Tindie vs Shopify

I have been an online seller of hobbyist electronic products for 6 years now. When I created my online store, I looked at several options and wound up going with Tindie. The primary reason was it did not require any ongoing payments and it used PayPal which I was familiar with. They took their payment from sales in the form of a transaction fee (3.5%) as well as a tindie fee (5%). Receiving the proceeds of sales was easy, just hit the Disbursement button and your money (minus the fees) was transferred to your PayPal account. The store was relatively easy to set up - though, a lot of that was due to a lack of features. My little side business grew nicely.

I stayed on Tindie for almost 6 years until April of 2026 when they were sold to a Chinese company that was woefully unprepared to run it. The site was down for 10 days and after a full month, sellers were still not getting their disbursements. This caused me to look around for an alternative. I settled on Shopify.

Prior to this, I had looked at Shopify. It was attractive because it had more features and a lower transaction fee (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction). But, because it had a lot more features, it was a bit daunting. And the monthly cost was a concern to me. I took the easier path and stayed with Tindie.

With the chaos of Tindie, I had a second look at Shopify and took the plunge. It was relatively easy to set up - easier than I had expected due to their AI agent. Don't know how to do something? Just ask and it will tell you. It made navigating the complex system easy. Two days of effort yielded a working store and over the course of several weeks I made a number of tweaks to make it even better. The Shopify software guides you through a number things like SEO, policies, improving your product pages and so on.

So, how does Shopify compare with Tindie? It definitely has many more features. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface but here is what I have found so far:

Product Pages

Tindie is pretty basic with a fairly simple template. You plug in photos, add some text and provide a few links to documents. It works and forces a similar look and feel across the Tindie site.

Shopify has themes that you select from and provides tools that allow you to construct the product offerings. It allows far more degrees of freedom than Tindie. That is good but requires a lot more thought on your part. It also allows "collections" which are another way of presenting your products. I feel that I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

Billing

The customer billing interaction is handled by both Tindie and Shopify. Shopify has a few more ways for customers to pay but I think they are close to equal on this front. Unfortunately, Tindie often has a tendency to delay an order. I've gotten notification of an order up to a week after the customer placed it. So far with Shopify, I have no complaints.

Shipping

This is a big area. I spent a huge amount of time on this in both Tindie and Shopify. International shipping makes this area even more complex.

Tindie is very simplistic. You can set a shipping fee for each product and each country. For multiple orders of a single product you set a fee for the first unit and a second, different fee for each additional unit. You have to do this for each country. I found myself tweaking the the second fee fairly often. The second unit fee forces you into some weird dynamics to avoid losing money on shipping. For example, in the US, shipping for up to 8 ounces is one price with 8-16 ounces at a second, higher price. My products typically weigh 4 ounces so in order to avoid losing money on shipping of 3 units, I had to overcharge customers for shipping 2 units. Yuck.

Shipping with Shopify is much better but a lot more complex. It has a number of options but the one I use allows me to bill shipping by actual weight. Each product gets a weight and the customer is billed based on the weight of all the products in their order. I set up each country with the specific cost per each tier of weight. It works.

Shipping Services integration

I use ShipStation for shipping labels. Shopify integrates directly to ShipStation so I can get my store's orders and directly process them with no manual entry of addresses, weights, tariff information. There is no integration with Tindie, everything is entered manually. Tedious and error prone. This is a huge win for Shopify.

Taxes, VAT, Customs, Import Fees

A sad reality of our world is that these exist and truly complicate an online store.

This is one area that Tindie completely ignores. There is absolutely no support for it and taxes, customs, etc are completely the responsibility of the Seller.

Shopify has a full set of features for this. For US sales, taxes down to the individual buyer's location (state, county, city) are billed and sent to the proper authority. Export tariff information is supported by Shopify. There is support for EU and UK VAT though I still punt that to the buyer. (It's on my todo list.)

Marketing, SEO, Google Search, Tagging, ...

Tindie doesn't do any of this. One supposed advantage - Tindie is a marketplace for electronics enthusiasts and thus draws in potential customers. Perhaps that does work for some products but I never saw much of that. My customers came looking for a specific type of product. Another touted benefit was the synergy with Hackaday, a popular technology blogging site, both owned by Supplyframe. In theory, Tindie products would be highlighted there. But in the 6 years I used Tindie, I saw precious little of that. In my case, I had to do all the work to get my products featured on Hackaday. This has been a missed opportunity for Tindie.

Shopify allows you to track where sales came from. They have support for search engine optimization and tagging pages. I haven't spent a lot of time on this yet but it looks useful. Marketing and promotion is up to you.

Seller Payment

Tindie will automatically disburse your sales proceeds your PayPal account after a period of time (2 weeks, I think) or you can manually request disbursement. Though, disbursement has been broken since the April 14 acquisition date. As of May 15, it is still broken.

In Shopify, you can set the limit that triggers transfer of sales proceeds to your account. The default is $60. Basically, you don't need to do anything after that. Well, of course you should check to make sure it's happening.

Costs

This is an area of keen interest to many. It was my initial impression that Tindie is cheaper for small sales volume. When I ran the numbers, the reality was quite surprising. I'm using the basic Shopify plan - $39/month. Let's look at some examples. First, the fee structures

Tindie Fee 5% of total transaction

Tindie transaction fee 3.5% of total transaction

Shopify Fee $39.00 per month ($29/mo if paid annually)

Shopify transaction fee 2.9% + $0.30/transaction

While Shopify's monthly fee seems like it would overwhelm, it turns out that you don't need a lot of sales to make up for it.

Let's look at some hypothetical monthly sales numbers.

Average transaction price $50 (includes shipping cost)

Number of transactions 20

Total sales $1000.00

Tindie Fees $85.00 (50+35)

Shopify Fees $74.00 (39+35)

As you can see at even relatively low sales numbers, Shopify is cheaper. And at higher volume, the difference becomes very significant.

Where is the break-even point?

Average transaction price $35 (includes shipping cost)

Number of transactions 15

Total sales $525.00

Tindie Fees $44.63 (26.25+18.38)

Shopify Fees $58.73 (39+19.37)

So, in this case, Tindie is cheaper though Shopify's better features make it worth the additional $14 a month.

What about really low cost items? I looked at a $10 product with $6.50 shipping cost.

Average transaction price $16.50 (includes shipping cost)

Number of transactions 65

Total sales $1072.50

Tindie Fees $91.16 (53.63+37.54)

Shopify Fees $89.60 (39+50.60)

At 65 sales per month, Shopify edges out Tindie.

Also, the Shopify annual discount price of $29/month tilts the math even more towards them.

Conclusion

For any small business with at least $1000 in revenue and 20 or more sales per month, Shopify is a clear winner. Tindie, if they fix their current problems, still has a place for someone just starting out. It's easy to set up and the amount of investment is low. But, if you grow, Shopify is the way to go.