How to Sell Handmade Items on Shopify in 2026 — A Maker's Guide
Ready to sell handmade items on Shopify? Here's exactly what you need to know about setting up, pricing, and running a Shopify store for your craft business.
Last updated: April 2026
When you’re a handmade seller, thinking about the business side of things doesn’t always come naturally. Exploring a new marketplace or setting up your own Shopify store can feel like more work than it’s worth — especially if you’ve already found some success on Etsy.
But if you’re not using Shopify to expand your business, you’re missing out. Thousands of craft business owners have grown their revenue significantly when they moved beyond a single marketplace. And the good news? Getting started is a lot less daunting than it looks.
That said, Shopify isn’t a magic wand. Whether it’s the right fit for your business depends on a few things. Let’s work through them.
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Can you sell handmade items on Shopify?
Yes — absolutely. Shopify places no restrictions on handmade or artisan goods, and plenty of successful makers run their entire business on the platform. You can sell physical products, digital downloads, made-to-order items, or a mix of all three.
What Shopify does well for makers is give you full control: over your brand, your pricing, your customer relationships, and how your shop looks and functions. That’s the key difference from selling on a marketplace where someone else sets the rules.
Is Shopify right for your handmade business?
Probably — but it depends on where you’re at.
The makers who get the most out of Shopify tend to:
- Already have a customer base to market to, or a plan to build one
- Know their ideal customer inside-out
- Have already seen some success on Etsy or a similar marketplace
- Want to stop paying transaction fees on platforms they have no control over — like Etsy offsite ads
- Want their own branded home on the internet
You can start on Shopify from day one, but you’ll need a marketing strategy ready to go. Without one, you’ll spend money and time on a store that gets no traffic.
Shopify pricing for handmade sellers in 2026
Shopify has three main plans for growing businesses. Prices listed are for annual billing:
- Basic: $29/month — good for solo makers just starting out. Includes your online store, unlimited products, and basic reports.
- Shopify: $79/month — adds professional reports and lower transaction fees. Worth it once you’re doing consistent volume.
- Advanced: $299/month — best for high-volume sellers who need detailed reporting and third-party calculated shipping rates.
Shopify also offers a Starter plan at $5/month — this doesn’t give you a full storefront, but it’s useful if you want to add a buy button to an existing website or sell via social media.
All plans come with Shopify Payments built in. If you use Shopify Payments (available in most countries), you avoid transaction fees on top of card processing. Card rates start at 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction on Basic, dropping to 2.4% + 30¢ on Advanced. If you use a third-party payment processor, Shopify charges an additional 0.5–2% fee depending on your plan.
Use our free Shopify fee calculator to see exactly what you’ll keep per sale at different price points.
4 ways to set yourself up for success on Shopify
1. Brand your store to stand out
If there’s one thing Shopify does well, it’s customisation. You can completely brand your store so it feels unique and attracts your ideal customer.
Start with a free theme from the Shopify Theme Store — there are solid options designed specifically for craft and artisan businesses. As you grow, you can upgrade to a premium theme or work with a designer to build something entirely custom.
Beyond the theme, you can customise product options (perfect for made-to-order items with colour or size variations), add announcement bars for restock alerts or sale codes, and use product page fields to let customers request customisations. Don’t try to add everything at once — start with the basics and improve as you learn what your customers respond to.
2. Build your audience with Shopify’s built-in tools
Shopify gives you tools to grow your customer base without needing a separate stack of apps.
Email marketing:Shopify Email is built into the platform and free to use for your first 10,000 emails per month. You can create branded campaigns, automate welcome emails for new subscribers, and set up abandoned cart recovery — all without leaving your Shopify dashboard.
SEO: You can edit page titles, meta descriptions, and URL handles directly from your admin panel. Adding a blog to your store (like you’d find in most Shopify themes) helps you rank for long-tail search terms over time and bring in organic traffic.
Analytics: Shopify’s built-in analytics show you which products are selling, where your traffic is coming from, and how customers move through your checkout. Higher plans unlock more detailed reports, but even the Basic plan gives you enough to make informed decisions.
Use these tools to build a relationship with your customers. On a marketplace, you’re renting access to someone else’s audience. On Shopify, you’re building your own.
3. Reach international buyers with Shopify Markets
One of the bigger platform upgrades in recent years is Shopify Markets — a built-in tool that lets you sell to customers in multiple countries from a single store.
With Shopify Markets, you can:
- Show prices in your customers’ local currency
- Translate your store into different languages
- Set country-specific pricing and tax rules
- Use local payment methods (important for conversion in markets like Germany and the Netherlands)
If you’re selling anything that travels well — jewellery, skincare, candles, textiles — Shopify Markets can open up your business to a much wider audience without the complexity of managing separate stores.
4. Control your pricing (and know your numbers)
One of the best reasons to move to Shopify is pricing freedom. On a marketplace, every fee eats into your margin. On Shopify, you only pay your subscription, card processing fees, and whatever you spend on ads or apps. The rest is yours.
That freedom only helps you if you know what your products actually cost to make. Too many makers price by gut feel — which works fine when you’re small, but breaks down as your order volume increases.
Shopify’s built-in inventory tools track finished products — but they don’t track raw materials, recipes, or what it actually costs to manufacture each item. For handmade sellers, that gap matters. See our guide to Shopify inventory management for handmade businesses for a full breakdown of what you need to track and how to set it up.
Craftybase’s Shopify integration pulls in your order data automatically, so you can see exactly what each product cost to make and what your actual profit margin is — not a guess, but a real number. And because it tracks your raw material inventory in real time, you’ll know when to reorder before you run out mid-production.
If you want more profit, you tweak your margins. If a product isn’t covering costs, you’ll catch it quickly rather than discovering the problem six months later.
To explore Craftybase’s product pricing features, or explore our Shopify inventory management tools designed specifically for makers.
Connecting Shopify with Etsy (and managing both)
Many handmade sellers don’t abandon Etsy when they move to Shopify — they run both. And that’s a completely reasonable strategy. Etsy gives you access to a built-in audience of buyers who are already looking for handmade goods. Shopify gives you a home base you control.
The challenge is keeping your inventory in sync across both channels. If you sell the same item on Etsy and Shopify and don’t have a system keeping track, you can end up overselling — or tying up stock in one place when demand spikes somewhere else.
See our guide on how to sync Etsy and Shopify inventory for a practical breakdown of how to manage both platforms without the admin headache.
What about wholesale?
If you’re thinking about adding wholesale to your business, Shopify has built-in tools for that too via Shopify B2B (available on Shopify Plus) or through third-party wholesale apps on lower-tier plans.
You can set up trade pricing, net payment terms, and separate wholesale storefronts. It’s more powerful than it used to be, and worth exploring once you have the production capacity to handle wholesale orders reliably.
For more on the wholesale side, see our guide on how to sell on Faire wholesale marketplace — Faire integrates directly with Shopify and is worth knowing about.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I sell handmade items on Shopify?
Yes — Shopify has no restrictions on handmade or artisan goods. You can sell physical handmade products, digital downloads, made-to-order items, or a mix. Shopify gives you full control over your branding, pricing, and customer relationships, which is a major advantage over selling purely through a marketplace like Etsy where the platform sets the rules.
How much does it cost to sell handmade items on Shopify?
Shopify's plans start at $29/month (Basic, billed annually). You'll also pay card processing fees — 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction on Basic, dropping to 2.4% + 30¢ on Advanced. If you use Shopify Payments, there are no additional transaction fees. Use Shopify's built-in fee calculator or our free Shopify fee calculator to see what you'll actually keep per sale.
Should I sell on Shopify or Etsy as a handmade seller?
Most established makers run both. Etsy gives you immediate access to buyers already searching for handmade goods — it's a great discovery channel. Shopify gives you a branded home base you own, with lower fees on repeat sales and more control over your customer relationships. Starting on Etsy and adding Shopify later (once you have a customer base to market to) is a common and sensible path.
Does Shopify have tools for selling handmade items internationally?
Yes — Shopify Markets is a built-in feature that lets you sell to multiple countries from a single store. You can show prices in local currencies, set country-specific pricing and tax rules, translate your store, and accept local payment methods. It's available on all standard Shopify plans and is worth setting up if you're shipping internationally.
How do I track inventory and COGS when selling handmade items on Shopify?
Shopify's built-in inventory tracking handles finished product stock, but it doesn't track raw materials or calculate your true cost of goods (COGS). For handmade sellers, that gap matters — you need to know what each product costs to make, not just how many units you have on the shelf. Craftybase integrates directly with Shopify to pull in order data, track material-level inventory, and calculate accurate COGS for every product you sell.
Ready to grow your handmade business on Shopify?
Shopify gives handmade sellers something most platforms don’t: a real business foundation you control. Your own domain, your own brand, your own customer list. And unlike selling purely through a marketplace, you’re not at the mercy of algorithm changes or fee increases you have no say over.
But that control only means something if you know your numbers. How much does it cost to make each item? What does your margin look like after Shopify’s fees and your material costs? Are you actually making money on your best sellers, or just staying busy?
That’s where Craftybase’s Shopify integration comes in. Connect your store, and Craftybase automatically pulls in your order data, tracks your raw material inventory, and calculates the true COGS for every product. You’ll see your real margin — not a rough estimate — and you’ll know when to reorder materials before production stalls.
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