A Closer Look At Shopify vs Amazon Dropshipping for Scalable Success

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Starting a dropshipping business can be exciting and daunting. On one hand, it’s a low-cost way to start a company that doesn’t require buying products upfront or managing inventory. On the other hand, choosing the right platform to launch your dropshipping store is critical to your success and can feel overwhelming. Shopify and Amazon are two of the most popular options; deciding between them can feel like a chess game. What are the long-term implications of each? How will they affect my profitability? What happens if I want to change platforms later? What will my customers think? This article breaks down Shopify vs. Amazon dropshipping to help you make the right choice for your future business goals and Best Dropshipping Niches 2025.

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A Closer Look At Shopify vs Amazon Dropshipping for Scalable Success

When it comes to dropshipping, both Shopify and Amazon have their pros and cons. Choosing one over the other will depend mainly on your business goals and preferences. Let’s take a closer look at how both platforms compare.

Business Model and Control

Shopify and Amazon operate on very different business models.

Shopify is a tool that lets you build your online store.

Amazon is a massive online store.

Just to give you some perspective, in 2023, U.S.-based Amazon sellers sold 4.5 billion products—8,600 per minute. When you sell on Shopify, renting a space to set up your shop is the online equivalent. Many merchants like doing this—the latest Shopify stats suggest that over 5.5 million sites are currently powered by the platform (source: Builtwith.com). Working with Amazon is more like selling your goods in a massive supermarket.

With Shopify, you’ll have more work to configure things how you want—and find customers. But because Shopify lets you build your website, you’ll have complete control over everything and can decide:

How your brand is presented

What your storefront looks like

How you advertise your products

How you capture data

How you sell your goods

Setting Up and Managing Your Store on Shopify vs Amazon

With Amazon, the customer base is already there…but so is the competition. To continue the supermarket analogy, having a storefront on Amazon is like having some shelf space in the supermarket aisle.

Many people will walk past it, but will they reach out for one of your products—or choose a competing one from the shelf above? Both these selling methods have pros and cons—I will discuss these in-depth later in this comparison. But first, how easy are both platforms to use?

Ease of Use

Amazon and Shopify are both designed to be easy for ecommerce beginners to get going with. When you sign up for an account on either platform, an onboarding setup process is provided that walks you through the key steps needed to start selling.

Many online resources and video tutorials are available to support you further. The learning curves—while not incredibly steep in either case—are quite different for both platforms.

Getting Started: Account Setup and Requirements on Amazon

You must learn how to use a database—“Amazon Seller Central”—most effectively with Amazon. So, the key challenge new Amazon merchants face involves ensuring requirements about product names, details, and catalog numbers are met. Filling in the required information is not particularly difficult. On the downside, you’ll need to collate a lot of information, and the process of doing this—and filling in the relevant forms—is time-consuming. Perhaps more significant is that there are quite a few hoops to go through to get an Amazon seller account in the first place.

To start selling on Amazon, you’ll need:

A business email address or Amazon customer account

A chargeable credit card

Government ID

Tax information

Phone number

A bank account

Customization and Branding: Designing Your Store on Shopify

With Shopify, you are building a new website. Adding products to your store is more straightforward—creating them takes seconds, and you can enter as much or as little information about them as you like. And all you need to get started with Shopify—initially at least—is an email address and basic contact details. You just enter these when starting a free trial.

With Shopify, you will have to become comfortable with web design tasks like:

Customizing themes

Creating web pages

Registering and mapping domain names

Although the platform has been designed to facilitate this as quickly as possible, if you’re new to web design, you still have quite a bit to learn.

Branding & User Experience

When you sell on Amazon, you are limited in how you can present your business. Although a few customizations are possible (you can add your business logo, for example), your storefront will generally look very ‘Amazony’, and you won’t be able to create much of a bespoke shopping experience using the platform. In many ways, this is a good thing because Amazon users expect a specific type of experience—and deviating too far from this won’t necessarily be suitable for sales.

Branding and Customization: How Much Control Do You Have on Shopify?

By contrast, Shopify gives you much control over your brand and user experience. You can tweak many templates (I counted 230 at the time of writing) to match your branding. If you have the relevant technical skills, you can adjust your store’s HTML and CSS code to customize its layout and the user experience you provide.

Shopify’s multi-currency and multilingual features allow you to customize the user experience further. So, if you’re after a very bespoke shopping experience tailored to a particular buyer persona, market, or location, Shopify offers this in a way that Amazon doesn’t.

Shipping and Dropshipping

With Amazon, you have two ways to ship products.

You can either:

Ship them yourself

Send them to Amazon for fulfillment using its “Fulfilment by Amazon” (FBA) service.

Amazon FBA can be a brilliant option for some businesses because it offers merchants product storage and shoppers super-fast ‘Prime’ delivery (a delivery method that many consumers love). It does come with some additional fees.

Shipping products with Shopify

You can set shipping rates to ship your goods with Shopify. A flexible range of options is available based on:

Product weight

Price

Quantity and more

If you don’t want to fulfill your products, connect your Shopify store to a third-party fulfillment service (including FBA—more shortly). You can also consider dropshipping. And speaking of which…

Dropshipping with Amazon vs. Shopify

Dropshipping is a way of selling goods where you don’t make, store, or fulfill any products. You simply:

Take an order via your online store

Send it to a supplier

They deliver the goods to your client

Your ecommerce site becomes a middleman of sorts. Although you can technically dropship with either Amazon or Shopify, Shopify is a much better solution for this type of online selling—and, in many ways, it has been designed with it in mind.

Dropshipping Integration: Shopify’s Apps vs. Amazon’s FBA Solutions

With Shopify, you can connect your store to many dropshipping apps and suppliers (at the time of writing, I counted 639), and there’s no sizeable investment involved. Amazon’s FBA service can fulfill items sold via a paid-for third-party integration (pictured below) or an official ‘Buy with Prime for Shopify’ app (more shortly). While dropshipping with Shopify is exceptionally straightforward, this is not true with Amazon.

Dropshipping Fees and Restrictions: Shopify vs Amazon

You can use Amazon somewhat, but some key limitations and additional costs apply. There are two particular points worth noting here: Retailers that you’re working with can’t ship directly to your customers unless they identify you as the ‘seller of record’—i.e., no orders can be shipped with:

Packing slips

Invoices

Other information that includes a seller name or contact information other than your own.

Unlike Shopify, Amazon takes a percentage of income from drop-shipped sales (in the region of 10% to 15%), meaning that your profit margins can be considerably lower. So, Shopify generally works out as a better dropshipping solution than Amazon—especially if you’re aiming to dropship a high volume of goods.

Attracting Customers to Your Store

There’s no doubt that if you’re looking for a ready-made customer base, Amazon is the clear winner in a Shopify vs Amazon shootout. Because of its 300+ million user accounts in over 180 countries, its 3.6 billion monthly visits, and its multi-billion dollar revenue ($574.8 billion net sales in 2023), having a storefront on Amazon technically gives you a shop window to the world. This is the primary benefit of using the platform over a store builder like Shopify.

That’s not to say that you will immediately experience a rush of customers the moment you start selling on Amazon—but your products will be immediately available on a hugely popular platform that generates enormous amounts of revenue. And, so long as you’ve identified a niche correctly and put work into creating quality product descriptions and a strong pricing strategy, you stand a reasonably good chance of generating sales.

Traffic and Marketing: Organic Discovery on Amazon vs. Driving Sales on Shopify

Amazon’s algorithmic “customers also viewed” and “customers also bought” recommendations can also help boost views of your products—and if you start generating a decent number of sales, these automated recommendations can help scale up a new business. (Marketing exercises like ‘Amazon Prime Day’ and Black Friday promotions can also help drive existing Amazon customers your way.)

By contrast, you start from scratch when you set up a Shopify store. Because of this, you’ll need to put a lot of effort into SEO, content marketing, online advertising, and online PR for your store to start gaining visibility and customers. This can be an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Conversely, you will have a robust online asset you control entirely if you succeed.

Business Stability and Platform Risks: Shopify vs Amazon

Amazon can change its terms of business or its recommendation algorithms any time it likes, which can—in extreme cases—sink a successful business. Although operating a Shopify store is not without risks either (the impact of Google core updates on your store’s performance in search results is probably the thing you have to worry about the most), there is a lot to be said for the relative independence, control, and stability that running your ecommerce site provides. But overall, because of its ready-made customer base that you can tap into, Amazon wins the ‘ease-of-attracting-customers’ battle.

Content Marketing

The success of many online stores is now often linked to content marketing—where interesting blog posts are used to attract readers to websites (with the ultimate aim of selling them something!). Thanks to a built-in blogging tool, Shopify makes creating in-depth posts about your business area easy, which can be used for these inbound marketing campaigns.

But you want to do content marketing for an Amazon product catalog. In that case, you must set up a separate blog (typically using a platform like WordPress or Squarespace) and insert links to your Amazon store’s products in my posts. This can work, but it’s not as effective as hosting my product catalog and your blog on the same site.

Email Marketing

Another key differentiating point between Shopify and Amazon worth mentioning is email marketing. When you subscribe to Shopify, you can access its ‘Shopify Email’ app—a powerful tool that lets you capture email addresses, create branded e-newsletters, and program basic autoresponder cycles.

Amazon doesn’t permit you to do any of this—it doesn’t provide a mechanism to capture email addresses for marketing purposes. You can only communicate with your customers by handling inquiries via its Buyer-Selling messages tool. So, creating and growing a mailing list—a vital asset for any online business—is a clear win for Shopify.

Local Selling and Point of Sale

The recent pandemic made ecommerce a sudden necessity for millions of ‘physical’ businesses forced to close their premises during lockdowns. Many of them turned to Shopify, and for good reason—the platform offers a wide range of ways to:

Sell online

Facilitate pickups

Offer local delivery services

\Shopify’s Customization for Local Businesses vs Amazon’s Global Market

Because Shopify is a customizable solution that lets you create your store rather than just display a product catalog, local businesses can use it to make online presences that encapsulate the essence of their physical store. As discussed earlier, you can use Shopify to create a presence that is entirely consistent with your existing brand, and by running a site on your domain, I can take advantage of local SEO techniques that can raise the visibility of my business in my area, too.

Amazon doesn’t offer you a similar way to cater specifically to a local audience; it’s more about getting products to as many people as possible as quickly as possible. This, of course, can be a very good thing, but if your business has a particular local focus, then Shopify is usually the better bet.

Point-of-Sale (POS) Integration: Shopify’s In-Store Capabilities vs Amazon’s POS Solutions

Thanks to its extensive point-of-sale (POS) functionality, Shopify can quickly process payments in physical locations. This lets retailers use one system to manage all their offline and online sales and keep inventory synced—no matter where a sale occurs.

Although various workarounds and integrations are available for Amazon that let you sell at the point of sale, Shopify’s POS features are currently considerably more extensive and much more ‘baked in’ to the platform. Shopify wins handsomely when facilitating sales in physical locations, and you can learn more about its POS solution here.

SEO—A Tale of Two Search Engines

A crucial part of success on either Shopify or Amazon boils down to your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts—and setting up a storefront on either platform means familiarizing yourself with how different search engines work. With a Shopify store, the leading search engine you’ll need to worry about is Google—when you run your store on your domain, it’s the leading search engine that will be presenting your products to the world (others like Bing and Duck Duck Go will also do so, but Google currently gobbles up nearly 90% of all search engine queries).

When selling on Amazon, you must primarily focus on a different search engine—Amazon’s (often called the “A11” algorithm). Amazon’s search engine is the second-biggest in the world, and it is used for 50% of all product searches.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Shopify’s Google Search vs Amazon’s Product Search

According to Moz (a key provider of SEO tools and data), it helps to consider the differences between the two search engines: On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions; they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy.

So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

SEO Best Practices: Optimizing Your Store for Shopify vs Amazon Search Engines

Lorna Franklin, Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World’s Largest Ecommerce Search Engine, Moz blog. So, to get the most out of your Shopify or Amazon store, you’ll need to research the best search engine optimization techniques for both.

I’d recommend checking out the Style Factory Shopify SEO guide as a starting point for Shopify and Moz’s guide to Amazon vs Google SEO for Amazon. (You’ll also need keyword research tools to find out what search terms you’ll realistically be able to rank for—for example, apps like Ahrefs and Semrush).

Dual Search Visibility: Leveraging Amazon’s SEO Advantage vs Shopify’s Single Search Channel

One thing to remember about Amazon stores is that they present two SEO opportunities, unlike Shopify’s. Not only can you optimize your storefront for Amazon’s search engine, but—because your Amazon store is indexable by other search engines—Google, too. This means that, technically, an Amazon store presents you with more opportunities to get your products in front of a ‘search audience’ than a Shopify one.

And importantly, having your products appear on two search engines allows you to significantly ‘de-risk’ your business. By generating traffic not just from Google’s search engine but Amazon’s too, you’ll be diversifying your traffic sources—and making yourself less vulnerable to all your traffic getting wiped out by a significant algorithm update.

Customer Support

Customer support for Amazon is available—but it’s not something the company shouts about. Support is not listed as a key feature of plans on the Amazon Sellers’ website, and contact details for Amazon’s support team are not particularly prominent on any of the company’s online material for merchants. Instead, Amazon encourages you to use the resources provided to solve your problems, like:

Help pages

Community forums

Video tutorials

You can request a callback from Amazon by logging into your account and clicking on the ‘Contact Us’ section.

Customer Support: Shopify’s Comprehensive Support vs Amazon’s Seller Assistance"

By contrast, support is a key feature of all Shopify plans, and it’s pretty easy to get through to Shopify’s support team. Live chat and email support are available for the platform, as are support web pages in 18 languages. (Phone support is also available if you’re a ‘Shopify Plus’ customer.) As somebody who builds Shopify websites for clients, I’ve found myself using Shopify support quite a bit—on the whole, my experience has been generally positive.

I found one particular aspect of contacting the Shopify support team annoying. Before you are presented with any contact details, you must address your query to an AI chatbot. As the ‘robot takeover’ continues, this is increasingly common practice among software companies—but I’d prefer it if the tech were a bit more developed (and able to answer queries more effectively) before it was presented to users. In many situations, using these chatbots just feels like an extra hoop to jump through.

Ethics of Shopify vs. Amazon

Something you don’t often see in Shopify vs Amazon comparisons is a discussion on ethics. Amazon’s approach to paying its fair share of tax and treating its workers moderately has raised a lot of question marks over the years. So, depending on your political outlook, dealing with this ethical dimension may raise dilemmas for you.

On the one hand, if you’re running an online business, it’s tough to ignore Amazon as a sales channel—it is now the primary way of purchasing goods for millions of consumers. By not offering your goods on the platform, you will be cutting yourself off from a vast customer base and the world’s second most popular search engine.

Ethical Considerations: Shopify’s Values vs Amazon’s Business Model

But by listing your products on Amazon, you are effectively buying into the company’s ethos and helping them to make money—and from a moral standpoint, you will need to be comfortable with doing that. So, if you have sensitivities around this area and want to take a more ethical approach to doing business, setting up a Shopify store may be a good way.

(Shopify has occasionally positioned itself as a ‘good shop to Amazon’s bad shop.’ Whether this is accurate depends on how its customers use the platform and what they sell on it. Still, there’s no doubt that Shopify does at least give you the option to sell online in a way that more closely matches your values and moral approach to conducting business.)

Pricing

We’ve discussed how Shopify and Amazon work and their respective e-commerce features, and now it’s time to examine their selling costs.

Shopify Costs

Shopify offers five monthly pricing plans:

Shopify Starter: $5 per month

Basic Shopify: $39 per month

Shopify: $105 per month

Advanced Shopify: $399 per month

Shopify Plus: starting at $2,300 per month

If you pay upfront for a year, you can avail of a 25% discount on your subscription. A Shopify free trial is also available, but it’s relatively short and lasts just three days. Shopify is currently trialing a system that offers an extended, three-month trial for $1 per month. All these plans give you access to core ecommerce functionality, including:

Unlimited digital and physical product catalogs

Credit card processing

Gift cards

Abandoned cart recovery

Discount codes

An SSL certificate)

Shopify Pricing Plans: Features, Limitations, and Which One is Right for Your Business

There are some key differences between Shopify plans to be aware of. These are as follows:

The Shopify ‘Starter’ plan doesn’t let you build a fully customizable standalone online store. Instead, it mainly allows you to sell products through social media channels and messaging apps or by embedding a ‘buy button’ on an existing website.

The number of users you can have on your account varies significantly according to your plan. For example, Shopify’s ‘Starter’ and ‘Basic’ plans only let you have one staff account; ‘Advanced’ Shopify enables you to have fifteen.

The ‘Shopify Plus‘ plan is focused on enterprise users, and prices vary depending on needs. This plan offers advanced security, API, fulfillment features, dedicated account management, and phone support.

Customizable reports are only available on the (expensive!) ‘Advanced’ and ‘Shopify Plus’ plans.

Credit card fees are lower on more expensive plans.

If you use Shopify Payments (Shopify’s built-in payment gateway), transaction fees are not applied. If you use a third-party payment processor, transaction fees apply and vary depending on your plan (as you might expect, they’re lower on the more expensive plans).

Amazon Costs

To sell online with Amazon, you must set up a ‘seller account.’

This comes in two flavors:

Individual: $0.99 per item sold

Professional: $39.99 per month

Please note that these are US prices; pricing elsewhere varies by territory, but the plan types are consistent.

Regarding the key differences between these payment options:

Individual Plan

The ‘Individual‘ plan is a ‘pay-as-you-go’ plan with no monthly fee to be paid; instead, a referral fee for each item applies. This plan limits you to selling less than 40 items a month and doesn’t let you use any Amazon advertising services or access detailed reports.

Professional Plan

The ‘Professional‘ plan is a subscription service, so there’s a recurring cost involved. It lets you:

Sell an unlimited number of goods

Use all of Amazon’s selling features

Set your shipping fees

Sell across multiple categories

Advertise on the platform

Add multiple users to your account

On top of the costs associated with the plans highlighted above, Amazon takes a referral fee on every sale. These vary significantly according to the type of product you’re selling—but most selling fees are between 8% and 15%.

Choosing the Right Plan: Shopify vs. Amazon Pricing Structures for Power Users

Because of the different natures of the Shopify and Amazon platforms, it’s hard to say which pricing structure is the ‘best value.’ I recommend the Shopify plan as the ‘sweet spot’ option.

If you want to go down the Amazon route, the ‘Professional’ plan is the only one that power users or professional merchants should consider. If you hope to avoid referral fees altogether, Shopify is a better option.

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Diversifying Your Portfolio is Not a Bad Idea

Putting all your eggs in a basket is always a bad idea. You can be one of the over 1.75 million merchants selling on Shopify and selling at Amazon simultaneously. Shopify’s sales channel offers many benefits to businesses looking to expand to Amazon.

Although this comparison has so far examined the differences between Shopify and Amazon, it’s essential to understand that you don’t have to use them in a mutually exclusive way.

Integrating Shopify and Amazon via Apps

You can integrate Shopify pretty tightly with Amazon via apps from the Shopify app store and third-party developers.

Available solutions for doing so include:

The ‘Amazon Integration Plus’ app

The ‘CedCommerce Amazon Channel’

You can use the Shopify-developed ‘Shopify Marketplace Connect’ app (formerly ‘Amazon by Codisto’)

These apps let you:

Create listings for products new to Amazon.

Link your existing Amazon listings to your Shopify store’s admin.

Receive notifications in Shopify for your Amazon orders.

You will usually need to pay to use these apps (for the examples given, plans cost $14 to $250 per month, with some more expensive ‘Enterprise’ plans also available). Still, they do give you the best of both worlds—a brand and website of your own via Shopify and access to the vast Amazon marketplace.

How Amazon’s ‘Buy with Prime’ Works on Shopify Store

Amazon’s ‘Buy with Prime‘ feature lets FBA merchants sell goods with Prime benefits in their stores, giving their customers:

A fast and familiar checkout process

Next-day delivery

Free returns

When it was launched in April 2022, Buy with Prime was widely regarded as a significant threat to Shopify. This was because it moved Amazon in a more Shopify-like direction, allowing merchants to run their digital stores while using Amazon as a payment gateway and fulfillment service.

Shopify’s discomfort with Buy with Prime’s introduction was reflected in its statement at the time that any of its merchants who attempted to use the feature would violate their terms of service.

Integrating 'Buy with Prime' into Your Shopify Store: Benefits and Setup Guide

Shopify and Amazon subsequently announced an official partnership that allows Shopify merchants to add ‘Buy with Prime’ to their checkout (but with all payments handled by Shopify’s built-in payment gateway, ‘Shopify Payments,’ rather than Amazon).

To use this integration, Shopify merchants must install the free ‘Buy with Prime for Shopify’ app in the App Store.

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