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Sell a USD 40 dress on Etsy with USD 6 shipping and the fees come to USD 4.82. Questo è 10.5% of the order, before you’ve paid for the dress itself. Let Etsy’s Offsite Ads claim that same sale and you’re handing over USD 11.72, roughly a quarter of what the customer paid. Your own store costs more to set up and far less to run. The crossover arrives earlier than most boutique guides admit.
Risposta rapida: Under about 10 ordini al mese, stay on Etsy and pay nothing monthly. Oltre quello, Squarespace Core at USD 29/month annually takes 0% of your sales and pays for itself. Past roughly USD 5,000 un mese, or a couple of hundred variants, move to WooCommerce, which takes no cut at all. Treat Etsy as a discovery channel afterwards, never as your only shopfront.
Ultima revisione: settembre 2026. Platform fees, registry pricing and returns data verified against primary sources.
What This Guide Checked, and What It Couldn’t
Every fee below was read off the company’s own pricing or help pages in September 2026. None of it was copied from a roundup. Where a page geo-locked to euros, that’s flagged rather than converted. Shopify is the clearest case. Its pricing page served euros on four attempts, and both of its help-centre pages refuse to state amounts. So no dollar subscription figure for Shopify appears here.
Three exclusions shaped the list. Platforms with no published fee schedule were left out, because a boutique can’t budget against a sales call. Plans that can’t actually take a payment were excluded from any cheapest comparison. That removes Wix Light despite its USD 17 prezzo. Anything quoted only by affiliate roundups was dropped, including two print-on-demand claims that collapsed on checking.
Weighting follows what drains a small boutique’s margin: per-order fees first, then monthly cost, then catalogue limits, then design. We ran no load tests and bought nothing. Two honest gaps remain. No primary source publishes a current apparel-only return rate. Namecheap’s dollar renewal price couldn’t be confirmed either, so neither is stated here as fact.
The Fee Math Nobody Runs for You
Most comparisons quote Etsy’s headline 6.5% e fermati lì. That number understates what leaves your account. Three charges compound, and they hit exactly the kind of product a boutique sells.
Start with the listing. Etsy charges Dollaro statunitense 0.20 per inserzione, and its help pages are blunt about it. The fee applies “regardless of whether or not the item listed sells”. A listing runs four months, then needs renewing at the same USD 0.20. The transaction fee is 6.5% of the total order. Etsy states it “applies to the total cost of the item, along with shipping and gift wrap”. Payment processing for a US seller adds 3% più USD 0.25, calculated on the total including shipping and sales tax.
Put a real order through that. Un dollaro statunitense 40 top with USD 6 postage is a USD 46 ordine. Paghi USD 0.20 to list it, Dollaro statunitense 2.99 nelle commissioni di transazione, e USD 1.63 in processing. Totale: Dollaro statunitense 4.82, o 10.5% of what the buyer paid.
Now the part that catches boutiques specifically. Say you sell one garment in five sizes and three colours. Etsy bills each additional variation in the same order as though it were another listing. Their help pages say you’re charged the standard USD 0.20 listing fee for each additional item bought from that listing. A customer ordering three sizes to try costs you another USD 0.40, before anything ships back.
Then Offsite Ads. Etsy advertises your products elsewhere and bills you when one of those clicks converts. Shops that have always made under USD 10,000 in any 365-day period pay 15% of the order total. Cross USD 10,000 and the rate drops to 12%, but participation becomes mandatory. Opting out early doesn’t save you. On reaching the threshold, Etsy requires participation and charges 12% “for the lifetime of your shop”. Fees cap at USD 100 per ordine.
If Offsite Ads attributes our USD 46 order at 15%, add USD 6.90. The order now costs USD 11.72 nelle tasse, di 25.5%.
Contro questo, your own store on Squarespace Core takes no commerce fee at all. Card processing runs 2.9% più USD 0.30. Lo stesso dollaro americano 46 order costs USD 1.63. Sono dollari americani 3.19 cheaper per order than Etsy. Divide the USD 29 monthly plan by USD 3.19 and you get the crossover: di 10 orders monthly. Sotto quello, Etsy is cheaper. Above it, every order on your own site is money you keep.
Three Ways to Put a Boutique Online
The choice isn’t really between brands. It’s between three models with different bills, and the right one changes as you grow.
A marketplace stall
Etsy gives you buyers on day one and no monthly fee. You pay for that in per-order cuts, in rules you don’t set, and in a customer list you never own. Etsy Plus is optional at USD 10 un mese. New shops pay a one-time USD 15 tariffa di installazione. Non-US sellers carry an extra line. Etsy raised its Regulatory Operating Fees on 22 giugno 2026, taking France from 0.47% per 1.14% and Italy from 0.32% per 0.80%. The UK moved from 0.32% per 0.48%, and Hungary was added at 1.97%. US sellers aren’t charged it.
Skip a marketplace-only plan once repeat customers appear. You can’t email people Etsy considers its own.
A hosted store
You rent the software, and they handle servers and security. The traps here are specific, and they cost real money.
- Squarespace Basic richiede 2% of every product sale, on top of processing. Core at USD 29/month annually drops that to zero. Basic is a false economy for physical goods.
- Wix Light cannot sell anything. No store, nessun pagamento, no payments, despite costing USD 17. A boutique’s real Wix entry is Core at USD 29.
- Ecwid Starter caps 10 prodotti for USD 5/month. That’s tight for clothing, and the next tier is USD 29 fatturati ogni anno. Ecwid changed pricing on Venture, Business and Unlimited on 2 marzo 2026, leaving Starter alone.
- Square Online is free with no monthly fee. Its free tier charges 3.3% più USD 0.30 in linea, contro 2.9% più USD 0.30 on paid tiers. Square replaced 18 separate subscriptions with three tiers on 6 ottobre 2025.
- BigCommerce Core caps GMV a USD 30,000 over a trailing twelve months. It restructured plans on 1 giugno 2026 and added a fee of up to 2% on outside processors. Stripe and PayPal sit on its free list.
Shopify belongs in this group and carries one charge worth knowing. Route payments through anything other than Shopify Payments and Basic adds 2% per ordine. That falls to 1% su Crescere e 0.6% su Avanzato. Its plan prices are covered in our Shopify store setup guide, and the wider field in our roundup of ecommerce website builders.
Your own WordPress store
WooCommerce is a free plugin rather than a subscription, and it takes no percentage of your sales. Processing through WooPayments runs 2.9% più USD 0.30 for US domestic cards, with no monthly fee. W3Techs data dated 12 settembre 2026 puts WooCommerce on 47.8% of all ecommerce systems.
What you trade is maintenance. You pick the host, run the updates, and own the consequences. WordPress 7.1 is current and recommends PHP 8.3, while WooCommerce 11.1.0 wants PHP 8.0 as a floor. One note if you’re reading older advice: Automattic discontinued Woo Express, and its page now reads “Woo Express is no longer available”. La nostra guida a Hosting di e-commerce WordPress covers what a store needs from a server that a blog doesn’t.
What Year One Actually Costs
Take a realistic first-year boutique: 60 items listed, 10 ordini al mese, Dollaro statunitense 46 average order. Here’s the bill on your own Squarespace Core store.
- Dominio: circa USD 11 per l'anno
- Piattaforma: Dollaro statunitense 348, that’s USD 29/month billed annually
- Card processing on 120 ordini: circa USD 196
- Logo: Dollaro statunitense 0, for reasons covered below
- Anno uno: circa USD 555
Now the same 120 orders on Etsy. Strip the listing fee out of that USD 4.82 primo, so it isn’t counted twice. Transaction and processing come to USD 4.62 per ordine, o USD 554 durante tutto l'anno. Listings add USD 36, coprente 60 items reposted three times as they expire. Questo è circa USD 590. On those numbers the gap looks small.
The difference is what Offsite Ads does to it. If Etsy attributes just a fifth of those orders at 15%, add about USD 166. Etsy then becomes the more expensive channel by a comfortable margin, and you still don’t own the customer.
Neither number includes stock, packaging or postage. They’re the cost of being open, not the cost of trading.
One number is worth setting against that plan. IRP Commerce tracks independent SME retailers in Britain and Ireland, excluding Amazon and the big chains. That makes it a closer benchmark for a boutique than most. Its July 2026 figures put fashion conversion at 1.81%, dal 1.36% un anno prima. At that rate, 10 orders a month needs roughly 550 visite. That’s the traffic target sitting behind every threshold in this guide.
Il tuo nome, Your Domain, and a Price Rise in November
Domains are the one line item with a dated increase already on the calendar. Verisign is raising the wholesale registry fee for .com from USD 10.26 a USD 10.97 sopra 1 novembre 2026. That’s a USD 0.71 rise, announced on 23 aprile 2026 alongside its first-quarter results. Every registrar pays it, so every registrar passes it on.
Two ways to handle that. Porkbun sells .com at USD 11.08 and charges the same to renew, which removes the first-year bait. Cloudflare Registrar sells at cost, stating you “only pay what is charged by registries and ICANN”, though it publishes no figure. Namecheap’s USD 6.79 first year is real, but limited to new customers, one per household. Its renewal rate couldn’t be confirmed in dollars, so treat any quoted renewal with suspicion.
On the name itself, three rules earn their keep. Say it out loud before you buy it, because half your traffic arrives from someone repeating it in a message. Check it against a trademark register before printing anything, since swing tags and packaging are expensive to redo. And avoid the trend word that dates you. A shop named after a 2026 silhouette looks tired by 2028.
Logo, Fotografie, and the Colour Problem
You don’t need to pay for a logo. Namecheap’s Logo Maker is described on its own page as a “100% free logo generator tool”. The same page says it “never adds watermarks” and includes PNG and SVG files with every download. That SVG matters more than it sounds. Vector files scale to a swing tag, a tote and a shop sign without anyone redrawing them. Most free tools hold the vector back and sell it later, which our comparison of the best logo makers goes through in detail.
Product photos are where boutique sites are won. A phone by a north-facing window beats a bad studio setup, so spend the effort on consistency instead of equipment. Shoot every garment the same distance from the same background. A grid of mismatched photos reads as amateur, even when each shot is fine on its own.
Colour accuracy isn’t a vanity issue. It’s a returns issue, and a screen is worst at exactly this. Photograph each colourway separately rather than recolouring one image. Then say in the description what the light was. “Photographed in daylight, the navy reads slightly warmer on screen” prevents more returns than any size chart.
On file formats, AVIF now has 95.36% global browser support and WebP 96.82%, per caniuse data checked in September 2026. Serve AVIF with a WebP or JPEG fallback and you’re safe everywhere that matters. Most of this gets judged on a phone. The same IRP data puts mobile at 60.4% of fashion sales, contro 36.6% sul tavolo. Speed pays here too, though the best-known evidence is older than it looks. Google’s study with Deloitte found a 0.1 second mobile improvement lifted retail conversions 8.4%. That data was collected in late 2019.
Stock, Sizes and Colourways
This is where a boutique stops resembling a general online shop. Twenty styles sounds small. Twenty styles in five sizes and three colours is 300 individual things to count, photograph, price and reconcile.
That number breaks plans quietly. Platforms differ on whether a variant counts against your product limit, and the cheap tiers are where it bites. Ecwid’s 10-product Starter plan is fine for a candle maker and hopeless for clothing. Check how your platform counts before you pay for a year.
Two habits save real money. Keep one SKU per size and colour from day one, even while you’re small enough to remember everything (you won’t be for long). Retrofitting SKUs onto a live catalogue is miserable work. And don’t list stock you haven’t physically counted. Overselling a size you no longer have costs you a refund, an apology and often the customer.
How many products do you actually need to open? Fewer than you think. A tight 20 per 30 pieces that clearly belong together sells better than 200 that don’t. It also keeps your photography consistent while you learn what moves.
Where the Stock Comes From
Two routes suit a new boutique, and they carry different risk.
Wholesale means buying stock up front. Faire dominates this space for independent retailers, and its published terms are clear. Marketplace orders carry 15% commission, più un USD una tantum 10 fee on a customer’s first order. Bring your own retailers in through a Faire Direct link and commission is 0%. Brands based outside North America pay a 10% referral fee on top for a first order, così 25% in totale.
Print on demand means no stock at all. Printful runs a free tier, with a Growth plan at USD 24.99/month. That plan becomes free once your store passes USD 12,000 a year in sales. Printify offers a free tier and Premium at USD 39/month, o USD 24.99 fatturato annualmente. One thing worth knowing before you treat them as rival quotes: Printful and Printify announced their merger on 5 novembre 2024. Both brands still run as separate platforms under one owner.
Print on demand protects your cash and costs you margin and control. Wholesale does the opposite. Plenty of boutiques run both, using printed pieces to test a design before committing to a wholesale order.
Returns Are the Fashion Tax
Returns are the line that decides whether a clothing boutique makes money. The National Retail Federation, with Happy Returns, mettere 2025 returns at 15.8% of total US retail sales, di valore Dollaro statunitense 849.9 miliardo. Online is worse: 19.3% delle vendite online came back. They estimate 9% of returns are fraudulent. The research was published on 15 ottobre 2025, surveying 2,006 consumers and 358 ecommerce professionals.
Be careful with the apparel numbers quoted elsewhere. No primary source publishes a current apparel-only return rate. The figure most often repeated covers a twelve-month period that ended in March 2023. We’d rather tell you that than repeat it.
What is documented is that this is fixable. ASOS reported cutting its underlying returns rate by about 150 basis points in its 2025 financial year. That year ran 52 settimane a 31 agosto 2025. Its annual report credits tightened size guidance, more customer reviews, and a fair use policy. The effect reached the accounts: distribution costs fell 70 basis points to 10.6% delle entrate.
For a small shop, the lesson transfers without the budget. Measure every garment flat and publish the measurements, non solo “size 10”. Let buyers see reviews that mention fit. And put your returns policy where people find it before checkout. Baymard’s research across 50 studies puts cart abandonment at 70.22%. An unsatisfactory returns policy sits behind 13% of abandonments, and unexpected extra costs behind 40%.
Rules That Kick In Once You Ship
Selling into the EU brings obligations that catch small sellers by surprise. The General Product Safety Regulation has applied since 13 dicembre 2024, and its Article 19 covers distance selling directly. Any online offer must show the manufacturer’s name and both postal and electronic address. It must name a responsible person inside the EU where the manufacturer isn’t established. Add information identifying the product, including a picture, plus safety warnings in a language the buyer understands. The text is public on EUR-Lex.
The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 giugno 2025 and names ecommerce explicitly. There’s a microenterprise exemption, and it’s narrower than most summaries suggest. It covers microenterprises providing services, defined as fewer than 10 staff with turnover or a balance sheet under EUR 2 milione. It isn’t a blanket pass for small businesses, and it doesn’t exempt products.
US sellers have an easier time here. Three new state privacy laws took effect on 1 gennaio 2026, in Indiana, Kentucky and Rhode Island. Their thresholds start at 35,000 residenti, so nearly every new boutique falls outside them.
Which Setup Fits Your Boutique
Match your situation to one of these five, using the constraint you can’t move.
Testing the idea, sotto 10 ordini al mese. Stay on Etsy and pay no monthly fee. Skip Squarespace Core for now. A USD 29 un mese, it takes roughly 10 orders before the per-order saving covers the subscription. Opt out of Offsite Ads while you still can.
Design-led, 10 per 100 ordini un mese, 60 SKU, under USD 40/month. Squarespace Core at USD 29 fatturati ogni anno, per il 0% commerce fee. Don’t take Basic to save USD 10. Suo 2% cut costs more than the difference above roughly USD 500 in monthly sales. Skip Wix Light entirely, since it can’t take a payment.
Checkout on an existing site, sotto 10 prodotti. Ecwid Starter at USD 5/month embeds into what you already have. Leave the moment you pass 10 prodotti. Venture is USD 29 annualmente, and Square Online’s free tier does the same job at USD 0 mensile.
Already on Square registers. Square Online free, for the shared inventory. Run the numbers before upgrading, anche se. Square Plus at USD 49/month only cuts your online rate from 3.3% per 2.9%. That needs about USD 12,250 in monthly online sales to pay for itself.
Past USD 5,000 mensile with 200-plus variants. WooCommerce on ecommerce hosting, because it takes no percentage and caps no catalogue. Skip it if nobody on your side will run updates. Squarespace Core stays the calmer bill in that case.
Domande frequenti
Is it cheaper to sell on Etsy or on my own website?
Etsy is cheaper below roughly 10 ordini al mese, because it charges nothing monthly. On a USD 46 ordine, Etsy takes USD 4.82. A Squarespace Core store takes USD 1.63 in card processing. Quel dollaro 3.19 gap covers the USD 29 monthly plan at about 10 ordini. Sopra quello, your own site wins, and the margin widens every month.
Does Etsy charge fees on shipping and on each size I sell?
Yes to both. Etsy’s 6.5% transaction fee applies to the total order, including shipping and gift wrap when you charge for them. Processing is calculated on the total including shipping and sales tax. On a multi-variation listing, you’re charged another USD 0.20 for each additional item bought. A customer ordering three sizes to try costs you USD 0.40 extra, before any of it comes back.
How many products do I need to open an online boutique?
Twenty to thirty pieces is enough to open, provided they look like one collection. A tight range photographs consistently and tells visitors what you are. Watch your platform’s limits rather than your ambitions. Clothing multiplies fast: 20 styles across five sizes and three colours is 300 varianti. Ecwid’s USD 5 Starter plan stops at 10 prodotti.
Can I start an online boutique without holding inventory?
sì, through print on demand. Printful has a free tier and a USD 24.99 Growth plan, which becomes free past USD 12,000 nelle vendite annuali. Printify runs a free tier with Premium at USD 39 mensile, o USD 24.99 fatturato annualmente. You give up margin and control over the product in exchange for risking no cash on stock. Note the two merged on 5 novembre 2024, so you’re comparing one company’s two catalogues.
How do I cut down on clothing returns?
Publish flat measurements for every size instead of relying on size labels. Photograph each colourway separately rather than recolouring one image. Make your returns terms easy to find before checkout. This is what the large retailers do too. ASOS cut its underlying returns rate by about 150 basis points in the year to 31 agosto 2025. It credits better size guidance, more reviews and a fair use policy.
Which platform handles clothing sizes and colours best?
For a small catalogue, Squarespace Core at USD 29 annually handles variants without a product cap and takes 0% delle vendite. For a large one, WooCommerce is stronger, because nothing caps the catalogue and no platform takes a cut. Avoid entry tiers that count variants against a low product limit. And avoid Wix Light, which can’t process a payment at all.
Where to Start This Week
Buy the domain first, prima 1 novembre 2026 if you want to register ahead of the .com increase. Then list 20 pieces on Etsy and see whether anything sells. That costs USD 4 in listing fees and answers the only question that matters. Opt out of Offsite Ads while you’re still under the USD 10,000 soglia.
When you pass 10 orders in a month, open the real store. That’s the point where your own site stops being an expense. It’s also where owning your customer list starts to compound.
Un'ultima cosa, and it’s the piece most new owners skip. Write the measurements down. Every garment, piatto, in centimetres, before it goes live. It’s the dullest hour of the whole build, and it’ll do more for your margin than a redesign.
Maybe you’re weighing this against selling without stock at all. La nostra guida a creating a dropshipping website covers the model where you never touch the product. That changes both the economics and the risks described above. For the server side of a WooCommerce boutique, the WordPress eCommerce hosting comparison linked earlier covers what checkout demands from a host. The ecommerce builder roundup goes deeper on fees and lock-in across the platforms named here.