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Shopify offers the best sales features of any ecommerce builder we’ve tested, making it ideal for businesses looking to expand their horizons. Better yet, it offers a vast range of third-party integrations, and its user experience is up there with some of the best ecommerce website builders – but this level of quality doesn’t come cheap.
While Shopify’s pricing for ecommerce starts at $29 per month when billed annually – or $1 for the first month with its current deal – its prices can exceed $2,300 per month for larger sites.
Shopify Pricing Plans Overview
- Starter – $5 per month
- Basic – $29 per month (billed annually)
- Shopify – $79 per month (billed annually)
- Advanced – $299 per month (billed annually)
- Plus – Starts at $2,300 per month
Use the links above to get started with Shopify, or scroll for the full details of each plan.
On select plans, enjoy $1 for the first month
Shopify’s plans might seem expensive, but they’re good value if you’re going to make the most of its excellent sales tools. If not, it may be better to opt for a builder with more affordable packages like GoDaddy or Squarespace.
We dissect each of Shopify’s pricing plans, their offerings, and how the value of each plan compares to competitors, to help you understand if the website builder is right for you.
In this guide:
- Shopify Pricing Plans Explained
- What Shopify Plan Should You Go For?
- Does Shopify Offer Plans For Nonprofits?
- Does Shopify Offer a Free Plan?
- Does Shopify Offer a POS Plan?
- Is Shopify Good Value For Money?
- Hidden Costs with Shopify
- Shopify Hosting Costs
- What Are the Best Shopify Alternatives?
- Verdict: Is Shopify Worth It?
- Frequently Asked Questions
Shopify Pricing Plans in 2024: Overview
Shopify offers five pricing plans in total: Basic, Shopify, Advanced, Starter, and Plus. The first three are designed for small to medium-sized businesses; Starter is a cut-back package that only allows for sales on Facebook, and Plus is a bespoke package for large businesses and high-volume merchants.
- Starter – best for small businesses with existing non-Shopify sites
- Basic – the best fit for new ecommerce businesses
- Shopify – ideal for growing businesses that sell online
- Advanced – perfect for scaling businesses in need of advanced reporting
- Plus – aimed at enterprise-level businesses with bespoke platforms
All Shopify plans are 25% off if you opt to be billed annually rather than monthly. If you want to know exactly how these plans compare when it comes to pricing, features, and support, take a look at this comparison table for a deeper dive:
| Plan | Price paid annually The price per month you'll pay if you choose to be billed annually | Price paid monthly The price per month you'll pay if you choose to be billed monthly | Staff accounts | Reporting | Gift cards | Online credit card rates | In-person credit card rates | Transaction fee if not using Shopify Payments | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Starter | Basic | Shopify | Advanced | Plus | |||||
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| $2,300/month | |||||
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| 1 | 2 | 5 | 15 | Tailored | |||||
| Basic | Basic | Standard | Advanced | Bespoke | |||||
| | | | | | |||||
| 5% + 30¢ | 2.9% + 30¢ | 2.6% + 30¢ | 2.4% + 30¢ | Bespoke | |||||
| 5% | 2.7% | 2.5% | 2.4% | Bespoke | |||||
| 5% | 2% | 1% | 0.5% | Bespoke |
One thing to bear in mind with Shopify is that some features – customer reviews for example – are only available as third-party apps, and they might require some additional cost to use at scale.
What Shopify Plan Should You Go For?
Depending on what type of business you run, these are the pricing plans you should go for:
- If you want to run a giant online store – Start with Shopify Basic, then move up the chain
- If you’re running a small online business – Go with Shopify Basic
- If your business is on and offline – Choose the Shopify plan
- If you sell products as a side hustle – Go for Shopify Starter
- If you already sell on different websites – Go for the Shopify plan
The Shopify Starter Plan
- A good choice for small businesses with existing non-Shopify sites with occasional in-person sales
- $5 per month
Shopify Starter is the cheapest plan offered by Shopify, but it doesn’t offer access to the Shopify online store platform.
Instead, you can use the Shopify sales platform to sell on Facebook and communicate with your customers using Messenger. You can also use Shopify Starter to sell products on another website you already own. For example, if you use WordPress, Squarespace or Tumblr, you can add Buy Buttons for each of your products and turn your existing site into an online store.
Who is Shopify Starter for?
- Businesses looking to sell on online social media channels, especially if they already have a website set up with another provider
Shopify’s Starter plan lets you sell on various social media channels, including Instagram and TikTok. Source: Shopify
The Shopify Basic Plan
- The best fit for new ecommerce businesses with occasional in-person sales
- $29 per month billed annually; $39 per month billed monthly
Shopify Basic is designed for small businesses just starting out on their online sales adventure. It allows for just two staff accounts, and while it does offer the Shopify point-of-sale app for offline sales, you don’t get access to some of the hardware support available to the other plans.
Shopify’s entry-level commerce plan does let you sell an unlimited number of products. This gives Shopify Basic the edge over Wix’s equivalent Core plan – which lets you sell up to 50,000 products – for businesses retailing large volumes of stock.
Shopify AI helped us write descriptions for products directly on the site. Source: Tech.co testing
This plan also gives users access to Shopify Sidekick, the platform’s very own “personal ecommerce assistant”, which is able to respond to queries like ChatGPT and Claude. This makes This plan makes the plan especially useful to users with little prior ecommerce experience. See how Shopify’s AI capabilities compare to other builders in our guide to the best AI website builders.
Shopify Basic lets you promote and sell your products across multiple different channels too, including through social platforms. However, if you’re in a pinch this capability is available for cheaper elsewhere, with GoDaddy’s Commerce plan letting you sell 50 or less for $20.99 per month.
We found a wide range of effective email marketing templates available with Shopify. Source: Tech.co testing
Limitations of Shopify Basic
One of the main drawbacks with Shopify Basic compared to the other plans on offer is the higher credit card rates you’ll have to pay with Shopify Payments. On the Basic plan, you’ll be charged 2.9% of each transaction, plus 30¢. In-person card uses will cost just 2.6% plus 10¢ per transaction, however (a discount that Shopify just rolled out in 2023). If you’re selling lots of cheap products, this likely won’t make much of an impact. However, if your products are expensive these payment rates will add up fairly quickly.
However, Shopify Basic offers some features at lower prices than rivals like Squarespace. For example, you’ll be able to get abandoned cart recovery tech to try and push customers toward completing orders, whereas Squarespace reserves this feature for its $49 per month Advanced plan. You’ll also get access to gift cards which can be great for making the most of seasonal shopping events.
Learn how Shopify compares to the best website builders for beginners, for those building a site for the first time.
Who is Shopify Basic best for?
- Solo entrepreneurs or small online small businesses, due to Shopify Basic’s scaled-back feature package, and affordable price tag
- Businesses that have recently launched, as users are easily able to upgrade their Shopify package as their needs develop
The Shopify Plan
- The best choice for growing businesses that regularly sell online and in-store
- $79 per month billed annually; $105 per month billed monthly
Shopify’s confusingly named middle plan, Shopify, is designed for businesses that are looking to grow. If your site is earning around $4,000 in monthly revenue, or you’re looking to expand into point of sale transactions, this is the plan for you.
The improved point of sale functionality offered by the Shopify plan is the biggest advantage over Shopify Basic. For example, essential hardware peripherals such as barcode scanners and label printers will be integrated into your platform and you’ll also be able to set up register shifts to manage how much your staff’s hours. With the Shopify plan, you also get unlimited Shopify POS app staff PINs — meaning that you can hire more people. Plus, third-party POS apps will be supported, should you need them.
You’ll also be able to operate up to five stores, ideal if you’re looking to expand.
Advantages of Shopify over Shopify Basic
The Shopify plan also gives your online store some upgrades. For example, you’ll be able to set up five staff logins, meaning that more employees can edit, analyze, and update your store. Plus, you’ll be able to dive deeper when analyzing your sales and customer traffic with Shopify’s professional report-building tools
What’s more, credit card processing rates are reduced. You’ll now pay 2.7% plus 30¢ for every online transaction. In-person credit card rates drop to 2.5% plus 10¢. That might not sound like a big difference when compared to the Shopify Basics plan, but the reduced fees will add up to potentially big gains. This being said, with other builders, like Squarespace letting you sell for free for as little as $27 per month, better value options exist for businesses with a keen eye on their bottom line.
Read our Squarespace review to learn more about the design-focused builder.
Shipping discounts with USPS, UPS, or DHL Express improve from up to 77% with Shopify Basic to up to 88% with the Shopify plan. With the ecommerce economy growing nearly three times faster than the overall economy in recent years, this plan could help your company boost growth to keep pace.
Limitations of the Shopify plan
It’s also worth noting that the fees aren’t as reduced as they once were: At the start of 2023, this Shopify plan only charged 1.9% plus 30¢ for cards, with a 1.6% fee for in-person card transactions.
The plan doesn’t offer third-party calculated shipping rates either, which means that customers won’t be able to see how much it’ll cost them to get your products delivered to their address.
Who is the Shopify plan best for?
- Small teams, due to its generous staff limits and mid-range price point
- Businesses ringing in decent sales, especially if they’re looking to expand, thanks to its reduced credit card rates
Shopify’s namesake plan lets you create digital and physical gift cards for your business, and the creation process couldn’t be easier. Source: Tech.co testing
The Advanced Shopify Plan
- Best for scaling businesses that require advanced reporting
- $299 per month billed annually; $399 per month billed monthly
While the jump from $79 per month to $299 per month might seem excessive, the Advanced Shopify plan is designed for seriously established on- and offline businesses.
As such, the biggest improvements from the Shopify plan are to be found in the post-sale area. You’ll get access to Shopify’s advanced report builder, which gives you all the tools to seriously understand your customers and improve the sales journey. Don’t underestimate the impact this could have on your business, as the International Journal of Educational Research & Social Sciences highlights how important ease of use is to ecommerce performance.
You’ll also be able to save any custom reports you build, making it great to track individual marketing campaigns, for example. However, if this feature is important to you, you’ll be able to access the same benefit for less with Wix’s Business Elite Plan, which costs $159 per month.
Learn more about Wix’s costs in our Wix pricing guide.
Benefits for buyers on Advanced Shopify
Third-party calculated shipping rates become available, meaning that customers will be able to see how much it will cost them to get your delightful products delivered. This can be a huge trust signal for potential buyers and will almost definitely prevent customers from dropping off at the last hurdle.
Credit card processing rates drop again. Online transactions cost 2.5% plus 30¢, while in-person rates drop to 2.4% plus 10¢. You’ll also be able to open up to eight store locations.
Limitations of Shopify Advanced
Despite Shopify’s promise of unlimited product uploads, there is actually a ceiling of 1,000 new products or variants every 24 hours after you exceed 50,000 products or variants. This will only convenience stores selling an extremely large volume of products, however.
The plan also restricts merchants to having one single store. Therefore, if you’re planning on building multiple stores for different countries, you’d need to create separate Advanced accounts for each of these stores.
Who is the Advanced plan best for?
- Businesses set on expansion, thanks to the plan’s superior product limits and growth tools
- Businesses selling high volumes of products, due to the plan’s affordable card processing fees
The Shopify Plus Plan
- Best for enterprise-level businesses with bespoke platforms and functionality developed by Shopify
- Starting at $2,300 per month
Shopify Plus is designed for enterprise-level businesses and very high-volume merchants. There’s no set price, as you have to call up and get a quote direct from Shopify. This plan is aimed at businesses with more than $750,000 in annual revenue and prices start from $2,300 per month, so you’ll need to be in with the high rollers to make this plan worth it.
While Shopify doesn’t disclose exactly how much card rates differ on this plan, the provider does claim to reward high-volume merchants with ‘competitive rates’. To understand what card processing fees your business would be expected to pay, we recommend reaching out to Shopify directly.
Who is the Plus plan best for?
- Established ecommerce businesses making more than $750,000 per annum
- Businesses looking for ultra-competitive card processing rates
Check out our guide to the Best Website Builders for more information on Shopify’s rivals.
Does Shopify Offer Plans For Nonprofits?
Yes, Shopify offers two different non-profit-focused plans: NPO Lite and NPO Full. To be eligible for both, you need to be a verified charity. Read on to learn more about their offerings, and how they compare.
NPO Lite
- Best for smaller nonprofit organizations
- $29 per month
Shopify’s standard NPO plan offers everything that’s available in Shopify Basic, alongside the ability to accept donations through Shopify Payments, unlimited staff accounts, real-time carrier shipping, 1% transaction fees if you’re using a third-party payment provider, and Shopify plan rates if you’re using Shopify Payments.
NPO Full
- Best for more established nonprofit organizations
- $99 per month
If you’re a larger nonprofit that’s able to spend more each month, you’ll gain access to everything in Shopify’s namesake plan, alongside unlimited staff accounts, real-time carrier shipping capabilities, and the ability to accept donations through Shopify payments.
The biggest perk of the plan? You won’t be charged card processing fees if you’re using a third-party payment provider. You’ll also be charged lower processing fees than with the Shopify plan, if you’re using Shopify Payments.
Does Shopify Offer a Free Plan?
If you’re looking to build an ecommerce store for free, you’ll be out of luck with Shopify. Shopify doesn’t currently offer a free plan. The popular provider does let users get a taste of the product with a 14-day free trial, however. With this trial, you’ll be able to test out most of Shopify’s features, themes, and apps, but you won’t be able to sell products until you upgrade to a paid plan.
When it comes to building a website, cutting corners with a free solution isn’t always a good idea. However, if you’re willing to put up with drawbacks like on-site ads and default domains, they can be a good way to grow your business presence without blowing your budget.
Take a look at our guide to the best free website builders to see how the best complimentary options compare
Does Shopify Offer a POS Plan?
If you also sell in-store, you’re in luck as Shopify offers a seamless integration with its POS service.
Shopify’s main POS plan, Retail, costs $79 per month and offers unlimited user access, as well as advanced customer relations and product management capabilities. On top of this, you’re able to access help 24/7 through Shopify’s phone, live chat, and email channels, and the service also allows you to manage online and in-person sales through one integrated platform.
Learn more about the plan in our Shopify POS price and feature review.
Is Shopify Good Value For Money?
Technically, Shopify lets businesses get selling from as little as $5 per month with its Starter plan. However, since you need to upgrade to pricey packages to unlock fairly essential selling features, we don’t think Shopify is excellent value for money for small and mid-sized businesses. This is why Shopify only secured a value score of 2.4/5 in our research and testing.
If you aren’t willing to pay a massive premium and can make do without sophisticated post-sales tools and estimated shipping rates we’d recommend using Squarespace instead, as it’s the best value ecommerce builder we’ve reviewed. Not only is the average price of its plans much lower than Shopify, but it also lets businesses get started from as little as $16 per month.
Shopify Hidden Costs
Shopify’s pricing is pretty transparent but, as ever, there are some extra costs and little technicalities that are worth being aware of.
Shopify Payments rates
The most important thing to be aware of with Shopify is its in-house payment processing — Shopify Payments.
If you choose to use Shopify Payments as your chosen payments processor, you’ll pay 2.9% + 30¢ for online credit card transactions and 2.7% for in-person transactions on the Basic Shopify plan — these fees drop slightly as you start using more expensive plans.
However, if you choose to use a different payment processor — Square or Stripe, for example — you will have to pay 2% of the cost of every transaction to Shopify plus the credit card and in-person processing rates of your chosen provider. This drops to 1% with the Shopify plan and 0.5% with the Advanced plan.
If you’re not careful, these costs could start mounting up and eating into your profit margins. If you’re committed to Shopify, it’s worth choosing Shopify Payments but, if you’re not sure, we’d recommend looking into some other ecommerce platforms.
Premium themes cost extra
Shopify isn’t known for creating beautiful websites — check out Squarespace for those — but it does let you build clean, easily navigable ecommerce-specific websites.
However, it only offers ten free website themes. This means that, while you’ll be able to create a decent online store, there’s a chance it will end up looking like thousands of other Shopify-based stores.
But Shopify does offer more than 60 premium themes for your delectation. These paid themes cost between $140 and $180 — no small investment.
Paid Shopify apps
Shopify runs an app store that will let you add integrations and features to your site that might not be offered in the base Shopify platform.
Email marketing integrations, dropshipping apps, and landing page builders are all available to be added to your site but you might also have to pay extra. For example, the PageFly Landing Page Builder app lets you build responsive, SEO-friendly landing pages for your site.
However, while it offers a free plan, PageFly also has three pricing plans that start from $19 per month. You’ll be able to build a single page with the free version but extra pages will cost more.
Custom domain names
By default, all Shopify stores come with .myshopify.com at the end of their URL. This, obviously, doesn’t look very professional.
If you want, Shopify will let you buy a custom domain from $11. It will last you for one year and that domain name is yours to keep forever, even if you leave Shopify. If you already have a domain name purchased from another company, you can import it into a Shopify store easily.
Learn what else you get in the provider’s web building packages in our Shopify review.
| Test Score Our score is based on independent assessments of ease of use, features, ecommerce functionality and value for money | Starting Price | Pros | Cons | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BEST OVERALL  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
| Wix | Shopify | Squarespace | Hostinger | GoDaddy | BigCommerce | Square Online |
| 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.5 | 4.6 |
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Wix vs Shopify
Wix’s value for money is stronger than Shopify’s too, with the builder’s entry price of $17 per month undercutting Shopify’s $29 per month. The average price of Wix’s plans is also significantly lower than Shopify, and the provider even lets you get started with an – albeit limited – free plan, which lends the solution much better to smaller businesses and solo entrepreneurs.
Wix offers hundreds of responsive and customizable templates for hospitality businesses like restaurants and cafes. Source: Tech.co user testing
Wix also offers better customization options than Shopify, due to its larger selections of templates, and its intuitive grid-based drag-and-drop builder. Wix even lets you customize the colors in your theme by entering custom HEX, RGB, or HSB, values, making it ideal for businesses looking to bring a very precise vision to life.
Learn more about Wix in our Wix review and about how the builders weigh up in our Wix vs Shopify comparison guide.
Squarespace vs Shopify
If you’re new to ecommerce website building, Squarespace offers the best user experience out of any ecommerce builder we’ve tested, because of its intuitive interface and shallow learning curve. Squarespace also performed the best in our value category – because of its high-quality features and affordable plans.
It was super easy to add products to my Squarespace website. Source: Tech.co testing
Squarespace also prioritizes design more than Shopify, making it the superior choice for creative businesses like designers, photographers, and bespoke retailers. However, the provider doesn’t match Shopify when it comes to sales features, so for businesses looking to elevate their sales strategy Shopify will remain the best option. Learn more about how Shopify vs Squarespace compare here.
Verdict: Is Shopify Worth It?
Shopify offers a lot of features, some serious power, and in-depth inventory tools to get your business going. You’ll be able to get your store set up, be able to monitor how you’re doing, and make quick changes, whether you’re a small business or a large business.
The ecommerce website builder also stands out for its range of third-party integrations, which can be added to dramatically expand the functionality you need — Shopify can quite literally do anything you want it to. For this reason, yes Shopify is worth it if you’re an established business that’s serious about increasing sales.
Shopify is moderately expensive, though, especially if you want to unlock more advanced capabilities like custom reports. This makes Shopify less suitable for newer businesses with tighter margins unless they’re only planning on selling via social channels through Shopify’s Starter plan.
If you’re using Shopify Payments, the time it takes for you to get paid varies from country-to-country. If you’re in the US or Australia, you’ll get paid in two business days. If you’re in other countries you might paid within three to four days.
If you’re not using Shopify Payments, the time it takes you to get paid will vary according to your payment provider.
Customers will still be able to check out using PayPal regardless of which payment provider you use, as long as you have it set up as an option.
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