Shopify Exchange alternatives: where to buy or sell a store now
Shopify shut the marketplace and deleted the listings. Here is what absorbed the demand, what each route costs, and which one fits the size of your business.
Shopify closed the Exchange Marketplace on 1 November 2022. Sales in flight had to finish before that date, and when the app was decommissioned the listings and the history went with it. Five years of transaction records, gone. Whatever brought you looking for Exchange, the honest answer is the same: nothing took its place on the same terms.
We should say what we are before we describe the landscape, because it shapes what follows. Ecomma buys ecommerce businesses and then operates them. We are one of the options below, not a neutral referee, and we will point out where we are the wrong fit as clearly as where we are the right one.
What Exchange actually was, and why losing it stung
Exchange opened as an app inside Shopify in 2017, per Shopify's own launch announcement, and its advantage was never the quality of its buyers or the rigour of its vetting. It was reach and price. A store owner could list without a broker and without a minimum, on the platform the business already ran on. Stores changed hands there from roughly two hundred dollars up into six figures.
That range is the thing to notice. The bottom of it was the part nothing else served. A store making a few hundred a month has never been worth a broker's time, because a percentage of a small number does not pay for a diligence process. Exchange carried those listings because the marginal cost of hosting one more was close to nothing. When it closed, the small end lost its venue and the large end barely noticed.
The second loss was quieter and worse. Exchange published what stores actually sold for. Deleting it removed the only free, public price reference the category had. What filled the vacuum was marketplace blog posts about multiples, most of them written by firms that earn a commission on the number they are quoting.
The four routes that absorbed the demand
Every option available today is a variation on four models. They differ on who does the work of finding and vetting the other side, and that is what you are paying for.
1. Open marketplaces
Flippa is the closest thing to Exchange in spirit: you list, buyers browse, and the platform takes a cut on completion. At the time of writing its success fee is tiered, around 10 percent under fifty thousand dollars, dropping to roughly 7.5 percent between fifty and a hundred thousand and about 5 percent above that, charged on top of a listing fee. Check the current schedule before you plan around those numbers, because marketplace pricing moves.
The tradeoff is the one Exchange had. Volume of listings means volume of tyre kickers, and vetting is largely yours to do. It works when your business is clean and easy to explain, and it works badly when the story needs a person to tell it.
2. Curated brokers
Empire Flippers, Quiet Light and the firms around them sit at the other end. They vet the business before it lists, build the package, manage the buyer conversations, and run the migration. Empire Flippers charges around 15 percent on transactions below seven hundred thousand dollars at the time of writing, with no listing fee.
Fifteen percent reads brutal until you price the alternative. On a six hundred thousand dollar sale that is ninety thousand dollars, and what it buys is a filtered buyer pool and someone else absorbing three months of diligence questions. Whether that is worth it depends almost entirely on whether you have the time and the stomach to do it yourself.
3. Direct buyers
A direct buyer is a firm that acquires with its own capital and keeps the business. There is no listing, no auction, and no commission, because nobody is brokering anything. You are talking to the counterparty.
This is what we do. Ecomma has bought and now runs 40+ brands, across 70+ founder exits. The reason a founder picks this route is usually not price, it is privacy: no listing means no competitor, no supplier and no employee finding out that the business is for sale. The reason a founder does not pick it is that one buyer is one opinion. A marketplace runs a competitive process, and a competitive process is how you discover the top of your range. We will not pretend otherwise.
4. Selling it yourself
Founder to founder, no intermediary. It costs nothing and it is the right answer more often than the industry admits, on one condition: you already know the buyer. If you are starting from a blank page, you are not saving a commission, you are taking on an unpaid job with an unpredictable finish date.
Choosing by the size of the business
Size decides this more than anything else, because it decides who can afford to look at you.
Under about twenty thousand dollars of annual profit. An open marketplace or a direct sale to someone you know. No broker will take it and no acquirer will underwrite it, because the diligence costs more than the deal is worth. Expect to do the work yourself and price accordingly.
Roughly fifty thousand to a million dollars of value. Every route is open, and this is the band where the choice actually matters. A competitive process through a broker tends to find a higher number. A direct sale tends to close faster and quieter. Run both conversations before you commit to either; there is no cost to asking. This is the band Ecomma buys in, and our floor is fifty thousand dollars.
Above a million. You are in lower mid-market M&A, not the store marketplaces, and the advisers, the diligence, and the deal structures are different. An article about Exchange alternatives is the wrong map for that territory.
What the closure should have taught the category
Exchange is worth remembering for one reason beyond nostalgia. It was a marketplace run by a company whose real business was somewhere else, and when the strategy moved, the marketplace went with it and took its data with it. Anything you build on somebody else's platform carries that risk, including the store itself.
The practical version of that lesson: keep your own records. Clean books, a real profit and loss, supplier terms in writing, traffic and email data exported and held by you. Every one of those is what a buyer asks for first, and every one of them is harder to reconstruct than to keep. The founders who sell quickly are almost never the ones with the best business. They are the ones who can answer questions with documents.
Common questions
Is Shopify Exchange coming back?
There has been no indication of it. Shopify closed the marketplace on 1 November 2022 and deleted the listings and the transaction history with it. Shopify's stated reason was focus: it builds the tools merchants sell on, and it decided that running the market where those merchants trade was not its job.
What replaced Shopify Exchange?
The platforms that already existed alongside it absorbed the demand: open marketplaces like Flippa, curated brokers like Empire Flippers and Quiet Light, and direct buyers who acquire and then operate. No single one took its place, and the gap it left sits at the small end, because Exchange was the only venue where a store worth a few thousand dollars could be listed cheaply.
What is my Shopify store worth?
Almost always a multiple of annual profit, not revenue. What moves that multiple is how much of the business survives you leaving: supplier concentration, paid traffic dependence, whether anyone else knows how it runs. A store doing the same profit can trade in a wide band on those factors alone.
Do I need a broker to sell a Shopify store?
No, but somebody has to do the work a broker does. Sell direct and that somebody is you: the diligence process, the negotiation and the migration all land on your desk. That workload is the reason the commission exists. Selling direct is worth it when you already have a buyer.
How long does it take to sell a Shopify store?
On a marketplace, plan for months rather than weeks. The listing has to be built and vetted before it goes anywhere, and then the right buyer has to actually find it. A direct sale to an existing buyer removes that last step, which is both the longest and the least predictable part.
If you want a direct conversation
We buy ecommerce businesses and operate them afterwards, which means the diligence is about whether it runs without you, not whether the listing photographs well. There is no listing and no auction, and the process stays private from the first message.
Send us the business and you will hear back within 24 to 48 hours. If it is not a fit we will say so and tell you which of the routes above we would use instead.
Talk to us about selling · Or see what we currently buy
Sources and dates
Exchange closure date, launch year and price range: Shopify's own decommissioning notice for the Exchange Marketplace app, reported November 2022. Marketplace fee structures for Flippa and Empire Flippers: each platform's published pricing, read August 2026. Fees change without notice, so treat the figures above as a shape rather than a quote and confirm current terms with the platform before you plan around them. Ecomma's own figures are our operating record as at August 2026.