Amazon vs Shopify — a marketplace you rent against a store you own

On this page

• Which should you pick, Amazon or Shopify?
• Who owns the customer
• What each one costs, in pounds and dollars
• Condition rules: what Amazon refuses and Shopify never asks about
• Product identifiers: ASIN and GTIN against nothing at all
• Branding, the product page and the search box
• Returns: Amazon’s policy against yours
• Buy with Prime and Marketplace Connect, the two bridges
• When running both is the right answer
• How FLUF Connect treats Amazon and Shopify differently
• What FLUF Connect costs
• Sources and verification
• Related guides

Which should you pick, Amazon or Shopify?

Pick Amazon if you have new, barcoded stock that buyers already search for by name, and you want sales this week rather than an audience next year. Pick Shopify if margin, brand or your customer list matters more than immediate volume, or if your stock is second-hand, handmade or otherwise unwelcome on Amazon. If you have both kinds of stock, the honest answer is both, and the rest of this page is about doing that without either channel tripping the other.

The two are not rivals in the way that Amazon and eBay are rivals. Amazon is a marketplace: a crowd of buyers, a search engine tuned to sell to them, and a rulebook you did not write. Shopify gives you a shop, a checkout and a back office, and then leaves you alone. Nobody arrives at a Shopify store by accident; everyone arrives at Amazon by habit, and almost every difference below follows from that.

Who owns the customer

On Shopify, the customer is yours. Every order writes a customer record into your admin with name, email, delivery address and purchase history, and you can segment them, email them and export the whole list if you leave. On Amazon, the customer is Amazon’s. The buyer’s contact email is an Amazon relay address that expires with the order, buyer name and address are classed as restricted data that a third-party app can only read with a specific approval, and Amazon handles the buyer conversation itself. FLUF Connect’s own Amazon integration therefore records the buyer as Amazon Customer and returns no shipping address, because a partial address would look real and mislabel a parcel.

This is the difference that compounds. A Shopify merchant with 1,000 orders behind them owns 1,000 relationships and a mailing list that lowers the acquisition cost of every future order. An Amazon seller with 1,000 orders owns a feedback score and nothing else that leaves the platform with them.

The flip side: Amazon supplies the crowd. A Shopify store on its first day has a polished checkout and no visitors, and every visitor after that is one you paid for.

What each one costs, in pounds and dollars

The two fee structures do not line up, so the tables keep them apart and a worked example follows. All Amazon figures exclude VAT, as Amazon’s own pricing pages state.

Amazon: subscription, referral fee, then fulfilment

Two things the table cannot show. The referral fee is charged on the whole amount the buyer pays, delivery included. And Amazon’s rates moved in your favour recently: on 15 December 2025 the UK and EU clothing bands were cut from 8% to 5% below £15 and from 15% to 10% between £15 and £20, and from 5 January 2026 Home Products under £20 dropped from 15% to 8%, part of what Amazon described as an average reduction of £0.15 per unit across its European stores. FBA fulfilment fees for parcels fell by an average of £0.26 at the same time. The per-unit FBA fulfilment charge depends on size tier and weight and is published only in Amazon’s downloadable rate card, so no single figure is quoted here.

The Individual plan is cheaper than Professional only below 34 sales a month, and it cannot use the Selling Partner API, so no third-party tool, FLUF Connect included, can connect to it.

Shopify: subscription, card processing, and a penalty for using someone else’s gateway

Shopify’s middle tier was renamed from “Shopify” to Grow, so older guides that price a “Shopify plan” are describing Grow. Shopify Payments, the built-in processor that earns those card rates, is available to businesses in 45 countries including the United Kingdom and the United States; if your country or business category is not supported you must use a third-party provider and pay the extra percentage in the last column on top of that provider’s own fees. The headline rate is for a standard UK card: on Basic the same page lists 3.1% plus 25p for Amex and international cards, 4.99% plus 30p for Klarna, and 2.2% plus 20p for iDEAL and Bancontact. New stores currently get three days without paying, then £1 a month for three months, before standard pricing starts.

The fees neither headline mentions

Amazon’s pricing page carries a second tier of charges that only appear once you are trading. A refund costs you a refund administration fee of the lesser of £5 or 20% of the referral fee; a 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge is applied to FBA fulfilment fees from 17 April 2026; units sitting in a fulfilment centre for more than 241 days attract an aged-inventory surcharge; a storage utilisation ratio above 22 weeks triggers a further surcharge; and getting unsold stock back out again is a removal order with its own fee. None of these exist on Shopify, whose pricing page states there are no setup fees on any plan and whose Basic tier bundles unlimited hosting, a custom domain, an SSL certificate, abandoned checkout recovery, discount codes, gift cards, email campaigns and pay-per-send SMS. Paid apps, premium themes and advertising are what you buy separately.

A £30 jacket, sold once on each

That £4.16 gap is the whole argument in one row. Shopify’s take is a processing fee; Amazon’s is a finder’s fee. For a new brand with no audience the cost of finding the buyer yourself is frequently larger than 15%; for an established seller with a list it is close to zero, and the maths inverts.

Condition rules: what Amazon refuses and Shopify never asks about

Amazon publishes a condition rulebook and enforces it at the category level. The UK guidelines list a set of categories in which “only New items are permitted”: Apparel, Shoes and Handbags, Sports, Baby, Pet and Grocery, plus anything consumable, ingestible or topical, which sweeps in Beauty, Health Care and supplements. New means unused, with original tags, packaging and protective wrapping intact; a jacket worn once cannot be listed in Apparel at all. The guidelines also warn that once you have chosen a condition for a listing you cannot change it afterwards.

Used is welcome in Books, Music, Video and DVD, Video Games, Electronics, Home, Office, Toys and Automotive, each with its own ladder of grades. There Amazon’s vocabulary is fixed: New, Used – Like New, Used – Very Good, Used – Good, Used – Acceptable, plus Collectible and Refurbished grades where the category allows them. FLUF Connect maps your own condition text onto that fixed set when it pushes to Amazon, and defaults an unrecognised description to Used – Good rather than anything higher, because a used item mis-graded upwards on Amazon is the fastest route to a return and an A-to-z claim.

Shopify has no condition rule and no condition field. A product on Shopify is whatever you say it is, and the platform’s only interest in your stock is that it is legal to sell and not on the payment processor’s prohibited list. For a second-hand clothing business, a vintage dealer or a refurbisher, that is the reason Shopify is on the shortlist and Amazon is not.

Product identifiers: ASIN and GTIN against nothing at all

An Amazon listing is not a page you write; it is an offer you attach to a catalogue entry. Every entry has a ten-character ASIN, and the question Amazon asks before anything else is which ASIN you mean. There are two acceptable answers and one refusal:

1. You know the ASIN. Your offer attaches to the existing entry with a price, a quantity and a condition. The photographs, title and bullet points already belong to the catalogue page; Amazon does not even require an image.
2. You know the barcode. A GTIN, meaning a UPC, EAN, ISBN or JAN of a valid length (EAN-8, ISBN-10, UPC-A at twelve digits, EAN-13, or GTIN-14), lets Amazon match your product to an existing ASIN or create a fresh one, and for a fresh one you must supply a product type from Amazon’s fixed vocabulary, names like SHIRT, SHOES or HOME_BED_AND_BATH, plus the attributes that product type’s schema demands. Amazon’s own guide states that most product categories require a GTIN to create a listing.
3. You know neither. Amazon rejects the submission. The route around it is a GTIN exemption, applied for per brand and per category, on the grounds that the product is handmade, generic, a part, a bundle or your own private label.

Shopify asks none of this. A Shopify product needs a title; everything else, including the barcode field, is optional. The cost of that freedom shows up later, when you push those products to a marketplace and discover it needs the barcode you never recorded.

Before publishing to Amazon, add the correct ASIN or valid product barcode. Check that the identifier belongs to the product; a warehouse or stock reference is not a manufacturer barcode.

Branding, the product page and the search box

On Shopify, the storefront is yours to the pixel: theme, domain, typography, photography, copy, checkout wording, the email that goes out after purchase, the packaging insert that says where to find you next. The product page is a page you wrote, and it competes with nothing on the same screen. On Amazon, the product page belongs to the catalogue and to every other seller of that ASIN, and the buyer’s eye is steered to whichever offer Amazon has chosen as the Featured Offer, which Amazon defines as the prominent area at the top of a product detail page where customers can select Add to Cart or Buy Now, awarded on price, delivery speed and certainty, order experience and being in stock. Your logo appears nowhere unless you hold Brand Registry, which needs a pending or registered trademark and unlocks A+ Content, a Brand Store, Sponsored Brands ads, Vine reviews and Transparency serial codes.

An Amazon ranking is won on the Featured Offer and Sponsored clicks, and is rented month to month; a Google ranking for your own Shopify domain is an asset.

Returns: Amazon’s policy against yours

On Amazon you sell under Amazon’s returns policy, not your own. Buyers return through Amazon’s flow, and if you decline a return the buyer can raise an A-to-z Guarantee claim and have Amazon decide. On FBA orders Amazon processes the return itself and you find out afterwards.

On Shopify you write the policy. Shopify supplies a template you can insert and edit, and then says plainly that you are responsible for following your published policies. Consumer law in your country still sets the floor, which for a UK online sale means the buyer can cancel within 14 days of receiving the item, has a further 14 days to send it back, and must be refunded within 14 days of its return; above that floor the terms are yours to set.

For a multi-channel seller the practical difference is where returned stock reappears: a Shopify return lands back in your own inventory count, while an FBA return lands in Amazon’s warehouse, may be graded unsellable, and is available to relist nowhere until you recall it.

Buy with Prime and Marketplace Connect, the two bridges

Marketplace Connect takes your Shopify products out to Amazon. It is Shopify’s own app, formerly Codisto, and it lists Shopify products on Amazon, eBay and two US retail marketplaces, syncing orders and inventory back into the Shopify admin. Its pricing is per synced order: the first 50 marketplace-synced orders a month are included, then 1% per additional synced order, capped at $99 a month. It needs a verified seller account on the marketplace you connect, and every Amazon constraint above still applies through it.

Buy with Prime brings Amazon’s fulfilment and Prime badge into your Shopify store. Through the Amazon MCF and Buy with Prime app, Amazon charges a Prime service fee of 3% per order with a $0.30 minimum, payment processing of 2.4% plus $0.30 through Amazon Pay, and fulfilment from $5.60 per unit, with a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on fulfilment fees from 2 May 2026 and peak-season surcharges between 15 October 2026 and 14 January 2027. The published pricing and the Prime checkout are US-only; the Multi-Channel Fulfilment half of the app can ship to US and UK customers.

When running both is the right answer

Run both when your stock is new, barcoded and repeatable, and you want Amazon to do the finding while your own store does the keeping: list the range on Amazon, treat the referral fee as customer acquisition, and put a reason to visit your own store in every parcel, inside the rules, so the second purchase happens at 2% plus 25p instead of 15%.

The failure mode of running both is the oversell: one unit, two places, one sale, and a second buyer paying for something already gone. With Amazon it has a sharper edge, because a pattern of cancelled orders is an account health problem, not a customer service one. Whatever runs both has to zero one side when the other sells, and be honest about which directions it covers.

How FLUF Connect treats Amazon and Shopify differently

FLUF Connect supports both Shopify and Amazon, but their available features differ. Review the supported sync directions before deciding how to manage your stock.

Shopify: the hub, both directions

Shopify requires no browser extension and can serve as your source catalogue and destination store. Shopify sales update connected marketplace availability. Supported marketplace orders can be centralised in Shopify for fulfilment, with tracking sent back to the selling channel. Relisting and offer management do not apply to Shopify.

Amazon: one direction covered, one deliberately not

Amazon requires a Professional selling account and no browser extension. Follow the authorisation prompts in FLUF Connect. Review the SKU, product identifier, required attributes and fulfilment settings before publishing.

Sold elsewhere, ended on Amazon: supported. When an item that is also on Amazon sells on Shopify or on any other channel, FLUF Connect sets the Amazon offer’s quantity to zero. That covers merchant-fulfilled offers; stock held in Amazon’s warehouses under FBA is Amazon’s count, not yours, and the integration deliberately treats an FBA listing with no declared quantity as live rather than sold out, because reading it as zero would delist a seller’s whole Amazon range everywhere else.

Amazon sales do not currently update other channels automatically or create mirrored Shopify orders. When an item sells on Amazon, remove it from your other channels yourself, or keep dedicated Amazon stock.

Inventory updates are not instantaneous. Amazon sales currently require manual reconciliation on your other channels.

What FLUF Connect costs

7 days for £1, then from £9/month, then plans from £9 a month. The Starter plan at £9 a month has unlimited listings and includes crosslisting, inventory sync, order sync and bulk operations; relisting, offer management and smart pricing come with the plans above Starter. Yearly billing costs 40% less than paying monthly.

Sources and verification

Every fee, rule and date on this page was checked against a primary source on 8 September 2026.

• Amazon UK selling plan pricing — the £0.75 Individual per-item fee and £25 Professional monthly fee, both excluding VAT; the banded Clothing, Home and Beauty referral rates; the 15% Footwear and Books rates; the 7% Consumer Electronics rate; the £0.25 minimum; and the £0.76 and £1.51 per cubic foot monthly storage fees, the refund administration fee, the 1.5% surcharge from 17 April 2026, and the 241-day and 22-week inventory surcharges.
• Amazon US selling plan pricing — the $0.99 and $39.99 plan fees, the $0.30 minimum referral fee, and the Clothing, Footwear, Electronics, Home and Kitchen, Beauty and Books rates, including the $1.80 media closing fee.
• Amazon’s announcement of its 2026 European fee changes — the 15 December 2025 and 5 January 2026 effective dates, the Clothing and Home Products cuts, the average £0.15 per unit reduction and the average £0.26 FBA parcel reduction.
• Amazon UK Condition Guidelines (PDF) — the verbatim New-only wording for Apparel, Shoes and Handbags, Sports, Baby, Pet and Grocery and for consumable, ingestible and topical products; the categories where used is permitted; the used-condition ladder; and the statement that a listing’s condition cannot be changed after it is chosen.
• Amazon’s GTIN guide — the definition of a GTIN, the UPC, EAN, ISBN and JAN formats, the statement that most categories require one, and the exemption route.
• Amazon’s SP-API developer registration page and registration documentation — that only Professional selling accounts can integrate with the Selling Partner API and Individual accounts are not eligible.
• Amazon’s returns policy — the A-to-z Guarantee escalation for third-party orders.
• Shopify UK pricing — the £25/£19 Basic, £65/£49 Grow and £344/£259 Advanced monthly and yearly prices, the from-£1,800 Plus price, the 2%, 1.7% and 1.5% plus 25p online card rates, the 2%, 1%, 0.6% and 0.2% third-party transaction fees, the Amex, international, Klarna, iDEAL and Bancontact rates and the three-day then £1-a-month introductory offer.
• Shopify US pricing — the $39/$29 Basic, $105/$79 Grow and $399/$299 Advanced prices and the 2.9%, 2.6% and 2.5% plus 30¢ online card rates.
• Shopify Payments supported countries — the 45-country list including the United Kingdom and the United States, and the requirement to use a third-party provider elsewhere.
• GOV.UK on accepting returns and giving refunds — the 14-day cancellation window for online sales, the further 14 days to return, and the 14-day refund deadline.
• Shopify’s store policies documentation — the policy templates and the statement that the merchant is responsible for following their published policies.
• Shopify Marketplace Connect and its requirements page — the supported marketplaces, the 50 included synced orders, the 1% per additional order and the $99 monthly cap, and the verified-seller-account requirement.
• Buy with Prime pricing — the 3% Prime service fee with $0.30 minimum, the 2.4% plus $0.30 Amazon Pay processing fee, the from-$5.60 fulfilment fee, the 3.5% surcharge from 2 May 2026, and the 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027 peak surcharge window.
• Amazon on the Featured Offer — its definition and the pricing, delivery, order-experience and stock factors that decide it.
• Amazon Brand Registry and Amazon’s seller programmes page — the trademark requirement, A+ Content, Brand Stores, Sponsored Brands, Vine, Transparency, Subscribe & Save, Amazon Business, Global Selling, Seller Fulfilled Prime and Multi-Channel Fulfilment as described by Amazon.
• Amazon Ads for UK sellers — Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands on a cost-per-click model, charged only on clicks.
• Amazon’s Listings Items API reference — the SKU-keyed listing path and the patch-rather-than-replace update model.

What we could not verify, and therefore treated with care. Shopify’s US pricing page redirected to the UK edition when we fetched it, so the dollar figures in the Shopify table were confirmed against several current third-party summaries of shopify.com/pricing rather than read from the page itself. Amazon’s own help page on its returns window returned a server error when we fetched it, so we have stated the A-to-z escalation and left out a specific number of days. Amazon’s per-unit FBA fulfilment fees live only in a downloadable rate card, so we quoted storage fees and not fulfilment fees. Whether Buy with Prime will reach UK merchants, and on what terms, is not stated anywhere we could find and should be treated as unknown.

Related guides

• Selling on Amazon
• Selling on Shopify
• Crosslisting from Shopify to Amazon
• Amazon vs eBay
• Shopify vs WooCommerce
• Selling on eBay
• All marketplace guides
• All crosslisting guides