Shopify is one of the most common questions beginners ask after they've heard about Amazon, eBay or Etsy: what actually is it, and how is it different? The short answer is that Shopify isn't a marketplace like Amazon — it's a platform for building your own independent online store.
On Amazon, eBay or Etsy, you're listing products inside someone else's marketplace, alongside other sellers, under their rules and their branding. With Shopify, you build a standalone website under your own brand name and domain. You control the design, the customer experience, and the data you collect about your customers, but you're also responsible for driving your own traffic — Shopify doesn't hand you a built-in audience the way a marketplace does.
Shopify takes care of the technical side of running a store: secure checkout, payment processing, hosting, basic inventory tracking, and a library of themes and apps you can use to customise how your store looks and functions. This means you don't need to know how to code to launch a functional store, though building a strong one still takes real setup work.
Shopify and marketplaces aren't mutually exclusive either — many sellers run a Shopify store alongside an Amazon or Etsy presence, using each channel for what it does best.
Beyond Shopify's own subscription fee, plan for payment processing fees, the cost of any paid apps you add, and — importantly — the cost and effort of actually driving traffic to your store, since Shopify itself doesn't generate customers for you the way a marketplace's existing shopper base does.