Shopify vs Sellfy (2023): The Complete Guide

Making the decision of Shopify vs Sellfy can be a challenge at first. Both tools are designed to help you get selling online. Shopify and Sellfy are also well-known for being easy-to-use, convenient, and packed with tools for customization.

However, there are always some differences between ecommerce website building tools worth considering. As you make your decision on the service that you’re going to use to launch your business, it’s worth doing a deep-dive into both tools.

Shopify is probably the best-known ecommerce platform in the world, allowing business owners to design highly customized stores with ease – and minimal web development skills. Shopify also has access to a host of apps and integrations to make your life easier.

Sellfy, on the other hand, is a lesser-known ecommerce platform, but one with an increasing amount of clout in the digital landscape. Sellfy allows users to build stores directly on the platform or incorporate sales tools into their existing website.

Let’s compare both options.

Shopify vs Sellfy: Pros and Cons

Both Shopify and Sellfy have a lot of benefits to offer in their own right. Shopify and Sellfy are excellent tools for beginners in a digital landscape, with tons of direction to guide you through the basics of making your store. Shopify, however, does have a lot more flexibility among the two services, with it’s extensive app market and scalable design.

Sellfy is simple and secure, and it’s best suited for people who want to primarily sell digital services, and a few physical products. You can also access a range of automations with Sellfy, and print-on-demand services without having to access add-ons.

Shopify Pros and Cons

Sellfy Pros and Cons

Shopify vs Sellfy: Background Info

Let’s start with a basic overview of both tools. Sellfy and Shopify are both digital tools for online sales, designed to help you keep your online store up and running. Starting life in 2006, Shopify has a headquarters in Ottawa, Canada, and stands as one of the most powerful ecommerce companies in the world. The solution allows for selling of all kinds of physical and digital products.

Shopify is best-known worldwide for it’s ease-of-use, customization options, and access to a wide range of integration and add-ons, intended to help you build the store most-suited to your needs. Shopify even has dedicated add-ons for specific selling strategies, like Oberlo for dropshipping.

Sellfy is similar to Shopify in a lot of regards, but it focuses mainly on supporting creators who want to make money online through things like merchandizing, and content subscriptions. You can easily sell a host of digital and physical products catered towards a specific online community.

Unlike most ecommerce platforms, Sellfy has a print-on-demand platform built into the service, so you can save time searching for an app for merchandizing your products. You will need to handle some aspects of running your store yourself, but Sellfy ensures there’s also various options for automation, to keep you on track.

Shopify vs Sellfy: Basic Features

As mentioned above, since Sellfy and Shopify are both tools for ecommerce selling, they have a lot of overlap between features. Both can allow you to sell online assets in the form of digital and physical products, and both have access to various tools for different kinds of sales, including print-on-demand and dropshipping. Some of the basic features on both tools are:

• Online store functionality: Both Shopify and Sellfy offer all the tools you’d expect for running an online store. Each has access to templates to make your store look fantastic, and there’s a range of checkout and payment options available.
• Templates and customization: You can customize your storefront with both software options, and you’ll be able to sell both physical and digital products. However, Shopify does have a few more templates and customizations available.
• Inventory management: Both tools offer basic inventory management tools for your digital and physical products. Sellfy also offers specialist solutions to help protect the digital files you sell and stop them from being re-sold.
• Calculations: Both Sellfy and Shopify can offer calculations for your shipping costs, as well as guidance for things like tax and VAT.
• Integrations: While you can access integrations for both Sellfy and Shopify, the integration options are much greater through Shopify. The app market is extremely advanced, with hundreds of options to choose from. Sellfy’s connections are more limited.
• Buttons: Sellfy and Shopify both have tools which allow you to add selling functionality to an existing website or online premises. This can help you to start selling items as quickly as possible, without having to start building again from scratch.
• Payments: Sellfy accepts PayPal and Stripe as its primary payment options, so you can access payment instantly from your clients. Shopify offers a wider range of payment options (over 100 payment gateways), but all will come with transaction fees, other than the dedicated Shopify Payments option.
• Security: Dedicated security solutions are available from both applications to keep your store safe. You can secure your digital assets and lock access to various products with Sellfy. Shopify and Sellfy also have tools for encryption and PCI protection in place.
• Mobile friendly: As mobile friendliness becomes increasingly crucial, both Shopify and Sellfy ensure your store will work just as well on a mobile device as it does on a desktop.
• Dropshipping: While Shopify offers integrations with tools for dropshipping, like Oberlo, Spocket, and so on, Sellfy has the technology already built-in.

Shopify vs Sellfy: Similarities

As online platforms for selling, Shopify and Sellfy are bound to have a few things in common. For instance, both Shopify and Sellfy have their own shopping cart functionality, complete with tools to automatically calculate shipping charges. You also get basic store functionality on both platforms, though Shopify is generally considered to be better equipped for selling than Sellfy.

Both Sellfy and Shopify also have extensive customer support solutions, designed to help companies get started, with live chat, ticketing systems, and phone for users with extra needs. Shopify does have a more extensive solution of how-to articles and guides, however.

Another area where these two solutions are quite similar is in their reporting functionality. Both tools have integrated analytics capabilities so you can track the product selling the most, and monitor orders. Shopify has detailed analytics and reporting pages, with access to a system that automatically creates reports on your behalf.

Sellfy can integrate with various tools, including Google Analytics, so you can monitor what’s happening in your store in real-time.

Finally, both of these tools are generally quite easy to use. Both Sellfy and Shopify stive to make their platform as simple and convenient as possible. The registration process for both platforms is very convenient, and the dashboard is also straightforward and easy-to-use. One of the key selling points for both Sellfy and Shopify is anyone can use them.

You don’t need any kind of coding knowledge to get started, and there’s very little learning curve, even with all the features you get from something like Shopify.

Sellfy vs Shopify: Pricing and Plans

One of the main differences between Sellfy and Shopify is the pricing plan you’ll get with both solutions. Both platforms have an incredible 14-day trial period allowing users to test the system before making their final decision, so you can start with the demo then decide where you want to go from there. Let’s start by looking at Shopify’s pricing plans.

Shopify’s pricing plans separate into four main options.

The first package you can get is “Shopify Lite”, which allows you to add sales functionality to an existing website or blog for $9 per month. You can accept credit card payments with this package, but you won’t be able to build a website. Other packages include:

• Basic Shopify: For $29 per month, you can access a site-building solution with 2 staff accounts, 4 locations, and a Shopify POS. However, there is a 2% transaction fee.
• Shopify: At $79 per month, Shopify gives you 5 staff accounts and locations, and a lower transaction fee of just 1%
• Advanced Shopify: For £299 per month, you’ll have a smaller 0.5% transaction fee, 8 locations, and 15 staff accounts.

Shopify Plus is also available for companies in search of enterprise functionality. However, there’s no direct price for this option – you’ll need to get a custom quote.

Sellfy pricing:

Perhaps the most exciting part of Sellfy is its “free forever” plan. The package offers support for unlimited sales per year, for up to 10 products. You can sell physical and print-on-demand products, access full store customization, discount codes, and VAT/Tax settings. However, there’s no custom domain available here. Other packages include:

• Starter: Starting at $19 per month, you can make up to $10k in sales per year with no transaction fees, unlimited products, and 2000 email credits. You also get to connect your own branded domain.
• Business: From $49 per month, you can sell up to $50k per year, with full store customization, 10,000 email credits, product migration, upselling, and cart abandonment options. This package also comes with Sellfy branding removed.
• Premium: At $99 per month you can make up to $200k in sales per year, access 50,000 email credits, and you get priority support.

If you’re selling more than $200k per year, you can contact the Sellfy team to access a deal for high-volume sellers.

Shopify vs Sellfy: Customization

Both Sellfy and Shopify will ensure you can customize your store to make it as unique and attractive as possible. However, your options are a lot more extensive with Shopify. Sellfy feels like more of a basic solution for print on demand and dropshipping – rather than an extensive ecommerce platform.

Shopify, on the other hand, is a state-of-the-art website builder, with a lot of tools to help you improve the look and feel of your store. There are dozens of customizable professional templates to choose from, and there’s an extensive drag-and-drop solution for making changes.

Sellfy’s store builder is far more simplistic. The basic shop builder is easy to use, but customization is limited to making some simple changes to styles and colors. There aren’t any professional, ready-made templates to make your store look incredible.

Notably, part of what makes Shopify so compelling from a customization perspective is the diverse application market which comes attached to the service. Though you can get a pretty complete experience for your online store without any downloads from Shopify, the app market ensures you never have to compromise on functionality.

Shopify’s app market is one of the biggest on the market, with access to everything from email marketing and social media advertising tools to apps which help with SEO.

You can link your site to Amazon or eBay and access a range of capabilities without the need to embed any coding like you would with another ecommerce solution.

Sellfy, on the other hand, does have some integration and third-party options, but it’s closer to BigCommerce than Amazon when it comes to add-on tools. Sellfy assumes you’ll have most of what you need from a commerce platform from the service already. This means you don’t get the freedom that comes with complete app marketplaces.

Shopify vs Sellfy: Payments

The good news for anyone interested in making their own website with Sellfy or Shopify, is both will allow you to receive payments from a range of tools relatively easily. You can accept payments from both service through Stripe and PayPal, however, there are a lot more options available from Shopify.

Sellfy gives you immediate credit as soon as a customer completes a transaction, but you can really only choose from a couple of payment options.

Shopify, on the other hand, integrates with a huge selection of third-party payment processes, debit cards, and credit card systems. This means your small business can grow by offering customers the kind of purchasing experiences they want.

Shopify also has Shopify Payments, which you can access if you want to leverage a secure cart for multiple currencies, without paying transaction fees. If you’re running an ecommerce business with a unique approach to payments, you can also take things like bitcoin and cryptocurrency with Shopify.

Shopify vs Sellfy: Shipping and Delivery

If you want to keep your customers happy, you need to offer a lot more than just regular gift cards and great products. Good shipping and fulfillment are essential too.

Sellfy is mainly used by creators building digital products, so there’s not a great deal of need for product tracking. If you’re looking to sell your merchandise and custom-printed items through Sellfy you can issue tracking numbers to customers for easier management.

Shopify offers the “Shopify Shipping” experience, which comes with an automatic tracking number your customers can use on the website to track their orders. The Shopify app marketplace will also offer a wide range of tools for shipping and inventory management too.

Sellfy automatically sets your shipping region to Worldwide, but you can adjust this and your shipping costs within your account settings. Shopify helps out with your shipping calculations and provides integrations with a huge selection of shipping carriers, including UPS, FedEx, DHL, and many others. Shopify also ensures you can track all of your inventory in the same place. You can even link in different sales channels.

Shopify vs Sellfy: Reporting and Analytics

No matter what kind of ecommerce software you’re using, you’re going to need analytics and reporting to ensure you’re getting the best return on your investment. Fortunately, both Shopify and Sellfy do give you insights into what’s going on behind the scenes in your store.

Within your Sellfy dashboard, you can keep an eye on everything from subscribers to subscription products, store visitors, purchases, and conversion rates. The analytics are very similar to what you might expect from a site builder like Wix. You’ll also be able to change the time range of your reports, although they look at the last 30 days by default.

Like WordPress, and other leading sites, you can connect Google Analytics with your Sellfy account without having to rely on tools like Zapier. This gives you a more comprehensive overview of the buyer journey.

The level of reporting and analytics you get from Shopify will depend on the Shopify plan you choose. There’s a comprehensive Analytics dashboard where you can track information about your number of visitors, traffic sources, top products, top pages, and so on.

However, you will get more advanced ecommerce software insights if you’re using the Premium plan for Shopify. If you want to expand your insights on Shopify, you can always use the app store to access external third-party apps. Like Sellfy, Shopify also works with Google Analytics, so you can create more comprehensive workflows for everything from cart recovery to retargeting.

Sellfy vs Shopify: Customer Support

Learning to sell products online with any ecommerce store builder and marketing tools can be complex. There’s a learning curve with any software, but Sellfy and Shopify aim to offer assistance when you need it most.

You can contact the Sellfy support team through live chat or email or access the Sellfy Help Center for self-service support in the form of articles and guides. The knowledge base can help you understand everything from SSL certificates to downloading issues for your customers.

Shopify also has a comprehensive help center full of articles about starting, managing, and expanding your stores. There are various documents on using Shopify apps and themes, and you can even access a comprehensive community of Shopify fans for extra guidance.

Accessing extra support from the Shopify team requires you to be logged into your account. You can also speak to the Shopify team through the various social media pages owned by the company. While Sellfy and Shopify have a lot in common for customer service, you do get slightly more resources with Shopify to help you understand and grow your store.

Sellfy vs Shopify: Which is Best

Both Shopify and Sellfy are excellent ecommerce platforms designed to help entrepreneurs run their stores easily and effectively online. Both solutions have a host of incredible features which allow business leaders to grow on the web. However, they take very different approaches to success.

Sellfy is an excellent platform to choose if you’re just starting off online and want to sell custom-made products or subscriptions. Shopify, on the other hand, is ideal if you want a more flexible environment for advanced ecommerce selling. Shopify can more easily scale with your business.

Notably, both of these offerings can provide print on demand functionality, but Sellfy has this feature built-in, while Shopify offers it via plugins and integrations.

We recommend checking both of your options carefully and taking the time to experiment with all of your available alternatives before you entirely invest in Sellfy or Shopify. Remember, both of these offerings have their benefits, but they’re far from the only ecommerce tools on the market. You can also find a wide range of additional options among.