Shopify charges no sales commission. You pay a monthly subscription plus payment processing of roughly 2.9 percent and $0.30 per order on the entry plan, which makes it cheap at volume and expensive when you are starting out.
The structural trade
Marketplaces take a percentage and bring you buyers. Shopify takes rent and brings you nothing. That is the whole comparison in one sentence, and it is why a fee-by-fee table can be misleading.
At ten orders a month, spreading a subscription across them costs more per order than an Etsy commission. At five hundred orders, it is not close. The Shopify Fee Calculator shows processing cost and profit per order, and the Break-Even Calculator handles the fixed-versus-variable side.
Find your crossover point
Divide your monthly Shopify cost by the commission you would have paid per order on a marketplace. That is the number of orders where the store becomes cheaper. Below it, the marketplace wins on cost. Above it, you keep more and you own the customer relationship.
Do the sum with a realistic order value rather than your best-selling item.
The third-party gateway penalty
Using a payment provider other than Shopify Payments adds an extra transaction fee on top of what that provider charges. For most sellers the maths favours Shopify Payments where it is available. Check before switching for a headline rate that looks better in isolation.
The cost that does not appear on any pricing page
Traffic. A marketplace fee is expensive traffic; a subscription is cheap infrastructure with no traffic attached. If you move to your own store and do not budget for acquiring visitors, you will save on fees and sell less. Build an advertising figure into the comparison or you are comparing fiction.
We put the three side by side in Etsy vs eBay vs Shopify.
The pattern that works
Use marketplaces to discover which products sell, then build a store for repeat buyers once you have proven demand. Running both is normal. Running five platforms badly is not.