and the relationship belong to you.

What do Etsy and Amazon charge when you sell?

The fees are not hidden, but new sellers rarely add them up before opening a shop.

On Etsy, listing an item costs $0.20 and the listing stays up for four months or until it sells, and when it sells you pay a 6.5 percent transaction fee plus a payment processing fee of 3 percent plus $0.25 (Etsy, 2026). If a sale comes from an ad Etsy ran for your item on another website, that sale carries a 15 percent advertising fee on top (Etsy, 2026).

On Amazon, you pay $0.99 for each item sold on the Individual plan, or $39.99 per month on the monthly subscription plan for bigger sellers (Amazon, 2026). On top of the plan, every sale carries a referral fee, which is a percentage of the price that depends on the product category.

Fees like these change, so check each marketplace's current fee page before you decide. The point is not that the fees are unfair. The marketplace is doing real work for that money. The point is that the meter runs on every single sale, forever, and it grows exactly as fast as your shop does.

Your own store is not free of costs either, and it is worth being honest about that. The payment company that runs your checkout takes a small cut of each sale, which our guide on taking payments on your website breaks down, and a domain name and hosting have their own small costs. But there is no marketplace fee on top, and no rent that rises with your success.

What does a marketplace do well for a new seller?

To be fair to the marketplaces, they solve the hardest problem a brand-new seller has: nobody knows you exist.

Etsy and Amazon are where shoppers already go with money in hand. Buyers there have accounts, saved payment details, and trust in the checkout, so a stranger will buy from a shop that opened last week. That is genuinely hard to get anywhere else on day one.

A marketplace is also a fast, low-risk way to test an idea. You can list a few items, see if anyone actually buys, and learn what people search for and what they say in reviews, all before you commit to building anything bigger. Many sellers find their real bestseller this way, and it is often not the item they expected.

What are the downsides of selling only on a marketplace?

The same things that make a marketplace easy also put a ceiling on it.

Your shop looks like everyone's shop. Marketplace listings follow the marketplace's template, and your item appears in a grid next to rows of similar items, sorted by the marketplace's search. Shoppers compare on photo and price, and the shop behind the item mostly disappears. It is the generic problem in a different form: the platform's look wins, and yours never gets a chance.

The rules are not yours. Fees, search placement, and policies can change whenever the marketplace decides, and your shop lives under those decisions. Sellers who built everything on one platform feel every change directly.

The customers are not really yours. The marketplace handles the checkout and the messages, so when a buyer wants the same gift next year, they search the marketplace again, and this time your competitor might be one row higher. Without a home base of your own, you start from zero with every sale.

What can your own online store do that a marketplace cannot?

Your own store fixes each of those ceilings, at the price of doing your own marketing.

It carries your name at its own address, which our guide on choosing a domain name can help you pick. The whole page is about your products and your story, with no competitor one scroll away. You choose what goes on a product page and how it looks, and our guide on what a product page needs shows the parts that matter.

You also keep the relationship. Buyers on your website can join your email list, and you can tell them about new items yourself instead of hoping they search the marketplace again. And your store can show up on Google when people search for what you make. That takes time for a new website, and our guide on getting a new website to show up on Google explains how it really works.

The honest trade-off: none of this brings visitors by itself. A marketplace rents you a crowd. Your own store asks you to gather one, order by order.

Do you have to pick just one?

No, and most sellers who last do not. The pattern that works looks like this:

1. Start where the shoppers are. Open the marketplace shop, make the first sales, and learn which items people actually want.
2. Set up your own store as home base. Same shop name, same products, at your own address.
3. Point everything home. Your packaging, your receipts, your social media profiles, and your thank-you notes all carry your website address, so a happy buyer knows where to come back to.

Over time the balance shifts on its own. New strangers still find you through the marketplace, and the people who already love what you make come straight to you.

How do you get your own store online without tech skills?

This used to be the hard part, and it is the reason many sellers stayed marketplace-only for years. It is not the hard part anymore. An AI website builder can put together a working online store from a plain description: what you sell, who it is for, and how you want to come across. Our guide on setting up an online store for the first time walks through the pieces, from products to checkout to shipping.

One warning applies. If you feed the builder one thin line like "make me a store," you get the same generic result as everyone else who typed a thin line, which defeats the whole reason to leave the marketplace grid. Feed it the real details: your actual products, the people who buy them, and what makes your work yours. That is the difference between a store that could be anyone's and a store that could only be yours.

Where should you start?

If you have zero sales so far, list on the marketplace this week and let it teach you what sells. If the marketplace is already working for you, the fees on every sale are the signal that it is time to open your home base. Either way, the destination is the same: a shop with your name on it, at your own address, that no platform can change out from under you. When you are ready to set it up, start with a store built around what you sell.