Shopify vs eBay : Which Is Good For Selling?

Shopify and eBay are well-known eCommerce companies in the global markets, but are they the same? No, they are not, Shopify is an eCommerce website builder that allows setting up a store and managing smaller-scale businesses to larger ones. eBay doesn’t allow these features instead they help businesses grow by allowing sellers to find their targeted audiences and hence get them sales.

At the end of this review, you will be able to pick the platform suitable for your business.

#Quick Summary

Below are a quick summary of Shopify and eBay platforms.

#7 Main Differences – Shopify vs eBay

1. Ease of Use

eBay takes just 2-3 steps to get started with the platform but Shopify’s learning curve is more in comparison to eBay hence it provides a 14-day free trial, so you can try and test before launching a store.
Winner: eBay

2. Domain and Hosting

Shopify provides inbuilt hosting. It provides a free domain on the annual plans. eBay too has provided hosting where all sellers can register themselves but they can’t connect to custom domains.
Winner: Shopify

3. Themes & Editor

Shopify provides free & paid themes. In Shopify’s Theme editor, users can customize & design the homepage. eBay doesn’t provide themes.
Winner: Shopify

4. Marketing Features:

Shopify doesn’t have an internal marketplace that can drive traffic. Users need to drive traffic manually through some marketing automation that Shopify offers. eBay has its own marketplace with millions of shoppers that can drive sales quickly.

Winner: eBay

5. Small business:

Shopify can be a good option for small businesses as it provides many inbuilt features and plenty of third-party tools for helping businesses. eBay too can be a very good platform to get started as it can provide exposure to businesses in the big marketplace.

Winner: eBay

6. Payments and Charges

Shopify provides 70+ payment providers. Shopify will charge a transactional fee for each order if the payment method is used other than Shopify Payments to receive payments. Whereas eBay offers popular payment methods also they have listing & final value fee charges.
Winner: Shopify

7. App store

Apps help in automation, design, marketing, and adding new features to your store. Shopify has over 6000+ apps to assist in online business, Whereas eBay doesn’t have an apps store.
Winner: Shopify

Ease of use

Shopify and eBay both are easy to use. Just signup with them to create an account. Shopify provides a 14-day free trial to set up the shop whereas eBay is free to use.

eBay is very easy to set up as it takes just 2-3 steps to set up. Once after the registration, users can search for the product that they want to list. The product details need to be filled and once it’s done the listing will be reviewed as per the guidelines and after approval, it will be published. Shopify has many steps to complete including providing information, setting up payment gateways, shipping, taxes, etc. Building and Customizing a theme for Shopify takes more time. Both platforms have plenty of support methods and resources.

Key takeaways: eBay is easier to get started in 2-3 steps. Shopify takes a bit of time to set up & use hence eBay is a winner.

The winner of the Ease of use Feature: eBay

Pricing & Charges

Shopify has 3 plans

Basic Shopify:$29/mo
Shopify:$79/mo
Advance Shopify: $299/mo

Shopify has launched a new plan called “Shopify lite” ($6/month) that allows selling on other platforms by embedding products on websites and social media. It can also be used to sell on offline platforms like events, fairs, malls, etc.

Shopify also has an enterprise plan which starts from $2000/month

eBay has various plans

• Starter Store – Up to 250 free listings.
• Basic Store – Up to 1,000 free listings.
• Premium Store – Up to 10,000 free listings.
• Anchor Store – Up to 25,000 free listings.
• Enterprise Store – Up to 100,000 free listings.

Shopify Pricing

eBay Pricing

—————————–Charges associated with Shopify————————–

Shopify imposes transactional charges for users who use payment methods other than “Shopify payments”. These charges vary plan by plan 2% for $29, 1% for $79, and 0.5% for the $299 plan. The Shopify payment method is available in only a few countries.

Shopify payments supported countries

There are credit card charges associated with every online transaction irrespective of the payment method. Credit card charges vary from 2.2% to 3.4%. The credit card charges differ for different from payment gateways.

Shopify Credit Card rates

—————————–Charges associated with eBay————————–——

eBay charges in terms of selling fees. These fees can be divided into

Pre-sale – Pre-sale fees are called listing fees and it’s free for the first 250 listings per month later it costs $0.35 for each additional listing. The additional listings price will decrease as you choose costlier plans.

Post-sale – The post-sale fee which is a final fee that includes tax, selling cost, and shipping cost are different for different categories.

eBay fees

Key takeaways: eBay has flexible plans for all kinds of sellers Whereas Shopify has additional pricings in form of apps & themes hence eBay is the winner

The winner of the Pricing & charges Feature: Tie

Themes & Customization

Shopify has various categories of themes. All these themes are well organized in the theme library. They have over 90+ themes out of which 9 are free and the rest of the themes are paid whose price ranges from $200 to $350. eBay doesn’t provide themes like Shopify they have only a single theme that will be the same for all sellers.

Every Shopify theme offers 2-3 style variations. All these themes have provided a brief introduction about their feature and provide necessary support information. Shopify themes can be customized for various designing options like colors, fonts, etc. eBay doesn’t provide theme customization. eBay users can do a little bit of branding by adding logos, banners, and descriptions to their shop page. eBay themes will not have variations but it works well as all buyers of eBay can easily navigate to the shop pages.

Shopify themes

Key takeaways: Shopify has plenty of themes & good customization features whereas eBay doesn’t provide themes & customization features hence Shopify is the winner.

The winner of the Fees Feature: Shopify

Marketing

eBay is a marketplace where shoppers from around the world trade. It was estimated that more than a 100million+ shoppers shop monthly on the platform. You will find almost all categories of shoppers on eBay so it’s a good place to sell all kinds of products. There are also 19million+ active sellers on the platform. Shopify doesn’t have a marketplace like eBay, all Shopify users need to drive traffic by themselves.

Shopify has plenty of marketing automation and integrations. It allows running and managing lots of ad campaigns right from the Shopify dashboard so tracking ad performance can be relatively easy. Shopify allows selling on social media and platforms like Amazon, Etsy, eBay, etc. Shopify has a blogging feature to write about the product with good SEO features.

Shopify marketing channels

There are some ways to get traffic from eBay. The internal traffic will be more than enough to get sales. eBay is a huge marketplace to find relevant customers. eBay provides internal traffic in two ways.

eBay SEO – Basic SEO setting done on eBay could result in huge traffic and more sales. Shoppers usually prefer to buy from the top 10 results preferably from the first few results. So targeting those keywords where chances of ranking are more in top results helps in good results.

eBay Ads – If you don’t reach the top of search results organically then going for eBay ads will be a good option. Over the years eBay ads have resulted in better conversion.

There are many other external sources that can be used to drive sales for ex Email marketing, Social media, Redirecting to a website, Google & Facebook ads, and Google searches.

eBay ads

In eCommerce platforms like eBay, Amazon, Walmart, etc. Reviews & rating plays a vital role in increasing sales. Users can try to minimize the bad reviews by solving customers’ problems upfront. They can also create promotions and offer discounts to customers.

Shopify has an inbuilt blog section that can be used to write more about the products, and services. Users can do some basic SEO settings and rank on these search engines. eBay doesn’t provide blogging features but it has great SEO features. eBay Users can rank products faster as eBay has good domain authority.

Key takeaways: Though Shopify has plenty of inbuilt marketing features & third-party apps the traffic needs to be driven externally whereas in eBay there are plenty of ways to drive traffic internally hence eBay is a winner.

The winner of the Marketing feature: eBay

Analytics & Reports

Analytics & report are vital for businesses to track their marketing campaign. It provides valuable data for promoting discounts, ad campaigns, email marketing, promotions, etc. It’s very important to make data-driven decisions to fix the gaps in businesses.

Shopify has presented beautiful visualization in form of graphs, lines, areas, Geo-maps, etc. Shopify’s live reporting is good as it allows tracking store visitors converting as customers from all across the world. This allows for setting up lots of campaigns and retaining customers in real time.

Shopify has an excellent dashboard that provides insights on plenty of key metrics for a business. Users can track sales driven from various channels, returning customer rate, Conversion rate, etc. Shopify provides basic, standard & advanced reporting on consecutive plans. It allows custom reporting as well.

Shopify Analytics

eBay provides data related to its marketplace. It provides 2 types of data terapeak research and terapeak sourcing. these features can be accessed from the eBay seller hub.

Terapeak product research allows analyzing competition, optimizing listing, product research, etc. This provides insights into underperforming/best-performing listings. It also provides methods to improve, suggests strategies, etc. They have provided visualization of data through charts, graphs, etc.

Terapeak Sourcing provides insights into what people are looking for currently. This analysis provides data on high-demand products with low supply, Seasonal trends & overtime trends, and Inventories to back up upcoming sales.

eBay analytics

Key takeaways: Both Shopify & eBay provide analytics, insights, and reports according to their respective marketings. So it’s a tie.

The winner of the Analytics & Reports feature: Tie

Support & Resources

Shopify has an excellent throughout the world. They serve customers 24/7 through live chat, Phone, and Email on all of its plans. eBay too has good support. They not only have sellers to manage but also millions of buyers as well. Having these many customers and sellers they provide one-to-one support through live chat & email. The level of support also depends on the plan. If you are on a higher plan you don’t need to wait in long queues and support will be provided by expert support staff.

There are plenty of blogs and tutorials as resources to help. There is an active community of fellow Shopify users and Shopify staff members to answer queries related to managing & running businesses. Users can also hire Shopify experts for setting up and managing businesses.

eBay has plenty of resources in the form of blogs, tutorials, FAQs, and forums where eBay-related queries can be discussed by fellow eBay users.

Shopify support

eBay support

Important!

eBay is an eCommerce platform where they have set some rules, guidelines, and policies for selling on their platform. If you knowingly or unknowingly go against their guidelines then your account might get suspended or blocked. There are some sets of guidelines for listing on the platform and the kinds of products that can be sold on their platform.

Check out the eBay selling guidelines that should be kept in mind before selling on eBay.

Key takeaways: Shopify provides all forms of support & they don’t have any strict restrictions, or guidelines like eBay to sell on their platform hence Shopify is a winner.

The winner of the Support & Resources feature: Shopify

Pros and Cons: Shopify vs eBay

Conclusion: Shopify vs eBay

Why should you use Shopify over eBay?

• If you are looking for a platform that can be customized and branded as per the business requirements then Shopify is better.
• If you want to start a business but don’t have inventory, or shipping facilities then Shopify can provide various applications that can meet users’ requirements.

Why should you use eBay over Shopify?

• If you have products and want to sell them on a global marketplace then eBay is good.
• If you have a bunch of products and want to sell them online eBay is good.

Declan Kingston

Declan Kingston mainly works around strong Data to create powerful visuals, complex graphs to make the right decision for companies. He has been working in this field for over 8 years, has a strong knowledge of eCommerce platforms and website builders. He has worked with Ethereum and Looker Data Sciences, Inc. (now part of Google Cloud).