Shopify Pricing Plans - A Guide to Shopify Fees
Starting an eCommerce business is an exciting prospect, but it also brings borderline trepidation.
Before you venture into any business, it’s important to understand the cost, and more so, due to the nature of this post, understanding Shopify pricing plans, fees, and generally any associated cost. Whether that be Shopify monthly costs, transaction fees, Shopify themes, or Shopify Apps, we’ll aim to give more clarity below before you part with your hard-earned cash.
Due to the scale of the many entrepreneurs around the round, some may like the idea of selling one product, and others may have a plan to sell thousands, thus the requirement to have an option to select a plan based on the size of the business is available.
As entrepreneurs have different requirements, Shopify offers a variety of pricing plans. These plans are priced differently and offer different features depending on the plan. You need to subscribe to the Shopify price plan that suits your requirements and goals.
Related blog posts:
Shopify Pricing Plans
As described above, the plan to choose is based on your current goals and budget. Below we’ll detail the different plans and transaction fees.
Basic Shopify Price Plan
Basic Shopify is the least costly option from Shopify and provides users with all the basics they need to begin their online business. This plan gives you 24/7 support, an online blog, different sales channels, and two sales accounts.
This option also comes with different discount codes and cart recovery. It is also backed with an SSL certificate and is best suited for manual order creation.
Cost: $29 per month
Transaction Fee: 2.9% and 30¢ per transaction
Shopify basic features:
- Website Version (Fully Functional)
- Up to 77% Discounts On Shipping Rates
- Spotting Of Fraudulent Transactions
- Round The Clock Support
- Unlimited Products
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- SSL Certificate (free)
- Manual Order Creation
- Gift Cards
- Blog
- Abandoned Cart Recovery
- 2 Staff Accounts
- Up to 4 Inventory Locations
With the basic Shopify plan, you will get a complete online store that provides all functionality to build a revenue-generating monster with little investment.
Standard Shopify Price Plan
Shopify Standard, or rather the plan just labeled as “Shopify” is a price plan that includes all the features from Basic Shopify with additional features such as Gift cards, five staff accounts, and professional reports.
Cost: $79 per month
Transaction Fee: 2.6% and 30¢ per transaction
Shopify standard features:
- Website Version (Fully Functional)
- Up to 88% Discounts On Shipping Rates
- Spotting Of Fraudulent Transactions
- Round The Clock Support
- Unlimited Products
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- International Domains
- Low Shopify Transaction Fee And Credit Card Fee
- SSL Certificate (free)
- Manual Order Creation
- Gift Cards
- Blog
- Abandoned Cart Recovery
- 5 Staff Accounts
- Professional Reporting
- USPS Priority Mail Cubic Pricing For US Users
- Up to 5 Inventory Locations
With the Standard Shopify price plan you get the option of using USPS priority mail and two further options:
- USPS Priority Mail Cubic Pricing
- USPS Parcel Select Ground Pricing
Both of these options offer discounted prices for priority mail for packages that are less than 20 pounds.
The latter offers discounted rates for packages less than 1 cubic foot in volume.Users can also use international domains and sell their products internationally.
Advanced Shopify Price Plan
Advanced Shopify is the highest-priced option, and it comes with the most number of staff accounts, which is 15.
It includes all the features from the lower tier price plans, with additional features such as third-party shipping rates and an advanced version of the report builder.
Cost: $299 per month
Transaction Fee: 2.4% and 30¢ per transaction
Shopify advanced features:
- Website Version (Fully Functional)
- Up to 88% Discounts On Shipping Rates
- Spotting Of Fraudulent Transactions
- Round The Clock Support
- Unlimited Products
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- International Domains
- Extremely Low Shopify Transaction Fee And Credit Card Fee
- SSL Certificate (free)
- Manual Order Creation
- Gift Cards
- Blog
- Abandoned Cart Recovery
- 15 Staff Accounts
- Advanced Report Building
- USPS Priority Mail Cubic Pricing For US Users
- Carrier Shipping Quotations
- Up to 8 Inventory Locations
Advanced Shopify charges are the highest among all, and rightly so, it’s an advanced price plan!
Two notable advanced features:
1, Report-building to allow users to create custom reports by manipulating data. It’s all about the numbers, what can be measured, can be quantified.
2, Third-party real-time carrier shipping calculates the exact shipping charges at the checkout. Sellers can also adjust the prices of different products according to different countries. Lastly, Advanced Shopify offers the lowest Shopify charges for transactions and credit card fees.
Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus is the least talked about, as it’s an enterprise-level price plan that comes with a large monthly price tag attached to it.
You can get two packages for Shopify Plus: the standard pricing and variable fee. Standard pricing costs USD 2,000, and the variable fee can cost you up to a certain percentage of your monthly sales. The transaction fee is 2.15% per transaction.
To reiterate, this is the best option for large-scale businesses, especially those with a high sales volume. It offers all the Advanced Shopify plan features and includes other features such as multi-currency selling, automation, and even security.
One of the most prominent features is the fully automatic multi-currency selling. This allows the store owner to immediately detect what country the customer is from browsing from through IP tracking.
Shopify Lite
Shopify Lite is not precisely a plan as it does not have a standalone website. Instead, it integrates with a website you may already have. Or it may also integrate with a social media page that permits different actions such as customer communication, credit card acceptance, and even creating invoices. It is a particularly cheap option, costing only $9 per month.
Shopify Transaction Fees and Credit Card Fees
Before moving on to other Shopify monthly costs, we’ll look into Shopify transaction fees, and credit card fees. It’s really important to understand what costs are involved.
The transaction fee is the amount deducted whenever a customer makes a purchase. The amount of the transaction fee depends on the plan you have. Many merchants consider this fee unfair, but it is essential to understand that when you pay the monthly fee for your plan, you are paying for the tools and software that help you set up your store completely.
Other companies also have transaction charges otherwise known as credit card fees. There is a clear difference between a transaction fee, and a credit card fee.
The credit card fee is a percentage taken from the payment provider, better known as a payment gateway. An example would be using a service like stripe. Each payment provider has a slightly different percentage charge.
Most entrepreneurs choose not to use Shopify payments, simply because they have multiple sales channels. I.E selling on Amazon, eBay, or even Etsy.
It makes sense to keep all payment processing in one solution for a better, uniform experience. Not to mention, better reporting and analytics.
Stripe
However, if you want to void yourself of the credit card fee, you can shift your payment processing to Shopify Payments.
Shopify will bundle the credit card fee into the transaction fee. Therefore, you will be able to save money, potentially a large sum of money - subject to volume.
Pricing Plan Transaction Fees
- Basic Shopify Plan: 2.2% plus 30 cents
- Shopify: 2.6% plus 30 cents
- Advanced Shopify Plan: 2.4% plus 30 cents
- In-person Credit Card Rates
- Basic Shopify Plan: 2.7%
- Shopify Plan: 2.4%
- Advanced Shopify Plan: 2.4%
Ok, we’ve summarised the Shopify pricing plans, with the transaction fees, but what about the costs that seem to be forgotten about? I.E Shopify themes, apps, Domain names, and email accounts.
Additional Costs With Shopify
Shopify Apps
Shopify has an established app store that allows you to extend Shopify functionality, not to mention automating certain processes.
The average cost of a Shopify app seems to sit around $22 per month, again this could be integrating with email marketing services, automating product videos, SEO reporting, and much more.
When you start to get fully immersed in the eCommerce world, you’ll often find that you’ll undoubtedly seek out Shopify apps.
On that note, it’s not uncommon to see a Shopify store with around three apps installed. Set aside an additional $60 to $70 dollars per month.
Shopify App Store
Shopify Domain Name
Yes, a domain name. You really wouldn't want to use the “MyShopify” sub-domain! It gives the impression that you’re not serious about building a reputable, credible business.
But fear not, purchasing a domain name has been relatively inexpensive from day dot.
You have two options; purchase a domain name through Shopify for $14 for the year. Or purchase a domain name through a domain registrar.
NameCheap is the cheapest on the market, so it makes sense to check them out.
Namecheap Domains
Ok, to get clearer a picture of your Shopify monthly costs, simply divide the cost of the domain name by 12 and add it to your monthly expenditure.
Email Hosting for Shopify
Email hosting is not natively supported on Shopify, but you can leverage many third-party services to bind to a custom domain.
As an example: If you purchased a domain from NameCheap, you can also purchase a mailbox for around $15 to $25 per year.
On the other hand, if you’ve purchased a domain name directly from Shopify, you can purchase a mailbox from Google (known as GMail or Workspace) costing around $6 per month.
There are multiple options, but it’s best to keep the domain name and mailbox together to make life easier.
Let’s assume you’ve opted to purchase Mailbox from Namecheap, you’ll divide the annual cost by 12 to get a monthly total.
Namecheap Email
Shopify Themes
Strictly speaking, a Shopify theme is not a recurring fee, but rather an initial outlay.
In the world of Shopify, you can leverage both free and paid themes. The paid ones can cost you anywhere between $0 to $350. You can browse through the theme store and use the filters to find the most suitable theme for you.
Number and price to purchase a theme directly from Shopify:
- Free - 9 themes
- $180 - 1 theme
- $240 - 10 themes
- $250 - 14 themes
- $260 - 2 themes
- $290 - 1 theme
- $300 - 15 themes
- $310 - 1 theme
- $320 - 9 themes
- $220 - 8 themes
- $270 - 1 theme
- $280 - 12 themes
- $350 - 5 themes
- $200 - 2 themes
- $210 - 1 theme
It’s worth mentioning, that you don’t have to purchase a theme from Shopify you can also use ThemeForest to purchase high-converting Shopify themes at a fraction of the cost.
You can typically find a professional theme on ThemeForest for as little as $53.
We’ve written a post here on the: Best Shopify themes to build a profitable store.
Themeforest
Finally, moving on to the all-important question…
How much does it cost to have a Shopify store?
Excluding the transactions fees and purchasing inventory, you should expect to pay around:
- $102.20 per month for the basic Shopify plan (Including apps, domain name, and email)
- $152.20 per month for the standard Shopify plan (Including apps, domain name, and email)
- $372.20 per month for the advanced Shopify plan (Including apps, domain name, and email)
It’s important to note, that we’ve included apps in the above figures, as 9 out of 10 stores have a minimum of three apps installed. By all means, if you plan to not use any Shopify apps you can deduct $70 per figure.
We’ll omit the details on the enterprise-level Shopify plan, as most entrepreneurs at that level will more than likely have a team in finance to handle and negotiate discounts with Shopify.
Initial outlay cost
Regardless of the Shopify pricing plan, they’ll always be the initial outlay cost, and in this case, it will be a Shopify Theme.
Again you can opt for a free one, but we can almost certainly guarantee that in a few months, or even weeks, you’ll more than likely be looking to purchase a theme.
Be prepared to pay a minimum of $53 for a premium Shopify theme on ThemeForest.
The Takeaway
Shopify offers pricing plans to suit most budgets, so you can be rest assured to find the perfect plan.
It’s key to point out that you should leverage the free trial on Shopify before considering a financial commitment. Whilst you can cancel at any time, you should perform a little due diligence before hitting the button.
What next:
- How to increase Shopify traffic
- How To Blog For Business With Blogging For E-commerce
- How to Get Easy Backlinks The Right Way
- 5+ Customer Retention Strategies to Help Increase Revenue by 35%
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Additional Shopify Resources
With Shopify being one of the largest eCommerce platforms on the market means you’ll never be short of resources to learn how to build a profitable eCommerce business.
Kanteneo aims to be the best Shopify blog on the market, but you may require additional resources to help you on that journey. Below we’ve listed a top-selling Shopify book by Veronica Jeans to help you learn how to launch a profitable business.
