Amazon vs Shopify: Should You Sell on Amazon, Shopify or Both?

Key Takeaways

• Amazon is a marketplace where you rent space beside other sellers; Shopify is the platform for your own store, where you control the brand, the customer relationship and the data.
• Amazon UK charges £25 a month excluding VAT on the Professional plan, or 75p per item on the Individual plan, plus referral fees that are mostly 8% to 15%.
• On a £40 sale, a 15% Amazon referral fee is £6.00 and Shopify Basic's card fee is £1.05, but Shopify merchants pay to bring in their own traffic.
• Amazon's communication rules ban marketing messages to its buyers, so an Amazon sale does not add a buyer to your email list the way a Shopify sale can.
• Shopify Marketplace Connect syncs listings, stock and orders with Amazon, and UK stores can use Amazon's app to fulfil Shopify orders from Amazon stock.
• 45% of Why Matters clients sell on both Amazon and Shopify, which is why this guide treats the choice as a question of roles rather than one platform or the other.

Quick Answer

Sell on Amazon if your priority is reaching shoppers who already search there and your margin can absorb referral, fulfilment and advertising costs. Build on Shopify if your growth depends on your brand, repeat purchases, email, subscriptions and search traffic you own. For most established UK brands the answer is both: run Shopify as the hub for your catalogue, stock, customers and brand, and connect Amazon as an extra sales channel through Shopify Marketplace Connect, so Amazon adds demand without owning your business.

Table of Contents

• What Is the Difference Between Amazon and Shopify?
• Amazon vs Shopify at a Glance
• How Much Does It Cost to Sell on Amazon vs Shopify in the UK?
• Who Owns the Customer?
• Traffic, Search and Advertising
• Branding and Customer Experience
• What Are Your Fulfilment Options?
• What Are the Risks of Relying on Amazon?
• How to Sell on Amazon From Your Shopify Store
• Should You Sell on Amazon, Shopify or Both?
• What About Etsy?
• Why Matters Perspective
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Final Thoughts
• Related Articles

What Is the Difference Between Amazon and Shopify?

Amazon is rented space in someone else's marketplace; Shopify is your own store. On Amazon your listing sits among competing products, other sellers' offers and sponsored ads, and the shopper has an Amazon experience from search to checkout (Amazon). On Shopify, the shopper visits a store your business runs, and you control the domain, theme, product pages, offers, checkout branding, email capture and subscription options.

That difference cuts both ways. A shopper searching Amazon for organic dog treats is already in a buying environment, so your job is to win the choice against the products beside yours. A new Shopify store brings no audience of its own, so you create demand through Google, paid social, email, content, PR and AI shopping channels, but you keep far more of the value once customers arrive. Put simply, Amazon helps you sell products, while Shopify helps you build an ecommerce asset.

Amazon vs Shopify at a Glance

How Much Does It Cost to Sell on Amazon vs Shopify in the UK?

Monthly plan prices tell you very little on their own. A fair comparison adds up plan fees, fees on each sale, payment processing, fulfilment, storage, advertising, apps and the cost of winning the customer.

Amazon UK Seller Fees

Amazon UK has two selling plans: Individual at 75p per item sold, or Professional at £25 a month excluding VAT, however many units you sell (Amazon). On either plan Amazon also takes a referral fee on each sale, a percentage set by product category; Amazon says most sit between 8% and 15%, and some categories use tiered rates, so check your own category. Fulfilment, storage, advertising and optional services come on top.

Shopify UK Costs

Shopify Basic costs £19 a month billed yearly or £25 billed monthly, and Shopify Payments charges online card payments on Basic from 2% plus 25p (Shopify). Higher plans cost more each month but lower the card rate, while apps, themes and marketing are extra on every plan.

A £40 Order on Each Platform

Take a £40 sale in a category with a 15% referral fee. Amazon's referral fee is £6.00 (£40 × 15%). The same £40 card payment on Shopify Basic costs £1.05, because 2% of £40 is 80p and the fixed charge adds 25p.

That does not make Shopify £4.95 cheaper per order. Amazon's fee buys access to shoppers who are already searching, while a Shopify merchant usually pays for traffic through Google Ads, Meta ads, SEO, content or influencers. The useful question is what each channel costs you to win and fulfil a profitable order, worked out product by product.

Fulfilment and Advertising Costs

With Fulfilment by Amazon, Amazon stores, picks, packs and ships your stock and handles parts of customer service, but it charges fulfilment fees based on size and weight, with storage charged separately (Amazon FBA). Many sellers also need ads to be seen, so the referral fee is rarely the whole cost of an Amazon sale. Amazon's pricing page includes a calculator that estimates fees for individual products, which is the right level for comparing margins.

Who Owns the Customer?

This is the biggest strategic difference. When someone buys from your Shopify store and gives marketing consent, you can build a relationship through email, post purchase flows, loyalty, customer accounts, subscriptions and win back campaigns. For many brands that matters more than the first order, because profit depends on customers coming back.

On Amazon, Amazon controls the relationship. Its UK communication guidelines limit messages to those needed to complete an order or answer a customer service query, plus a few set reasons such as requesting a review, and they rule out marketing or promotional messages, including vouchers, as well as email addresses or phone numbers unless legally required (Amazon). Breaking them can restrict you to Amazon's message templates or suspend your selling privileges.

Picture two brands that each win 1,000 new customers. One can send replenishment reminders, product education and cross sells through its email flows; the other depends on shoppers finding it on Amazon again. Even with identical first orders, their long term economics look very different, which is why Amazon works best as an acquisition channel rather than the whole strategy. Our guide to getting Shopify repeat customers covers the retention side.

What About Subscriptions?

Amazon does offer Subscribe & Save for eligible FBA products, but it runs the programme on its own terms and keeps the subscriber relationship. On Shopify you design the offer yourself: a coffee brand might sell 1kg of espresso beans at £24 as a one time purchase or £21.60 on subscription (10% off), with delivery every two, four or six weeks, then keep subscribers with replenishment emails, a customer portal, swaps, pauses and skips. Our guide to adding subscriptions to Shopify explains the options.

Traffic, Search and Advertising

Amazon's biggest advantage is that the traffic already exists, but its search is its own discipline. Amazon asks sellers to optimise titles, images, keywords, bullet points and product information, and points to sales, reviews and advertising as factors in how a new listing performs (Amazon). Shoppers also search differently there, typing "1kg espresso coffee beans" where they might ask Google for the "best coffee beans for espresso", so do not simply copy your Shopify SEO.

Visibility can also be bought. Sponsored Products ads appear in shopping results and on product detail pages, Sponsored Brands promote your brand and several products, and Amazon DSP buys display, video, audio and streaming TV ads on and beyond Amazon. Budget for advertising when you compare channels, because the referral fee is not your whole acquisition cost.

Building Demand for a Shopify Store

A Shopify store is not tied to one marketplace's algorithm. Traffic can come from organic search, Google Shopping, paid social, email, content and PR, and increasingly from AI shopping channels, because Shopify shares eligible products with ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Mode and Gemini, and Meta (Shopify Help Center). Amazon has taken the opposite line, blocking dozens of outside AI shopping agents while building its own assistant, Rufus (CNBC, March 2026). Our guides to Shopify SEO, getting more traffic and agentic commerce cover each route.

Amazon is excellent at reaching someone already thinking "I want to buy this". Shopify lets you reach people earlier: a supplement brand might attract a runner with an article on what to take before a marathon, add them to its email list, then win the first order and a subscription later. That journey is much harder to build when every step happens inside a marketplace.

Branding and Customer Experience

Amazon offers more branding than it used to. Brand Registry is free for eligible brand owners and unlocks protection and brand building tools, including A+ Content, which adds richer images, comparison charts and brand content to product pages, and Brand Stores, which are multi page brand destinations inside Amazon. Used well, they make a listing far more persuasive than a plain description.

It is still your branded space inside Amazon, not your own store, and Amazon controls the marketplace around it, the checkout and the policies. On Shopify you decide the homepage, navigation, product page layout, photography, content, offers, checkout branding, upsells, loyalty and email capture, which matters most for brands whose difference goes beyond the product itself. The branding argument is really about control of the whole customer lifecycle, not colours and fonts.

What Are Your Fulfilment Options?

There are three common setups, and many brands combine them:

1. Ship Amazon orders yourself. You keep control of storage, packing and delivery, and carry the operational work.
2. Use Fulfilment by Amazon. Amazon stores and ships your stock for Amazon orders, charging fulfilment fees by size and weight plus storage fees, so slow moving stock costs more to hold.
3. Let Amazon fulfil Shopify orders. Amazon's multichannel fulfilment app for Shopify ships Shopify orders from the stock you already hold in its network, and UK merchants can use it (Amazon).

What About Buy with Prime?

Be careful with advice written for the US. Buy with Prime in Amazon's Shopify app is only available to merchants with a US based business, for orders delivered to US addresses (Amazon). UK merchants can still use the multichannel fulfilment part of the app on its own, so for a UK brand the answer is yes to Amazon fulfilling Shopify orders, and not yet to Buy with Prime.

Which Setup Is Best?

A smaller brand often runs one warehouse for both channels. A business already invested in FBA might ship Shopify orders from Amazon stock, while a larger operation might use a 3PL for Shopify and FBA for Amazon. Compare pick and pack costs, storage, delivery speed, stock complexity, returns, international shipping and the customer experience before you choose.

What Are the Risks of Relying on Amazon?

Amazon is a valuable channel; the danger comes when it becomes your whole business. Amazon sets the rules: listings can be suppressed or restricted when they miss its requirements (Amazon), selling can be restricted until verification and compliance checks are complete (Amazon), and breaching the communication guidelines can suspend your selling privileges. If Amazon is 10% of your revenue, a suspension hurts; if it is 95%, it can end the business.

You also do not control the economics. Amazon sets plan prices, referral fees, fulfilment and storage charges and advertising products, while on Shopify you can change payment provider, fulfilment partner, apps and marketing mix. Competition is also highly visible: several sellers can offer the same product on one detail page and rival products sit beside yours, so products with little differentiation end up competing mainly on price, reviews and delivery speed.

How to Sell on Amazon From Your Shopify Store

You do not need to run Amazon as a separate business. Shopify Marketplace Connect links your store to marketplaces including Amazon and eBay, so you manage listings, stock and orders from Shopify (Shopify App Store). It works in any region and currency the marketplace offers, converting prices into the local currency (Shopify Help Center), and you need a verified Amazon seller account in each country where you want to sell (Shopify Help Center).

In practice Shopify stays the source of truth. If Shopify shows 10 units and you sell two on your store and one on Amazon, a properly configured sync updates availability everywhere, so you do not sell stock you no longer have. You can also set marketplace prices that reflect Amazon's fees, but weigh competition, brand consistency and marketplace rules before adding the full fee to every product.

Marketplace Connect is free to install. The first 50 marketplace synced orders each month are free, then it charges 1% per additional synced order, capped at $99 a month and billed in US dollars, on top of Amazon's own fees.

Should You Sell on Amazon, Shopify or Both?

For most established brands, the answer is to run Shopify as the centre of the business and add Amazon as a sales channel, which gives you marketplace demand without making the business depend on it. The right mix still depends on what you sell and what you are building.

Amazon suits you when customers already search your category there, the product is easy to understand, fast delivery matters and your margin can absorb its costs. Shopify matters most when your model depends on branding, repeat orders, email, subscriptions, content, SEO and lifetime value. Using both does not mean pushing Amazon customers to your site, which Amazon's communication rules do not allow; it means building demand for your brand through Google, social, content, PR, email and AI discovery while staying available to shoppers who prefer Amazon.

What About Etsy?

Etsy is a narrower marketplace. It only allows items that meet its Creativity Standards, such as items made or designed by the seller, qualifying vintage goods and certain craft supplies, and a vintage item must be at least 20 years old. That makes Etsy a strong fit for handmade products, original designs, personalised items, vintage and craft supplies, and a poor fit for mass produced goods. An independent jewellery maker may find Etsy a more natural home than Amazon, while a brand selling household consumables at scale is usually better served by Amazon. The same principle applies: use Etsy for discovery if it fits, and keep Shopify as the home of the brand.

Why Matters Perspective

We do not treat Amazon vs Shopify as a popularity contest, because the platforms do different jobs. 45% of our clients sell on both Amazon and Shopify, so for many of the brands we work with the real question is how the two channels fit together, not which one wins.

Our preferred model is Shopify at the centre with marketplaces connected around it. Amazon is not the enemy of direct to consumer ecommerce; it is another route to market, and Marketplace Connect makes it practical to run it from the same catalogue, stock and orders as your store. The mistake is dependence. Before you scale Amazon, ask whether you can win a second order, an email subscriber, a subscription and a loyal customer on your own terms. As a Klaviyo partner, we see that retention work as the part of the business Amazon cannot give you.

Why Matters is a Shopify Select partner with Verified Skills across development and marketing. Our pricing is published, retainer clients are billed one month in arrears and never tied into long contracts, and every development project carries a 3 month guarantee. See our Shopify packages, read our guide to what a Shopify store costs to build, or email us.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it better to sell on Amazon or Shopify?

It depends on your goal. Amazon gives you access to shoppers already searching its marketplace, while Shopify gives you control of your brand, customer experience and customer relationship. For many established brands, the best answer is Shopify as the hub with selected products also sold on Amazon.

Can I sell on Amazon and Shopify at the same time?

Yes. Shopify Marketplace Connect links your store to Amazon so you can manage listings, stock, prices and orders from Shopify. The first 50 synced orders each month are free, then it charges 1% per additional synced order, capped at $99 a month.

How much does Amazon charge sellers in the UK?

Amazon UK's Professional plan costs £25 a month excluding VAT, and the Individual plan charges 75p per item sold. Referral fees apply on top and depend on the category, with Amazon saying most are between 8% and 15%. Fulfilment, storage, advertising and optional services can add more.

Is Shopify cheaper than Amazon?

Per sale it often is: on a £40 order, a 15% Amazon referral fee is £6.00, while the Shopify Basic card fee is £1.05. But Shopify merchants usually pay to bring in their own traffic, so compare the total cost of winning and fulfilling a profitable order through each channel.

Can Amazon fulfil my Shopify orders?

Yes. Amazon's multichannel fulfilment app for Shopify can ship Shopify orders from stock held in Amazon's fulfilment network, and UK merchants can use it. Whether it pays depends on your product sizes, order volumes, storage needs and current fulfilment costs.

Can UK Shopify stores use Buy with Prime?

Not at present. Buy with Prime requires a US based business and US delivery addresses, but UK merchants can use the multichannel fulfilment part of Amazon's Shopify app on its own.

Can I email customers who buy from me on Amazon?

Not for marketing. Amazon's communication guidelines limit messages to completing orders, customer service and a few set purposes such as review requests, and they rule out marketing and promotional messages, including vouchers. Customers who buy on your Shopify store and give marketing consent can join your email list.

Final Thoughts

Amazon and Shopify are often presented as rivals, but for most merchants they work best together. Amazon brings marketplace demand, product discovery, fulfilment infrastructure and a checkout shoppers already know, while Shopify brings brand ownership, customer relationships, retention, subscriptions, email, SEO and content.

The risk is not selling on Amazon; it is building a business with no route to customers outside it. Build the brand on Shopify, use Amazon where it adds profitable extra demand, connect the channels where that simplifies operations, and judge both on profit and customer lifetime value rather than revenue alone. If you would like help planning that setup, email us.

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