If you run an Etsy shop as a small business/hand crafter and want to (and should) expand or just diversify your income streams, I would discourage you from trying Shopify. Maybe it works well with dropshippers and/or people who can invest a fairly large amount of money, but from my one-year experience, I highly doubt it can be of any use for a hand crafter, other than draining your pocket and drive you crazy.

The 4 lessons I learned along the way:

Lesson #1: You get something with the basic subcription, but not everything you need to run a store.

Example: I wanted to start a blog along with my store (which was provided). When I got my first comment to one of my blog posts few months later, I realized that there was no way to reply! Yes, you get a blog along with your subscription, but not the ability to reply to comments (you need to pay for an app to do so.)

Lesson #2: Solving your problems depends on the mood of the person you are dealing with.

Example: I somehow messed my blog's fonts and turned white (on a white background). The only thing I managed to do was to replace the white background so the text was visible (but looked awful.)

When I reached Shopify Support and explained the situation. I got a "You will need to hire an expert for this" response.

Two days later, I tried again: "Sure, let me solve this for you."

Less than 10 seconds later and it was fixed.

Why wasn't it fixed the first time, since it was less-than-10-seconds easy?

Lesson #3: Etsy fees are nothing compared to the marketing value and work they do for your store.

Example: When I first opened my Etsy shop, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. All I knew, was to make leather bracelets and create the listings.

I did write descriptions, but new nothing about keywords and SEO.

I did put all 10 photos, but they were not that good. (In fact, I occasionally stumble upon some of my first product photos and I freak out)

I did include all 13 tags, but most of them were wrong (I believe that some of them are still wrong)

I did set up social pages but other than sharing a picture of my products with a title, I knew nothing more about content quality and marketing (and I'm still learning!)

And this was my Etsy shop for a year. However, with my nothing SEO/marketing/content creating, I got 100 sales! Why? Because Etsy was driving people to my shop. They gave me the new shop boost, they used off-site ads, they did all the things they do to work on stores and it worked. The rest was a matter of my own work and crafting skilss, my products quality, my communication with buyers, my packaging, my shipping, etc.

I SPENT 200-250 euros in ads for my shopify store plus monthly subscription plus apps for 13 months and what I got was 9 sales in one year (and half of them were by people I brought to my store via social, or my Etsy customers.)

Lesson #4: They would if they wanted to, but they don't, so they won't.

Example: My biggest issue with Shopify (and my "I had enough" point) were product photos. They were displayed as crap and didn't know why. When I uploaded them as they were, my store's speed went red low. When I compressed them as best as I could (not to lose quality) and uploaded them, they were still crappy.

I reached out to Shopify Support just to have them telling me "Oh, you will need to hire a Shopify Expert for this". Again!

Tried to figure out things on my own (weeks passing), watched a bunch of tutorials, read articles, joined the Shopify community, to my surprise I saw many, many people dealing with the same issues that remained unsolved.

I decided to pay another 10 euros per month for a promising app that would optimize my pictures, provide alt texts and do all that micro-work (which is also important.) While the app did a great work (improved SEO, got me more traffic, impoved my organic search), my pictures were always pixelated.

How am I supposed to make any sales ?

I reached out to the optimizing app support team and asked them about my product photos problem. The guy just casually said: "Oh, it's just a matter of the theme's code, you can ask the developer to disable it. It's nothing really, done in seconds, and many others had the same issue, too."

Seriously?

Again, reached Shopify Support. I kindly asked them to disable image resizing from my theme's code. They told me to wait while they "take a look at it." Much later, the response was: "Our team seems to be unable to work on this. Consider hiring a Shopify expert!"

HELL, NO.

I already pay a lot and I expect AT LEAST to have a properly functional store, I told him. And closed the chat, slammed my laptop and unplugged it. I was FURIOUS.

One year later and I was ashamed of my store!

Next morning, made myself some coffee, turned on my laptop and went to ChatGPT: Suggest me FREE shopify themes that display high quality product images.

My dearest friend, replied: this, this and that. So, I went and changed my theme to one of ChatGPT's suggestions.

AND IT WORKED. But it was too late.

One year of me suffering, working like razy, paying for nothing, and NO ONE of the support-lol- team could tell me "hey, this theme you are using is not that good for your store, why don't you try this or that?"

WHY?

That was the moment I was done for good with Shopify. I closed my store the very same day.

I gave me a week of nothingness to calm down and went to Wordpress.