How to Determine the Best Shopify Pricing for Your eCommerce Store

Choice.

Some choices are simple, like what to have for lunch on Taco Tuesday.

Other choices, like what to say when told your in-laws are coming for a visit, are not.

Somewhere in between those two falls your choice of Shopify pricing. Not quite the minefield of your significant other’s parents, but not quite as straightforward as bean and cheese with extra guac.

Many factors go into deciding which Shopify tier is the right one for your business, including how much Shopify costs you every month.

Today, we’re going to examine just what each plan offers, and what sort of business does best with each plan.

We’ll look at:

The Basics: What You Need to Know Before You Start
Basic Shopify: Enough to Get You Started?
Shopify: The Classics Are Always a Good Choice
Advanced Shopify: For the Serious Retailer
Shopify Plus: Playing in the Big Leagues
Shopify Lite: For the Little Leaguers
Wrapping It All Upmembers, you still may not be as familiar with Shopify’s offerings as you’d like.

So let’s cover a few of the basic ins and outs of Shopify and level the playing field a bit for all of you.

What You Get With Any Shopify Plan

Except for the Shopify Lite option (which we’ll discuss briefly in a moment, but not in any great detail), all Shopify plans supply you with:

• A fully functional online store.
• The ability to sell an unlimited number of products.
• A free SSL certificate, providing a secure payment gateway.
• No additional transaction fees if using Shopify Payments (country-dependent).
• A blog, for content marketing and inbound traffic.
• 24/7 support.
• Abandoned cart recovery.
• Manual order creation, allowing you to make offline sales and process them through your Shopify account.
• Discount code creation, giving you the ability to hold sales.
• Fraud analysis, to alert you to fraudulent transactions.

As you can see, you get a lot for your money, regardless of which of the Shopify tiers you choose.

And if there is something more that you want or need, you can always visit the Shopify App Store and find just the right add-on for you.

A Word About Shopify and Shipping

All Shopify plans in the US, Canada, and Australia offer discounted real-time carrier shipping through certain select services.

For example, in the US, you can use the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, or DHL, and in Canada, it’s simply Canada Post.

To use third-party calculated shipping, however, you must have either the Advanced Shopify Plan or the Shopify Plus plan.

It’s one of the perks of their more expensive plans, unlike other eCommerce services like BigCommerce, which provide third-party shipping with every plan.

Another Shopify and shipping issue to note is that the printing of shipping labels via Shopify is also restricted to only the US, Canada, and Australia. Elsewhere, you have to use a separate shipping label app.

A Word About Shopify Payments

You’ll notice in the list above, we’ve stated that there are no transaction fees if you use Shopify’s payment gateway, Shopify Payments.

That’s mostly true.

Like their shipping and shipping labels, only certain countries currently have access to Shopify Payments.

In alphabetical order, they are:

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Canada
• Denmark
• Germany
• Hong Kong
• Ireland
• Italy
• Japan
• The Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Singapore
• Spain
• Sweden
• The U.K.
• The U.S. and Puerto Rico, but no other U.S. territories

A Note About Transaction Fees and Credit Card Rates

The credit card rates given in this guide are for the U.S. only. Each country has its own rates, and, depending on where you are, they may be higher or lower.in the U.K., as of this writing, one of the plan’s fees was 1% — a significant difference from the U.S. fees.

Basic Shopify: Is It Enough for Your Online Store?

Shopify Basic is the most useful and the cheapest plan per month. It’s plenty for the typical new eCommerce business.

First, the Good News

One of the biggest advantages of Basic over other competitors is its inclusion of abandoned cart recovery.

Allowing customers to log off and then come back without clearing their cart significantly increases your conversions and creates sales where they may not have been before.

By including it in the Shopify Basic plan, they’ve outstripped the competition. BigCommerce and Volusion would both charge you $79 per month for that service add-on.

The closest you could get from any of the “other guys” is Squarespace’s $46 monthly fee.

It’s Not All Good News

One negative aspect of Shopify Basic is worth mentioning — the plan does not offer any type of advanced report.

For professional bookkeeping reports (like monthly sales), you need to upgrade to the Shopify plan.

Another is that you cannot offer gift cards to your customers. You can only make direct sales of your products.

The Best Business for the Basic Shopify Plan

It really doesn’t matter what you offer in your online store. Our members sell everything from clothes to jewelry to home goods.

What does matter is how much of it you sell.

Let’s crunch some numbers. The big differences in cost between a Basic Shopify and “regular” Shopify store are in the credit card fees and monthly plan costs.

Basic charges a credit card rate of 2.9% + 30 cents, while Shopify costs 2.6% + 30 cents. And then there’s the $50 dollar difference per month, just to have the Shopify plan.

That .3% and $50 difference means you have to sell $50/.3 or $16,333 of product every month to break even.Flickr

Shopify offers a Shopify Lite plan. You use Shopify Payments, pay $9 a month, and have transaction fees of 2.9% + 30 cents. What you don’t get is an online store or any of its features.

You have to have your own website, sell through social media like Facebook, or sell in-person.

It’s perfect for the website owner who may want to turn their site into a point of sale for a few digital products, or make a few in-person sales at book signings, seminars, or other events, without the need of an online store.Flickr