Two things tend to happen when you decide to sell something online. Somebody tells you to open a TikTok Shop, because that is where the buying happens now. Somebody else tells you to build a Shopify store, because you should own your customers rather than rent an audience from an app that could change its mind on a Tuesday.
Both pieces of advice arrive with enormous confidence. Neither asks what you are selling, whether it exists yet, or whether anyone has ever paid you a pound for anything.
There is a third option that almost nobody recommends, because there is very little money in recommending it. It is a page with your links on it, pointing at wherever money currently changes hands. That is usually the right first move, and the way to show it is to be specific about what the other two cost.
What TikTok Shop actually is
It is a checkout bolted onto a video app.
The appeal is real. Someone watches your video, taps the little basket, buys, and never leaves the app. No new tab, no typing an email address on a phone with one thumb. Every step you remove from a purchase is a step where someone would otherwise have wandered off, and TikTok Shop removes nearly all of them.
The costs come in three shapes. First, admission: business details, a bank account, category approval, and for some categories a sample or documentation process that takes longer than you expect. Second, commission: TikTok takes a referral fee on each order. It launched in the US at an introductory rate and has gone up more than once since, and it varies by region and category. I am not going to print a number here as though it were fixed forever. Look it up in the seller centre for your country, and treat any figure quoted in a blog post as out of date, including this one.
Third, and least discussed, is that it is built for physical goods that ship. If what you have is a PDF, a template pack, a course or an hour of your time, TikTok Shop is mostly not for you, and you can burn a fortnight finding that out.
The deeper trade is that the shop lives inside somebody else's app, under somebody else's promotional logic, next to somebody else's near-identical product at a lower price. That is a fine trade when the distribution is working. It is a bad trade with four hundred followers, because you have taken on all of the admin and none of the traffic.
What Shopify actually is
Shopify is a proper shop, and it is very good at being one.
The pricing moves around, so check it, but the shape has held for years. A Starter tier at roughly five dollars a month that gives you checkout links and a very thin storefront. A Basic tier around thirty-nine dollars a month, less if you pay annually. On top of that, card processing somewhere near 2.9% plus a fixed fee per transaction, higher if you use an outside payment gateway, because Shopify charges extra for that. Then a theme, if the free ones do not fit. Then apps, at ten or fifteen dollars a month each, which multiply quietly in the way streaming subscriptions multiply.
None of that is unreasonable for a shop that is selling things. It is unreasonable for a shop that is not, and the meter runs at the same speed either way.
The bigger cost never appears on the invoice. A Shopify store asks you a hundred questions before it will let you feel finished. Homepage layout. Collections. Product photography that matches. Shipping zones and whether you charge for postage to Ireland. Refund policy. Abandoned cart emails. Which of the eleven review apps. Each decision is small, each one is a place to stop, and it is very easy to spend six weekends on a storefront for a product nobody has yet been asked to buy.
Shopify makes sense when you have demand you are failing to serve. It is a poor instrument for discovering whether demand exists.
The third thing, which is just a page
What the third option looks like: a page at one short address. Your photo, two lines saying what you make, and a list of links. One of those links goes wherever someone can pay you today. Gumroad, Payhip, a Stripe payment link, Ko-fi, an Etsy listing, a Shopify Starter checkout link if you already have one, or a form that ends with you sending an invoice.
The page does not take the money. It makes sure the person who watched a video at eleven at night can find the thing in one tap instead of three, and can also find your other video, your email list and your Instagram while they are there.
This is usually the right order because the bottleneck in a first sale is almost never the checkout. Nobody fails because their payment page had the wrong font. They fail because nobody clicked, or because the thing was not clearly described, or because the price was a guess, or because they told twelve people and twelve is not enough people. A link page costs nothing and puts all of that in front of you. A storefront costs money, tests almost none of it, and hands you the pleasant sensation of having worked.
There is a duller practical reason too. Whatever you sell first is probably not what you sell in six months. A page of links survives that change. A store built around one product does not, and moving a shop is a weekend you will not enjoy.
Where Relay fits, and where it does not
Relay is that page. A link-in-bio page, made in Warsaw, and deliberately not a shop. The free plan needs no card and does not quietly expire into a trial. Unlimited links on every plan, your own photo and bio, social icons, five themes, headings and dividers so a page with eleven links reads like a page rather than a row of browser tabs, tap and view counts so you can see which link people actually press, a QR code for anything printed, and a story-sized share image. Pro is thirty dollars a year, or four dollars a month, plus VAT, and adds all forty-seven themes, all eight fonts, custom colours, a background image, images on individual links, scheduled links, inline players, email capture, and it removes our badge. Data sits in the European Union, the fonts are self-hosted rather than fetched from Google, and there is no advertising and no third-party analytics on your page.
Now the part where we are on the wrong side of the question. Relay has no payments and no custom domains. You cannot take a card on a Relay page, and you cannot put it on yourshopname.com. If what you need is a checkout under your own domain, we are not the answer and you should go and pay Shopify. What Relay is good at is the layer in front of the checkout, the one address you put in every bio that outlives whichever platform you happen to be selling on this year. If you want to see how we compare against the obvious alternative, including the four rows where Linktree wins, that page exists and we did not rig it.
When TikTok Shop is the right call
If you already post regularly, if your videos pull a few thousand views without being paid for, and if you sell a physical thing that ships in a box, open the shop. The fee on each order buys you removed friction, and friction is where your buyers currently evaporate. You are not really choosing between a shop and a link page in that case. You will want both, one for inside the app and one for everywhere that is not the app.
Without a posting habit, TikTok Shop is a filing cabinet with nothing to file.
When Shopify is the right call
When you have already sold the thing by hand, more than a handful of times, and the by-hand part has become the problem. When people are messaging you asking for a link and you are typing out bank details from memory. When there is stock in your hallway. When you need shipping rules, or variants, or a discount code that expires, or an accounting trail that does not live in your notes app.
Also when the price is high enough that thirty-nine dollars a month is background noise. Sell one item at ninety pounds in a month and the subscription has paid for itself twice. Sell a two-pound sticker and it has not.
A sequence that costs almost nothing
Write down what you are selling in one sentence, the kind you could say out loud to a person without apologising halfway through. If you are stuck on what the thing even is, selling something you already know is the more useful question to settle first.
Put it somewhere that can take money. Gumroad, Payhip, Ko-fi, a Stripe link. Ten minutes, and most of them charge nothing monthly.
Put a page in front of it, claim the username you want while it is free, and use that one address everywhere you appear.
Then tell people. Not once. Repeatedly, in the boring way, for longer than feels reasonable. How long until the first sale covers what that looks like on a calendar, and how to make your first sale online covers the mechanics of the thing itself.
Upgrade the plumbing when the plumbing is what is breaking. Not before.
The pitch for TikTok Shop and Shopify is that you need infrastructure before you can sell. The reverse is closer to accurate. You need to sell something before you can tell which infrastructure you need, and until then a page and a payment link will carry everything you have. Relay is free to start, no card, and it will still be sitting there on the day you outgrow it.