Shopify Pricing and Shopify Fees: How it works

Since its founding in 2004, Shopify has been met with widespread enthusiasm from its users and is now a leading e-commerce platform used by more than 175,000 online stores. Its flexible pricing plans allow online businesses of all sizes to take advantage of the platform, irrespective of your budget or what it is that you sell. This post contains the essential information outlining your various options with Shopify so that you can create a store with features tailored to your specific needs. Since its founding in 2004, Shopify has been met with widespread enthusiasm from its users and is now a leading e-commerce platform used by more than 175,000 online stores. Since its founding in 2004, Shopify has been met with widespread enthusiasm from its users and is now a leading e-commerce platform used by more than 175,000 online stores. Its flexible pricing plans allow online businesses of all sizes to take advantage of the platform, irrespective of your budget or what it is that you sell. This post contains the essential information outlining your various options with Shopify so that you can create a store with features tailored to your specific needs.

Posted 8 years ago by Jonathan Kennedy

Shopify Pricing & Plans Explained

One of the benefits of starting an online store with Shopify is that you can try the e-commerce platform for two weeks without paying a penny. After taking the platform for a test drive, you’ll be able to choose between four different plans:

• Starter: At just $14 a month, this is the most economical way to launch a store with Shopify. As such, its features are fairly limited, and it’s the only plan that places a cap on the number of products you can sell, limiting your store to 25 items. If you just want to get a feel for the platform without managing a large number of products, then the starter plan is a good way to test out the market opportunities.     
• Basic: For $29 a month, the basic plan allows you to sell an unlimited number of items—a huge upgrade from the starter plan—and also includes telephone support for your store. Otherwise, the plan is similar to the starter plan: 1 GB of storage, no transaction fees, unlimited bandwidth, and the same credit card rate of 2.9% + 30 cents. This is an ideal platform for dropshipping companies that don’t need to use the features included in the higher priced plans.
• Professional: The monthly rate of $79 offers users more storage space (5 GB), which can be extremely valuable for uploading high-resolution images of products. The extra money also buys you additional features such as gift cards, abandoned cart recovery, and a lower credit card rate (2.5% + 30 cents), as well as more advanced analytics which provide storeowners insight into understanding the behavior of their customers.
• Unlimited: Reflected in the plan’s name, Shopify Unlimited ($179/month)offers infinite storage space without placing any restrictions on your store’s growth. This is the only plan suited for real-time carrier shipping, which is for companies which outsource their shipping operations. With the lowest credit card rate (2.25% + 30 cents), this option is geared towards those who are interested in limitless scalability for their store.

Shopify Plus

Shopify’s enterprise-grade solution is known as Shopify Plus, and it’s designed for successful online businesses that are large and anticipate future growth. Targeting high-volume merchants, Shopify Plus offers unlimited sales, bandwidth and products, a fully hosted platform, and zero transaction fees. If you have the budget to afford this option (starting at $995/month), then this plan will take care of all of your e-commerce needs, allowing you to focus your attention elsewhere.

Shopify POS: Expanding into a Physical Space

Included in all of the platform’s plans, Shopify POS is an extremely user-friendly iOS point of sale system that allows you to sell products in-person without any hassle. You’ll be able to accept credit card payments while monitoring your online and in-person sales in the same dashboard, allowing you to organize your entire store from a single platform.

Understanding Payment Gateways

With Shopify, there are many ways to accept payments but the most basic and fast ways that you can accept payments from consumers are: either directly through Shopify using Shopify Payments (powered by Stripe a popular 3rd party online payment company), or with a third-party payment gateway such as PayPal. The benefit of accepting payments directly through Shopify is that it removes the need for a third-party account; meanwhile, utilizing the dozens of payment gateways can allow a greater number of consumers, local and abroad to have easy access to your products.

Enhanced Functionality: Themes & Apps

Although free Shopify themes are available, the advantage of paying for a premium theme is that it offers users a greater amount of flexibility in customizing your site. This can be of tremendous value when it comes to nurturing a strong brand identity for your store, and it can also bring along search engine optimization (SEO) benefits as well.

Similarly, another great way of enhancing the functionality of your Shopify store is by investing in apps, which can improve every aspect of your business, ranging from SEO to analytics and product reviews. If you’re operating on a tight budget, there are some powerful apps in the Shopify marketplace available for free that are certainly worth your while.

Conclusion: Advanced Technology for a Low Price

Ultimately, it’s easy to lose perspective when you’re in the process of launching an online store and miss the forest for the trees. We’re living in an incredible reality in which we can gain access to a lightweight platform such as Shopify which contains immense power at a remarkably low monthly price. We should always keep in mind how fortunate we are to have these tremendous opportunities to start our own successful online businesses.

As an e-commerce storeowner, what do you feel most grateful for?  Which Shopify plan best suits your needs? Leave a comment below, we’d love to hear how your fairing if you’re a new or experienced Shopify store owner.