Selling Online for the First Time: What a Small Business Needs to Know

An indie builder ran the same $30 sale through five platforms' fee calculators. The best one put $24.41 in the seller's account. The worst put $19.86. Same product, same price, a 23 percent gap for clicking a different signup button. His writeup of the run ends with the line worth keeping: "a 23% difference in what hits your bank account, for selling the exact same thing."

Selling online is not one decision. It is three: borrow someone's traffic, rent someone's store, own your checkout. Do them in that order and you will be fine. Shuffle the order and you pay tuition.

Borrow traffic to prove anyone wants it

Marketplaces rent you their audience. Etsy's stack is 20 cents a listing, 6.5 percent of the sale, and about 3 percent plus 25 cents for processing, per Etsy's own fee policy. The part that ambushes sellers is the offsite-ads program: once a shop clears $10,000 in a year, Etsy takes another 12 percent of any sale its ads touch, and opting out stops being an option. One seller's summary: "the ambush: offsite ads are mandatory once you pass $10,000/year, and take another 12-15% of any sale they drive."

It is not just Etsy. An October 2026 fee comparison across marketplaces puts TikTok Shop at 6 percent, eBay around 13, Poshmark at a flat 20, and Amazon FBA at 22 to 36 percent all-in once fulfillment and storage land. The audience is never free. It is just priced differently.

The rule of thumb sellers land on: under about $500 a month in sales, Etsy is cheaper because there is no monthly plan. Above that, Shopify starts winning fast. The fee stack is not the reason to leave, though. This is: Etsy does not share buyer email addresses with sellers. The customers you worked hardest to win belong to the marketplace, not to you. Start the email list on day one regardless. A free Mailchimp account and a packaging insert will do.

Rent the store when the volume says so

Shopify Basic is $39 a month, $29 on the yearly plan. Card sales run 2.9 percent plus 30 cents through Shopify Payments, and plugging in your own gateway adds a 2 percent surcharge on top. What the monthly fee buys is never touching the infrastructure. A 2026 roundup of seller threads put it the way sellers actually say it: your first store is about validating a product and learning to sell, "without getting sucked into plugin conflicts, PHP updates, or server maintenance."

What the fee does not buy is a single customer. Shopify gives you a store, not traffic. The owners who get burned are the ones who expected the $39 to include the audience Etsy had been providing. WooCommerce flips the trade: the plugin costs nothing, hosting runs $25 to $350 a month on Woo's own pricing page, and you own everything, including the 2 a.m. maintenance window.

The platform is a decision you can revisit. The customer list is the part you cannot get back.

Own the checkout as early as you can

The cheapest honest way to take money online needs no website at all. Stripe Payment Links charge 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, no monthly fee, no per-link fee. Create the product in the dashboard, text the link to the customer, done. Validating demand? Start here tonight and build the store after someone pays you.

When you build, watch the processing gap, because it compounds. Square's free path runs 3.3 percent plus 30 cents against Stripe's 2.9 plus 30. Four-tenths of a point sounds like nothing. On $100,000 of sales it is $400 a year, every year, for the convenience of one dashboard.

Genuinely free storefronts exist too. Big Cartel's Gold plan is free forever for up to five products. And the move I keep coming back to is a plain site you own with Stripe Checkout doing the money part, so card data never touches your server. That is the whole thesis behind LaunchPad. It exists because a printables seller in the family needed a store she owned outright instead of paying a cut of every sale, forever. Fifty dollars once. The store is yours, the customer list is yours, the data is yours.

Two APIs do the heavy lifting once volume justifies it. Sales tax, because nexus will find you before you find it. Shipping labels, because the carrier discounts baked into the platforms are real money. Start with the hosted checkout. Add the APIs when the volume pays for the trouble.

Run your own $30 through three calculators before you sign anything. The platform is a decision you can revisit. The customer list is the part you cannot get back.

Sources

• DashBuilds, fee-calculator run across five platforms (May 2026)
• Etsy, Fees and Payments Policy
• Maltiplata, Etsy offsite-ads reality check
• JunctionKit, marketplace fee comparison (October 2026)
• Charle Agency, Shopify vs Etsy volume heuristic
• Dev.to, 2026 seller-thread roundup on Shopify vs WooCommerce
• Insight Agent, Etsy email marketing guide (buyer-email policy)
• Shopify, pricing page
• WooCommerce, pricing page
• ThemeIsle, Stripe Payment Links pricing
• Seamless Slot, Stripe vs Square payment-link fees
• Big Cartel, Gold plan