Subito to Shopify: move your ads to your own store

On this page

• The audience cliff
• What a Shopify store buys you: escape from Subito’s rules
• The photo ceiling: 6 against 250
• Volume ceilings, and a 300-item wardrobe
• One ad, one item — against one product, many variants
• The condition problem
• Payments and shipping
• What you may sell
• Regulation and VAT
• What syncs, and what does not
• The recommendation
• Sources and verification
• Related guides

The audience cliff

Most pages about this move start with the fees. Wrong end. What happens first when a seller on Subito opens a Shopify store is that the traffic stops.

Subito’s company page puts its scale at 26 million monthly unique users and 13 million live ads a day across 38 categories, and discloses 15.3 million average monthly active recipients at 30 June 2025 under the Digital Services Act. Post an ad and people already looking for something like it find it that afternoon, for nothing.

Shopify is candid about this. Its own comparison says marketplaces “bring in browsers and shoppers.. without the marketing efforts required to bring visitors to your own site”. Shopify is a store platform, not a marketplace: on day one it has a domain, a theme, a checkout and no visitors.

So the honest framing is not “leave Subito for Shopify”, but: keep the free Italian demand, and build what Subito cannot give you.

What a Shopify store buys you: escape from Subito’s rules

Subito is unusually restrictive, and usefully, the restrictions are published, so we can name them precisely.

• Category, region, province and the private-versus-business flag cannot be changed after publication. Subito lists what you may edit — title, description, price, photos — and excludes email, regione, provincia, categoria and ad type. Every edit re-enters moderation.
• Delete-and-repost to refresh ranking is banned. Bumping is paid, and the “In Cima” page is explicit that re-inserting an ad for visibility is not allowed. With the point above, a category mistake is unfixable by any sanctioned route.
• Duplicates are auto-rejected, and reusing the same photo across two ads triggers it by itself, per Subito’s own page. Three near-identical white shirts shot on one hanger is a problem unrelated to your honesty.
• The same item may not be posted in more than one category, region or province, a published rejection reason.
• A description that merely repeats the title is a rejection reason (moderation rules), and price is moderated, with ads rejected as unrealistically high or low.
• Links in ad bodies are banned, as are multiple accounts to dodge caps and posting on someone else’s behalf, which rules out consignment. The goods must physically be in Italy, and listing via unauthorised management software is prohibited: no “annunci utilizzando software gestionali non autorizzati”. All on the same rules page.

On your own Shopify store, none of that applies. Change a product’s category, type, price, photos and whole identity at will, with no moderation queue. Reuse a photo across ten products. Put a link in a description. Sell on consignment. Price at €1 or €10,000. Hold stock outside Italy. That is the real product being bought here, and the trade is control for traffic.

The photo ceiling: 6 against 250

A private Subito ad gets 6 photos. A paid “6 Foto aggiuntive” upgrade takes an ad to 12, but Subito states it is not available for fashion, so a clothing ad is hard-capped at six images whatever you spend. Photos must be JPG, PNG or GIF, 200×150 pixels or larger, under 16 MB, and every one is watermarked.

A Shopify product takes up to 250 media items: “You can add a maximum of 250 images, 3D models, or videos to a product”. No watermark, no upgrade, no category exclusion.

Consider what six costs you on a garment. Front, back, label and fabric close-up leave two frames for what actually closes a second-hand sale: the mark on the cuff, the flat-lay measurement, the sole wear, the lining. On Subito you choose what to omit. On Shopify you do not.

Volume ceilings, and a 300-item wardrobe

What pushes a Subito seller toward a store is usually not the photo cap, but running out of room.

The free-ad allowances are widely misread as a monthly quota. They are concurrent caps per sub-category, limiting how many ads may be live at once in that leaf: 45 for Abbigliamento e Accessori, 130 for Libri e Riviste, 250 for Collezionismo, 30 for Arredamento, 20 for Elettrodomestici, 45 for Tutto per i bambini, and 1 for Auto, on Subito’s allowances page.

Past those you pay. The same page carries a sentence worth reading twice: Subito reserves the right to decide when a user counts as a business “in base al numero di annunci inseriti”. Discretionary, based on your volume, not a self-declaration you control.

The business route is Subito Pro. Its subscription page lists a certification badge, a Shop storefront, up to 30 images per ad, call tracking, feed upload through authorised gestionali and a consultant. It requires a Partita IVA. Its price is never published: it is quoted by that consultant, so you cannot plan against it from outside.

Shopify has no listing cap at all. Its plans are Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, none gated on product count, and annual billing saves 25%. We deliberately publish no Shopify plan price for Italy: two independent reads returned different figures, the page is geo-rendered, and Shopify states that “I prezzi possono variare in base alla sede del negozio” — prices vary by store location. Check shopify.com/it/prezzi from Italy. For the same reason we publish no card-processing rate.

What reads consistently is the third-party gateway fee: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus, and 0% on Shopify Payments, per Shopify’s pricing page. Also: Shopify Starter is not available to new stores, and merchants who leave it cannot return.

Now put a 300-piece wardrobe against both. On Subito, 45 items are live for free; the other 255 wait, get paid for, or push you toward a subscription whose price you cannot see until you speak to someone, with the reclassification clause pointing straight at you. On Shopify all 300 are live from day one on the entry plan, and the constraint becomes how many people you can get to look. A better problem, but one costing money and effort rather than nothing.

One ad, one item — against one product, many variants

This is where the mental model breaks. A Subito ad is one item. The rules state an ad is one clearly identified item; stock lots are permitted only as a single block at one price, in the paid Attrezzature di lavoro category. No size dropdown sells three sizes from one ad: three sizes is three ads, and per the duplicate rule, three different sets of photographs.

A Shopify product is a product with variants: up to 3 options and, since 15 October 2025, up to 2,048 variants, each with its own SKU, barcode, price and inventory count.

The honest part. If your stock is genuinely one-of-one, 2,048 variants is a feature you will never touch: model every item as its own product with a single variant. A “Vintage Jackets” product with 40 variants looks tidy in the admin and wrecks everything downstream, giving one title, one description and one canonical URL to forty garments in forty conditions. Search engines index the product, not the variant.

If you carry new or multi-size stock, variants change everything: one page accumulates all the traffic, and a sold-out size drops off the picker without taking the page with it. Subito has no answer to that.

One more thing, the piece most sellers skip. A Subito ad carries no SKU field of any kind, so a Shopify SKU must be authored from scratch — and this is the moment, before the catalogue is too big to retrofit. A stable SKU is what makes every later channel behave: it is how orders reconcile, how stock stays aligned in two places at once, and how you avoid the same jacket existing three times under slightly different titles. Pick a short, unique scheme you can write on a label.

The condition problem

For a second-hand seller this is the most consequential gap, and nobody warns you before you have imported a thousand products.

Shopify has no native product condition field. Neither the Product nor the ProductVariant resource has one, and there is no standard metafield definition for condition. You build the field yourself.

Subito has a clean five-value enum with stable numeric keys — Nuovo, Come nuovo, Ottimo, Buono, Danneggiato — on Subito’s values endpoint and in its publishing guide. Mandatory on every ad.

One wrinkle: the display strings are not stable. The enum advertises “Buono”, while a live ad can return “Buono – usato ma ben conservato”. Anything matching the label rather than the underlying value will mismatch silently. Map on the value, never the words.

Here is what turns an academic gap urgent. If you put your Shopify catalogue in front of Google Shopping — an obvious way to get the audience a new store lacks — Google Merchant Center’s condition attribute accepts exactly three values, new, refurbished and used, and is required for used and refurbished products. A second-hand catalogue with no condition data cannot be submitted correctly: the field Shopify omits is one Google insists on.

Concretely: create a custom product metafield named something like condition, and populate it at import time. Keep Subito’s five values for your product pages, and hold a deterministic mapping to Google’s three: Nuovo becomes new; Come nuovo, Ottimo, Buono and Danneggiato all become used. Refurbished has no Subito equivalent, so set it by hand for genuinely restored goods only. Do it on day one; retrofitting across a live catalogue is a weekend you will not enjoy.

Payments and shipping

On Subito, with TuttoSubito, the seller pays nothing — no seller commission. The service fee falls on the buyer: €1.20 plus 5% on an item priced up to €300 excluding shipping, or €1.20 plus 4.5% above that, capped at €91.20. The buyer always pays shipping too.

The mechanics that structure your week: couriers are Poste Italiane, which cannot be deselected, plus InPost, BRT Fermopoint and UPS. Parcel bands run PICCOLO at 2 kg up to MAXI at 20 kg. Create the label within 48 hours of payment and dispatch within 6 days, or the sale auto-cancels. There is no home pickup, so you carry parcels to a pickup point. Payout releases 3 days after delivery, or up to 24 days for a verified reseller shipping independently, because of the buyer’s 14-day withdrawal right. And it is Italy only: “le consegne vengono effettuate solo sul territorio Italiano”.

On Shopify the shape changes. You are the merchant of record: you choose the carrier, who pays shipping and the free-shipping threshold, and there is no 48-hour clock but your own.

Shopify Shipping does cover Italy, with BRT Bartolini, Poste Italiane and DHL Express Europe as carriers. Read the next sentence carefully, because it is easy to conflate: Shopify separately states that “if your business is in the United States, Canada, or Australia, then you can use shipping labels to help ship internationally”. Two different statements. An Italian store can buy Shopify Shipping labels; it cannot use them for international shipments. Selling abroad remains possible — you arrange those parcels with a carrier directly.

Shopify Payments is available in Italy (supported countries). EUR is the domestic payout currency with no multi-currency payout fee. Selling in other currencies attracts a 2% conversion fee outside the United States, calculated on the gross order amount from 6 April 2026.

The strategic point is one sentence. Subito confines you to Italy; a Shopify store does not. That, with the photo ceiling, is the real case for the move — not fee arithmetic, which on a domestic sale favours Subito.

What you may sell

Shopify’s Acceptable Use Policy is principle-based rather than a category list, which surprises people expecting a table of banned goods. The list you need is elsewhere.

Shopify Payments carries its own, stricter prohibited-business list, naming cannabis, prescription drugs, medical devices, tobacco, firearms and weapons, money transfer, cryptocurrency, credit repair, explicit content, pseudo-pharmaceuticals, gambling and counterfeit goods — and saying outright that it “isn’t exhaustive and it varies depending on your region”. So “can I sell this on Shopify?” is usually a question about your payment processor. Resolve it first.

Subito’s bans sit on the same rules page. The three that matter to a clothing seller are used underwear, counterfeits and furs of CITES-protected species. The first catches sellers clearing a wardrobe; the third, anyone handling vintage outerwear without checking the fur. There are also per-category publication rules.

Regulation and VAT

On a marketplace, much of the compliance is handled around you. In a store it is yours.

GPSR

The EU General Product Safety Regulation has applied since December 2024. A listing needs an identifying element, the manufacturer’s name with a physical and electronic address, an EU Responsible Person where the manufacturer sits outside the EU, and warnings in the appropriate languages — set out on Shopify’s GPSR page. Be clear-eyed about the tooling: Shopify’s native support is a “Disclosures” product metafield, and there is no dedicated field for an EU Responsible Person. Shopify points merchants at third-party apps, so budget for one.

The €10,000 threshold

Selling to consumers in other EU countries brings an EU-wide threshold of €10,000 per year in intra-EU B2C distance sales. Below it you keep charging your domestic rate; above it VAT is due at destination rates, via per-country registration or a single One Stop Shop return. A Subito seller never met this, because Subito never let them ship abroad.

The Italian layer, and the €5,000 myth

Say it plainly: “you can sell €5,000 tax-free in Italy” is wrong. The €5,000 figure is the INPS gestione separata registration threshold — a social-security rule, not a tax-free allowance.

The statutory trader test is “attività abituale” under TUIR art. 55, and it has no euro threshold at all — it is about habituality, not turnover. Genuinely occasional sales are redditi diversi under art. 67, declarable from the first euro. Opening a storefront with a domain and continuous availability is not neutral against that test. Speak to a commercialista before you scale.

DAC7

DAC7 — in Italy D.Lgs. 1 marzo 2023 n.32 — only reaches platforms that facilitate the transaction. Subito reports its TuttoSubito sales; exemption needs both fewer than 30 sales and no more than €2,000, so breaching either puts you in the report. Your own Shopify store is not a reporting platform operator. That removes a report. It changes nothing about what you owe, and the habituality test above catches anyone treating a store as a way to become invisible.

What syncs, and what does not

FLUF Connect reads your Subito ads and pushes them into Shopify, so you build the store from the catalogue you already have rather than retyping 300 items. Quantities stay aligned, and Shopify supports order sync, so marketplace orders are worked from one place.

The honest limit matters more than the feature list. Sold-on-Subito detection is not wired, for a structural reason. Subito ads expire on their own, and the public index also drops ads merely paused or under moderation — and every edit re-enters moderation. So an ad vanishing from the index overwhelmingly does not mean it sold. Acting on disappearance would delist live stock elsewhere for items that were simply mid-review — a worse failure than not automating the step. Mark Subito sales yourself and the catalogue follows.

Two other things to plan for: condition does not carry across, because Shopify has nowhere native to put it, and SKUs do not because Subito has none. Both are one-time decisions, cheaper at the start. If Shopify is not the only destination, the same product record feeds other routes, including eBay (Subito to eBay) and Vinted (Subito to Vinted).

The recommendation

Run both. Not a hedge — it is what the evidence supports.

Keep Subito for the free Italian demand. It costs nothing to list and nothing in commission, and it puts your goods in front of an audience you would otherwise spend years assembling. Accept its rules and treat it as a demand channel, not as your business.

Build the Shopify store for what Subito cannot do: 250 media per product instead of six, no listing cap, variants where you have real multi-size stock, your own categories and copy, and buyers outside Italy. Do the setup properly on the way in — a SKU scheme, a condition metafield mapped to Google’s three values, a GPSR position decided before the catalogue is large.

Then let one catalogue feed both. FLUF Connect crosslists to 45 marketplace channels from one dashboard, with relisting, offer management and bulk operations included in every plan rather than sold as an add-on. Pricing is £1 for 7 days, then plans from £9/month (Starter). There is no free plan. See the pricing page.

Sources and verification

• Subito, About: 26m monthly unique users, 13m live ads a day, 38 categories, DSA disclosure of 15.3m monthly active recipients at 30 June 2025.
• Shopify on platform vs marketplace: marketplaces bring in shoppers without the marketing effort an own site requires.
• Subito on ad allowances: the concurrent per-sub-category caps and the discretionary reclassification clause.
• Subito on 6 Foto aggiuntive: the paid upgrade, unavailable for fashion. Photo rules: formats, 200×150 px minimum, 16 MB ceiling, watermarking.
• Shopify on adding media: the 250-media-per-product limit.
• Subito on editing an ad: what is editable, what is immutable, re-moderation. In Cima: paid bumping, delete-and-repost ban.
• Subito on what you cannot do: unauthorised gestionali, links, multiple accounts, posting for others; prohibited goods including used underwear, counterfeits and CITES furs. Per-category rules.
• Rejection reasons: duplicate, description, price, location.
• Subito on which ads you may post: one ad, one item; stock lots as a single block only.
• Subito Pro subscription: badge, Shop, 30 images, call tracking, authorised-gestionale feed, consultant; Partita IVA required.
• Shopify changelog: variant limit raised to 2,048 on 15 October 2025. Product category: Standard Product Taxonomy behaviour.
• Shopify standard metafields: no standard condition definition.
• Subito condition values and the publishing guide: the five-value enum with stable keys.
• Google Merchant Center condition: new, refurbished or used; required for used and refurbished.
• TuttoSubito policy and payments: the buyer-borne fee bands, the €91.20 cap, no seller commission.
• TuttoSubito mechanics: couriers, parcel bands, 48-hour and 6-day windows, payout timing, who pays shipping, Italy-only delivery.
• Shopify Shipping setup: Italy covered, with BRT Bartolini, Poste Italiane and DHL Express Europe; distinct from international labels, limited to US, Canadian and Australian businesses.
• Shopify Payments in Italy: supported countries, EUR payouts, 2% conversion fee, gross-amount calculation from 6 April 2026.
• Shopify Italy pricing (plan names; prices vary by store location) and Shopify pricing for the third-party gateway fees and the 25% annual saving; Shopify Starter, closed to new stores.
• Shopify Acceptable Use Policy and the stricter Shopify Payments prohibited businesses list.
• Regulation: Shopify on GPSR, the One Stop Shop €10,000 threshold, D.Lgs. 32/2023 with Subito’s DAC7 page, and TUIR art. 55, art. 67 and art. 44 D.L. 269/2003.

What we could not verify, and left out. No Shopify plan price for Italy appears here: two independent reads of the Italian pricing page returned different figures, one could not load it at all because it geo-rendered in another currency, and Shopify states that prices vary by store location. For the same reason there is no Shopify card-processing rate. We publish no price for Subito’s promotion options (Vetrina, In Cima, Super boost, Urgente, In Evidenza) or for the Subito Pro subscription, because Subito publishes neither. Neither Subito nor Shopify publishes character limits for titles or descriptions. Subito’s scale figures differ from its parent’s brand page, so we cite Subito’s own page and name it as the source. Subito’s GMV is not published anywhere.

Related guides

• Sell on Subito: the complete seller guide
• Sell on Shopify: the complete seller guide
• Crosslist from Subito to eBay
• Crosslist from Subito to Vinted
• Subito vs Facebook Marketplace compared
• All crosslisting routes
• Crosslist from Subito to Etsy
• Crosslist from Subito to WooCommerce