How Much Is Shopify: The real cost of maintaining an ecommerce website

Shopify offers 4 different pricing tiers, starting at a monthly cost of $29 for Shopify Basic, $79 for Shopify, and $299 for Advanced Shopify. Enterprise and high volume businesses can unlock deeper levels of customization with Shopify Plus, which begins at $2,000 per month. Pricing for Shopify Plus users can vary depending on sales volume.

Shopify Basic vs Shopify vs Shopify Advanced

The main differences between the 3 tiers of Shopify include: number of staff accounts and locations (stores/warehouses/pop-ups, etc), reporting, shipping discounts, and payment gateway fees. Shopify Basic only offers 2 staff accounts, 5 with regular Shopify, and 8 accounts for Shopify Advanced. This is critical if you have multiple people managing content, customer service, and orders. Most startups can get away with the very limited version of Shopify, but as sales start to come in, we would recommend upgrading to Shopify or Advanced to take advantage of the reduced online credit card fees of 2.6% and 2.4% respectively, when compared to Shopify Basics rate of 2.9%. Additionally you can reduce your shipping costs up to 8% by switching to Advanced. This more than makes up for the cost of the monthly upgrade.

With Shopify Advanced, you gain access to an advanced report builder. This exclusive feature allows for customization with filtering and editing reports.

Shopify Plus Pricing

Shopify Plus costs aren’t as straight forward. Pricing is equivalent to either 0.25% of total monthly sales (with a ceiling of $40,000), with a minimum of at least $2,000 per month. It’s a hefty fee to stomach a minimum of $24,000 in annual costs. The benefits of upgrading to Shopify Plus are having a dedicated account manager, unlocking checkout for customization, access to Shopify’s theme language called Liquid, unlimited staff accounts, and access to exclusive Shopify Plus apps. We recommend sticking with Shopify Advanced unless you’re generating at least a few million in sales.

Shopify Apps Pricing

Adding Shopify apps into the equation, like a review system, site-wide search, customer support tools, store locator, email capture, and so on, the average monthly cost of operating a Shopify store can more than double. For many apps, the enterprise-level plans are custom priced depending on your shop’s order volume. With the cost of apps, smaller businesses can expect to pay between $500-$1000 per month in total, while enterprise level businesses have ranged anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000 per month.

Working with a Shopify Partner

A Shopify Partner understands the inner workings of a Shopify store. Not only do we know the best apps to help your business successfully run, but we will act as a liaison for your business to Shopify and the apps to ensure the tools are properly working for your shop. We are the Shopify experts, which means we’ve done this many times and are aware of Shopify’s capabilities. We will be fully transparent when recommending a Shopify pricing tier, and will never push you to spend more money than your business needs to spend.

Our Shopify web designers and developers are best in the business. They know Liquid like the back of their hands and can customize your ecommerce website to fit the look and feel and needs of your business. Shopify is a flexible, powerful tool and with the right Shopify Partner, your new and improved ecommerce website can supercharge your business’ efforts and hit all of your goals.