Before you set up your Shopify store or decide to upgrade your current plan, you should know that there are several Shopify pricing plans to choose from, and this article contains all you need to know before you choose a Shopify plan.
There are various factors to be considered by Shopify store owners before choosing a Shopify pricing plan. These factors include the cost of themes, point of sale, credit card processing, fees and more. To make it even easier for store owners, Shopify has created several different pricing plans to choose from.
As a Shopify merchant, new or existing, you might be wondering which of these Shopify pricing plans are right for your business and if you should upgrade or downgrade from your current plan.
Ecom Experts has created an extensive list of the different Shopify pricing plans, highlighting their costs, their features, and any other extra charges attached to them. At the end of this article, we aim to help you figure out which Shopify pricing plan is best suited to your business.
Types of Shopify Pricing plans
Shopify Lite
The most basic Shopify plan, priced at $9/month, Shopify Lite is the cheapest option. The Shopify Lite plan is best suited for Shopify store owners looking to sell products without having to maintain an online store. While Shopify Lite does not provide for a standalone, functional store, there are different ways to sell without an online store.
This Shopify pricing plan, however, lets you create a store using a page building app, some of which are free. You can also go on to sell products on existing websites like WordPress or Facebook. Shopify lite is an excellent fit for anyone looking to use Shopify as a back-end system for selling products in physical locations like events and panels. The Shopify point of sale app and card reader feature available on the Shopify Lite plan can be used to carry out these in-person sales.
These in-person and online sales can be utilized using the Buy Button from Shopify, allowing Shopify store owners to embed their products or product collections to their sales channels. Working with the buy button is relatively easy; all you have to do is add products to your Shopify account; with images, descriptions, prices, inventory and with the buy button, you can embed it to the site of your choosing. Any change made on Shopify will be reflected on your site.
Hence, when customers click on the buy button, they would be redirected to the embedded checkout without leaving the website.
Next, let's consider transaction and credit card fees. Shopify store owners must understand the difference between Transaction and Credit Card fees regardless of the Shopify pricing plan they are on.
Transaction fees refer to fees charged by the company providing your online store, in this case, Shopify. On the other hand, credit card fees are charged by your payment gateway provider (the software used in processing credit card payments.
With Shopify Lite, there are no transaction fees involved; this is only limited to using Shopify's payment processing option — Shopify Payments — as the payment gateway.
On the 'Lite' plan using Shopify Payments, credit card fees in the US are 2.9% + 30c on online purchases made via a Shopify Buy button.
For a third party payment gateway, a 2.0% transaction fee is charged on each sale made on the 'Lite' plan, plus the credit card fees your payment gateway provider charges.
Basic Shopify Plan
The next Shopify pricing plan is the Basic Shopify plan, which costs only $29/monthly, a $20 upgrade from the Shopify Lite plan. The Basic Shopify plan features include a fully functional standalone online store.
The Basic Shopify plan comes with numerous benefits, including:
- Unlimited number of products
- 2 staff accounts
- 24/7 support via phone, email and live chat
- Manual order creation
- Discount code creation
- A free SSL certificate
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Gift cards
- A blog
- Discounted shipping rates
- Ability to print shipping labels and
- Fraud analysis
With a Shopify hosted store on the Basic Shopify plan, you also enjoy access to Shopify Themes and Shopify App store. These Shopify themes are templates for your store that allow you to design your store however you want. With the Basic Shopify plan, you enjoy access to hundreds of themes at your disposal, and they are fully customizable.
You also enjoy access to numerous Shopify apps, which are 4K hand-picked tools on the Shopify app store designed to ensure your success as a merchant. Regardless of what feature and functionality you want to be added to your store, you can always find an app for it on the Shopify app store.
Now, to consider fees, the Basic plan fees resemble that of the Shopify Lite pricing plan. This makes it a perfect choice for Shopify store merchants with limited budgets who need an online store and can do without advanced selling or reporting.
Shopify Plan
Priced at $70/month, the Shopify plan is a $50 upgrade from the Basic Shopify plan. This plan gives your store more benefits, including a higher online sales volume and lower Transaction and Credit Card fees.
Like the Shopify Lite plan, with Shopify Plan, you would not be charged transaction fees while using Shopify payments; instead, you would only be charged 2.6% +30c credit card fees in US dollars.
This Shopify pricing plan has all Shopify Lite, and Basic Plan features, including a Shopify store, Buy Button from Shopify, access to Shopify apps and themes. You also enjoy more professional reports as Shopify Plan gives you detailed, in-depth summaries on your sales report, retail sales report, customers, and marketing reports.
Another great benefit of using Shopify Plan is that you can sell in up to 5 languages. When you enable multi-language selling, a language folder is added to your domain, which then looks like ecomexperts.io/de…
You also get a free pass to the USPS Priority Mail Cubic Pricing. This means that you enjoy discounted rates on priority mail for packages below 20 pounds, measuring less than 0.5 cubic feet in volume.
Advanced Shopify Plan
As a Shopify store owner with a huge sales volume or expecting to have one, it is important that you consider an upgrade from Shopify Plan to Advanced Shopify plan.
Costing only $299/month, you would be saving more money on higher sales using this plan.
On the Advanced Shopify plan, the credit fee is 2.6% + 30c credit for online transactions using Shopify payments. For non-Shopify payments, however, an additional 1% transactional fee is charged.
You'll pay a 2.4% + 30c credit card fee for Shopify Payments and a 0.5% transactional fee on external payment gateways on the Advanced plan. This means that you save 7.7% on credit card fees and up to 50% on transactional fees for external payment gateways. This increased savings makes the Advanced Shopify plan a much more logical option for stores with high sales.
The benefits of the Advanced Shopify Plan does not only end with increased sales; for an extra $120/month, you enjoy access to an advanced report building tool. Using this tool, you get better insights into sales data which you can then use to adjust your operations to the nth degree.
This plan is targeted at Shopify store owners with an even higher sales volume.
Another important upgrade that comes with the Advanced plan is the Real-Time carrier shipping feature. This means that shipping rates will be automatically calculated at the checkout.
While this feature is already available on lower plans, you are however limited to Shopify's preferred providers on those plans. So, if you plan to use Shopify with a carrier outside the Shopify shipping service, or you're selling overseas in a country where it isn't available, then the Advanced Shopify plan is right for you.
Shopify Plus
Research has shown that Shopify Plus is a much more suited Shopify pricing plan for merchants when they record between $1-2 million in annual revenue. While it is worthy of note that the revenue doesn't necessarily trigger the need, we have found out that around this revenue mark, the extra support and unique features of Shopify Plus make it a worthy investment.
The price for the Shopify Plus Plan is negotiable as Shopify's provisions under this plan are often tailored to meet your requirements. This means that you might have to pay as much as $2000 on Shopify Plus in some cases. In short, If a merchant reaches $800k USD in monthly revenue, they'll move to a sliding model, which is 0.25% of their monthly revenue (Ex. $1M USD in monthly sales means $2500 USD that month). If they're using a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Plus, there is an additional fee of 0.15%.
Shopify Plus merchants receive preferred Shopify Payment rates:
- Domestic: 2.15% + $0.30 = 10.5% saving from Shopify advanced plan.
- Amex + International: 3.15% + $0.30
Shopify Plus starts as a 1-year agreement and moves month-to-month after the first year.
Shopify Plus comes with 'white glove' account management (dedicated onboarding, account management and support).
This Shopify pricing plan also allows merchants to automate e-commerce related tasks using 'Shopify Flow.' Using this visual workflow builder, Shopify merchants can now create an 'if this then that' (IFTT) style rules. Allowing Shopify to make certain actions based on certain events; for instance, it can email your supplier if your inventory is running low.
Using Shopify Plus, your store also enjoys access to automatic multi-currency selling. Using this automatic multi-selling feature on Shopify Plus, Shopify uses website visitors' IP addresses to determine their country of origin and presents your product prices in their local currency.
However, while this feature is not included in other Shopify plans, using third-party apps, you can show a currency selector on other Shopify plans.
Another feature that differentiates Shopify Plus from other plans is that it allows you to sell in up to 20 different languages.
Shopify POS Pro' Pricing
As a Shopify merchant, you probably already know this, but if you didn't, you should note that Shopify recently made a change to their pricing structure for point-of-sale (POS) features.
In the past, the higher your pricing plan, the more Shopify point-of-sale features you enjoy access to. Now, you have to invest in a "Shopify POS" add on to use any of them. So, you should expect an extra $89 per month fee on top of your regular Shopify costs.
Remember that ALL Shopify plans include POS features as standard, meaning that you can conduct in-person sales through your Shopify store synched with your inventory using a POS hardware.
The Shopify POS add-on is necessary if you intend to:
- Use more POS-only staff
- Allow physical and online buying
- Make provision for product exchanges
- Create custom-printed receipts
- Define staff roles
- Create a sales team
When choosing a Shopify pricing plan, you have to be sure that the features offered are in line with your store's requirements. Take into consideration your store's revenue, its features, your budget, as well as an estimate on transaction fees and credit card fees. Each of these Shopify pricing plans offers numerous benefits guaranteed to ensure the growth of your Shopify store.