Curios vs Shopify for Authors

Jul 15, 2025

Quick Summary: 

Authors make more money, have less costs, have less setup and management burdens, have more discoverability, and more insight by using Curios instead of Shopify to sell direct. 

How are you different than Shopify?

This is our most common question that we are asked by authors and rightly so. Authors have been selling direct for many years with many different solutions and in the past, Shopify has proven out to be one of the best ways to do this. UNTIL Curios. 

Price

Curios has many advantages over Shopify, but we will address price first as authors are entrepreneurs and the bottom line is very important. 

We ran a bunch of scenarios to illustrate this, as that is the easiest way to show the differences.  

Total Cost per unit on Shopify
Here is the breakdown of your earnings on Shopify when selling an audio or ebook at $14.99, accounting for their typical 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction fee:

• 10 books: $142.55 net after $7.35 in fees
• 100 books: $1,425.53 net after $73.47 in fees
• 250 books: $3,563.82 net after $183.68 in fees
• 1,000 books: $14,255.29 net after $734.71 in fees
• 1,000,000 books: $14,255,290.00 net after $734,710 in fees

Total Cost per unit on Curios
Here is the breakdown of your earnings on Curios when selling books at $14.99. 

• 10 books: $149.90 net after $0 in fees
• 100 books: $1,499 net after after $0 in fees
• 250 books: $3,747.00 net after after $0 in fees
• 1,000 books: $14,990 net after after $0 in fees
• 1,000,000 books: $14,990,00 net after after $0 in fees

Curios does charge a similar % + flat fee as Shopify, HOWEVER we add this on to the buyer so you are left with 100% of your sales. 

The difference is pretty drastic as the sales increase. This is not to say that the Shopify fees are arduous especially compared to the platform fees of companies like Amazon, but the fact remains that authors who sell on Curios will make more money than the same amount of books sold on Shopify. 

The real cost differences come in with the intangibles: the time, stress and non monetary costs. Shopify is an incomplete solution. You cannot set up your bookstore and just forget it. You still have to deliver any ebook or audiobook sales. This requires an additional platform like Bookfunnel that has monthly costs based on volume.That being said, Bookfunnel is run by an amazing team that shares many of the same values as Curios, however these costs will add up especially if you are moving a decent amount of audiobooks. 

Flat fees

While we are on the topic of costs, Shopify is expensive especially considering that it is incomplete.

Shopify’s base rate $39/month + $1.16 for the domain name per month. 

Curios’ most expensive plan is $50/month, however you do not need to be on a Curios plan to sell your work and keep 100% of the sales and get the customer contact information. That can all be done on the free plan. 

Additionally as mentioned, the Shopify solution is incomplete when it comes to ebook and audiobook delivery. You still will need another solution to deliver the books so that cost is additive and likely to be about the same as Curios’ most expensive plan. Again, the Curios plans are not required, merely an option for those who want the extra bells and whistles. 

VAT and Tax Burdens

On Curios, the company Curios is the merchant of record for any of your sales 

On Shopify, YOU are the merchant of record for any of your sales

It's that simple. For those who don’t know why that is THE most important distinction, please read on. 

On Shopify, you are the merchant of record. This means any taxes are your responsibility. 

With a Shopify site, selling a digital book into the EU, UK, or dozens of other VAT‑enabled markets isn’t as simple as “collect the money.” Under EU rules, every e‑book or audiobook counts as a digital service, so you must charge the buyer’s local VAT rate—even if the sale is just €2.99. That means for any sale you have to:

• Identify the customer’s country,
• Apply the correct VAT percentage (4 % in Italy, 20 % in France, 27 % in Hungary, etc.),
• Store two pieces of location evidence for 10 years, and
• File quarterly returns through VAT MOSS or register separately in every member state—plus remit the tax in the proper currency.

This admin nightmare completely goes away when you sell direct on Curios. Since Curios is a marketplace, Curios is the merchant of record. Technically speaking you would merely be receiving a 100% royalty from Curios and you immediately shed all VAT or tax responsibilities for the sale of the book. 

Curios collects the VAT from the buyer of the item, and then handles the tax payments, tracking, storage of sales information and quarterly returns on your behalf. Meaning you can just focus on the fun stuff. Writing and promoting. 

Marketplace Effect

The other very important difference between Shopify and Curios in addition to profit and taxes is that Curios delivers a marketplace effect. This refers to the cross pollination that can occur when multiple people are selling similar items in a similar place. 

It is very important to remember that readers read more than just your work. 

When you have a Shopify website, your site exists in a silo. It can be very difficult to get readers from the places they are actively visiting online to all of a sudden go visit a new and different site. Readers are not accustomed to going there and have to always be driven there. This is not impossible but it does require a high/consistent ad budget to do so. 

Meanwhile on Curios, there are thousands of authors with thousands of books listed for sale. Readers can browse, be recommended items, and you can sell into the natural velocity that comes from readers using the Curios app and marketplace on a regular basis. 

You can get the benefits of a marketplace and the reader volume without having to sacrifice the benefits of selling direct. Only with Curios. 

Time Savings and Management Costs 

Uploading your catalog of books to Curios is extremely fast and easy. After upload, we automatically create several dedicated webpages for your work and for you as an author. Within about 5 minutes your work can be listed for sale, and all fulfillment and taxes and website uptime is taken care of by the Curios team. 

Contrarily, on Shopify you will need to design and create your own site. Granted they have templates, but the work still needs to be done and any changes and management of the site will have to fall to you and your team. Any website downtime, updates, changes all have to be done by you. 

As mentioned many times, Shopify also does not fulfill. So you will have to manage that and any updates or connections or bugs that can come from those connections. 

Detailed Product Analytics 

Curios has an app for listening to audiobooks and reading ebooks and we run the website where your content is bought, viewed, and consumed. As a result we have backed tracking and analytics into the app and these pages. We output the analytics on your content to you. 

We will tell you things like completion rates, drop off points in a story, what parts of your book were read/listened to uninterrupted, where your traffic is coming from, page views, page clicks, item impressions and the like. When possible we also tell you where your buyers were landed from. 

We know the power of analytics and we want you to have that power. On Shopify, you can get the barest of analytics and have to bake in a third party solution like google analytics (so you’d have yet another thing to setup and manage). Additionally solutions like google analytics on shopify give you only the top level data. You don’t know where your traffic is coming from, and you certainly don't know what happens after someone gets your content. 

Knowledge is power, Curios gives you that power. 

In Conclusion

Shopify historically has been as a direct sales solution to avoid the egregious fees charged by Amazon, however that solution has been vastly improved on with Curios. 

With Curios you can immediately start selling direct without any of the setup headaches of doing so. We have built Curios specifically for this purpose and we hope that you use it and free up lots of time, effort, and money.

We want you to thrive as an author and we are here to help.