How to Move from Etsy to Shopify (Without Losing What You've Built)

You’ve put real work into your Etsy shop. Listings with hundreds of sales. Reviews that took years to collect. A shop identity that people recognise. And now you’re wondering whether to take the leap to Shopify.

Here’s the thing most guides don’t say upfront: the technical part (exporting your listings, importing them to Shopify) is actually the easy bit. What catches makers off guard is everything that comes after. Specifically, what happens to your inventory when you start selling in two places at once.

This guide covers both. We’ll walk through the move itself, then get into the part that trips up almost everyone.

Should you move from Etsy to Shopify, or add it alongside?

For most makers with an active Etsy shop, adding Shopify as a second channel beats migrating away — Etsy’s built-in buyer traffic is genuinely hard to replace.

Most advice you’ll find online treats this as a binary choice: Etsy or Shopify. In practice, for makers who’ve built up any kind of Etsy presence, abandoning the platform entirely is rarely the smart move.

Etsy gives you a built-in audience. People searching for handmade goods are already on the platform, already primed to buy. That traffic doesn’t come free on Shopify; you have to build it yourself through SEO, social, ads, or email.

The makers who do best aren’t choosing one platform over the other. They’re running both. Etsy keeps bringing in discovery traffic from buyers who didn’t know you existed. Shopify handles your brand presence, loyal repeat customers, and wholesale or custom enquiries.

There are situations where a full move makes sense, though:

• Your products don’t fit Etsy’s handmade guidelines and you’ve been flagged
• You’re wholesale-heavy and need full control over your storefront
• Etsy’s fee structure is genuinely eating into margins you can’t absorb
• You want a completely independent brand identity with no platform dependency

If you’re reading this and nodding at one of those points, a full migration makes sense. If you’re reading this because you want to grow into something bigger, adding Shopify alongside Etsy is probably the better path.

What actually transfers from Etsy to Shopify

Before you start, it helps to be clear-eyed about what carries over and what doesn’t.

What you can transfer:

• Product listings: titles, descriptions, and pricing can all be exported from Etsy as a CSV and imported into Shopify (with some cleanup; more on that below)
• Product photos: Etsy lets you download your listing photos, though you’ll need to re-upload them to Shopify separately
• Pricing: your prices come over in the CSV, though Shopify handles variants differently to Etsy

What doesn’t transfer at all:

• Reviews: your Etsy reviews stay on Etsy, full stop. They’re the platform’s property, not yours. This is genuinely one of the hardest parts of migrating because years of social proof just don’t move.
• Order history: past sales data lives in Etsy’s system. You can export a CSV for your own records, but Shopify won’t have that purchase history for your customers.
• Customer relationships: you don’t own your Etsy customers’ email addresses (Etsy’s terms prevent using them off-platform), so you’ll be starting fresh with customer acquisition on Shopify.
• Etsy SEO: your rankings on Etsy’s search don’t carry over. Etsy’s algorithm is entirely separate from Google, and your Shopify store will need to build its own search presence from scratch.

That last point is worth sitting with. The reviews and customer relationships represent years of trust you’ve earned. They’re real, they matter, and they don’t come with you. That’s the main reason most makers choose to keep their Etsy shop open rather than close it.

Step-by-step: exporting your Etsy listings and importing to Shopify

The CSV process is straightforward, but there are a few gotchas that will save you time if you know about them before you start.

Step 1: Export your Etsy listings

1. Go to your Etsy Shop Manager
2. Navigate to Listings
3. Click the download icon (top right of the listings table) to export all listings as a CSV

Your CSV will include listing ID, title, description, price, quantity, tags, and some variation data. Download your listing photos separately by going to each listing and saving the images, or use a bulk download tool if you have many listings.

Step 2: Prepare your CSV for Shopify

Etsy’s export format doesn’t map directly to Shopify’s import format. You’ll need to reformat the CSV. Shopify has a product CSV template that shows exactly which columns it expects.

A few things to fix before importing:

Variants. Etsy handles size/colour variations differently to Shopify. Shopify expects each variant on its own row, with the parent product on the first row. If your listings have multiple options, you’ll need to expand these manually.

Image formatting. Shopify wants image URLs, not file attachments. You’ll need to upload your product photos to Shopify (or another hosting service) first, then add those URLs to your CSV.

Shipping profiles. Etsy’s shipping profiles don’t transfer, so you’ll set up Shopify shipping zones from scratch.

Tags. Etsy’s tags are comma-separated in the CSV and should transfer reasonably well. Shopify also uses comma-separated tags, so this is usually the easiest column to handle.

Step 3: Import to Shopify

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Products
2. Click Import
3. Upload your formatted CSV
4. Review the preview; Shopify will show you a sample of what it’s about to create
5. Click Import products

Expect to spend some time cleaning up listings after import. Descriptions often need reformatting, images need checking, and any listings with complex variants will need manual attention.

The inventory problem nobody warns you about

Here’s where things get interesting. And by “interesting” I mean slightly painful if nobody tells you in advance.

When you’re selling on Etsy only, inventory is simple. You have a stock count in Etsy. A sale comes in. Etsy reduces the count. Done.

The moment you start selling on Shopify too, that simplicity evaporates.

Shopify shows Shopify stock. Etsy shows Etsy stock. They don’t talk to each other.

Say you have 10 units of your best-selling candle. You list 10 on Etsy and 10 on Shopify, but you only have 10 in total, not 20. A buyer on Etsy orders 3. Your Etsy count goes to 7. Your Shopify count is still showing 10. Then a buyer on Shopify orders 5. Now you’ve sold 8 total but you only made 10, and you’ve got active orders you can’t fulfil from both platforms.

This is how overselling happens. And it happens fast once you’re running two channels simultaneously.

But overselling is just the most visible symptom. The deeper problem is materials.

If you make products from raw materials (soap, candles, jewellery, skincare), each sale on either platform consumes materials from the same shared supply. Neither Etsy nor Shopify knows how much fragrance oil goes into each candle, or how many grams of beeswax you have left. They just show you product stock counts. Your actual production capacity is invisible to both.

So you might have 10 candles in stock but only enough fragrance oil to make 3 more when those sell. Neither platform tells you this. And at tax time, your COGS (the true cost of what you’ve sold) is scattered across two platforms’ order data that you have to manually reconcile.

This is the part of multi-channel selling that catches makers out.

Craftybase connects to both Etsy and Shopify, pulling orders from both into one place. When a sale comes in from either platform, your materials inventory adjusts automatically based on what went into that product. Your COGS rolls up across both channels, ready for tax time. See how the Etsy and Shopify integration works.

How to keep inventory in sync across Etsy and Shopify

You have a few options for managing stock across both platforms. Let’s go through them honestly.

Manual reconciliation

You export order data from both platforms regularly, update a spreadsheet, recalculate your stock counts, and update each platform manually. This works until it doesn’t, which is usually around the time your order volume picks up or you start making several products from the same materials.

The time cost is real. So is the error risk. One missed order or a formula error and your numbers are wrong across the board.

Shopify’s multi-channel selling tools

Shopify has built-in tools for syncing stock to other platforms, but these are designed for resellers and retailers, not makers. They sync product quantities between platforms without understanding that you make your products from raw materials.

If you sell a candle on Etsy, Shopify can reduce your Shopify stock count. But it can’t reduce your fragrance oil inventory, or tell you how many more candles you can still make. For makers, that limitation matters a lot.

Inventory software that understands how you make things

This is where dedicated inventory tools built for makers, like Craftybase, work differently. Rather than just syncing counts between platforms, they track your materials inventory separately from your finished product inventory.

When you log a manufacture (a batch of candles you made today), the materials used get deducted from your raw stock automatically. When a sale comes in from Etsy or Shopify, your finished product count drops. You can see, at any moment, how many units you have ready to ship and how many more you could make from what’s currently on your shelves.

It’s a different model to retail inventory syncing, and it’s the one that actually fits how makers work.

For a deeper look at material tracking specifically on Shopify, this guide on Shopify material inventory tracking for handmade sellers covers the specifics in more detail.

What changes in your bookkeeping when you go multi-channel

The inventory problem has a bookkeeping equivalent. Two platforms means two sets of orders, two fee structures, and two income streams that need to roll up into one accurate picture of your business.

Etsy’s fees include listing fees ($0.20/listing), a 6.5% transaction fee on the sale price plus shipping, and payment processing fees (3% + $0.25 in the US). If you run Etsy Ads, that’s separate again.

Shopify’s fees include your monthly subscription (starting at $39/month for Basic), payment processing (2.9% + $0.30 on Shopify Payments, or 0.5-2% extra if you use a third-party processor), and any app subscriptions. Shopify’s monthly cost is fixed; Etsy’s is variable.

You can compare the fee structures more carefully using the Etsy fee calculator to run the numbers on your specific prices and volume.

For tax purposes, both platforms’ sales need to be included in your total revenue. And your COGS (the actual cost of materials, labor, and overhead that went into making what you sold) needs to cover products sold on both channels.

This is where multi-channel sellers often hit trouble at tax time. They have accurate revenue numbers from both platforms. But their COGS calculation is either wrong (because it doesn’t account for the materials that went into each product) or it only covers one platform’s sales.

The cleaner approach is to track your manufacturing costs in one place, separate from either sales platform, so your COGS is always current regardless of where the sale came from. That’s the kind of tax-time relief that’s hard to put a dollar value on until you’ve experienced the alternative.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ready to sell on both platforms without the inventory chaos?

The migration itself is manageable. A few hours of CSV wrangling, some image uploading, and you’re listed on Shopify. That part you can do this weekend.

The part that needs a proper system is what comes after: knowing your true stock levels across both channels, understanding your materials inventory so you know what you can actually make, and having COGS figures at tax time that reflect every sale from both platforms.

If you’re about to go multi-channel, setting up that system now (before orders start flowing from two directions) is considerably less painful than trying to untangle it later.

Start a free 14-day trial of Craftybase — no credit card needed, and it connects to both Etsy and Shopify from day one.

Also worth reading: Batch manufacturing for Shopify makers covers production tracking when you’re making products in batches for multiple channels.