Shopify POS Review: Where the Free Version Stops

Shopify POS is the strongest argument for the whole platform and the easiest place to overspend on it. The till and the website share one stock pool with no middleware between them, which is genuinely hard to buy elsewhere at this price. The cost is a per-location subscription that reshapes a budget the moment you open a second door.

This Shopify POS review covers what arrives free with any paid plan, what the $89 upgrade adds, and the specific point at which paying for it stops being optional.

What every paid plan already gives you

Shopify calls it casual in-person selling and it is easy to overlook. Any paid plan can take card payments in person, with limited staff access to the till, simple customer profiles, and returns processed at the location where the sale originally happened.

For a market stall, a monthly pop-up, a studio that occasionally sells to a visitor, or a single-person shop, this is genuinely enough. You get the stock sync, the order history and the card rate without paying anything beyond your existing plan, and a lot of small retailers pay for POS Pro before they have any of the problems it solves.

What POS Pro adds, and what it costs

POS Pro is $89 a month per location, billed yearly. For that you get unlimited staff on the till with roles and permissions, richer customer profiles with loyalty insight, returns and exchanges at any location regardless of where the sale happened, real inventory management tooling and proper retail reporting.

Two of those matter more than the rest. Staff roles is the one that turns a till into a shop system — without it you cannot meaningfully control who is able to discount, refund or void, which is the entire reason retail software has permissions. And cross-location returns is not a nicety for anyone with two shops; a customer who cannot return to the branch nearest them will simply be annoyed at you instead.

One honest caveat on the price. Shopify's own POS pricing page gives $89 per month per location billed yearly, and that is the figure to plan against. Other published figures for monthly billing circulate and disagree with each other, so confirm the rate in your own admin before committing.

The per-location trap

The billing unit is the location, not the business. One shop is $89 a month. Three shops is $267. Six is $534 — more than the Advanced plan itself, for the till software alone.

This does not make POS Pro bad value; multi-location retail tooling is expensive everywhere. It does mean that anyone modelling an expansion needs the line in the spreadsheet from the start, because it scales linearly with doors and nothing about the plan pricing warns you.

The in-person rates are better than the online ones

Card-present transactions carry less fraud risk than card-not-present ones, and the pricing reflects that. Shopify charges 2.6% + 10¢ in person on Basic, 2.5% + 10¢ on Grow and 2.4% + 10¢ on Advanced, against online rates of 2.9%, 2.7% and 2.5% plus 30¢.

The per-transaction fixed fee is the underrated part: 10¢ in person against 30¢ online. A shop with a low average basket — a café, a florist, anywhere selling six-dollar items — saves considerably more from that 20-cent gap than from the fractional percentage difference. On 1,500 small transactions a month it is $300 a year in fixed fees alone.

What POS does not solve

Two things, and both catch retailers who expected the software to be the whole answer. The first is hardware. A till needs a card reader at minimum, and a serious counter wants a stand, a cash drawer, a receipt printer and often a barcode scanner. That is a one-off capital cost sitting outside every subscription figure on this page, and it is the reason a shop's first month on Shopify POS costs far more than its second.

The second is that POS inherits the plan's constraints. Staff accounts are a plan-level limit, so a Basic merchant who adds POS Pro gets unlimited staff on the till while still having one login for the admin behind it. That is a sensible split — counter staff rarely need access to payouts — but it surprises people who assumed Pro lifted the whole ceiling. If your shop floor staff also need to manage the online store, that is a plan upgrade, not a POS one.

Where it fits against the rest of the platform

If you already sell online with Shopify and you also sell in person, POS is close to unarguable, because the alternative is reconciling two stock systems by hand and that is a job nobody wants. If you sell only in person, you are paying for an online platform you are not using, and a dedicated retail system may fit better.

The one hard exclusion: Starter cannot take POS Pro. Anyone whose business is primarily a counter should start on Basic or above. The tier-by-tier reasoning is in Shopify pricing, plan by plan, and the broader case for the platform sits in the full Shopify review.

The verdict on POS

8.5 out of 10. The free tier is more useful than Shopify's positioning implies, the paid tier solves real problems rather than invented ones, and the card-present rates are fair. The mark comes off for per-location billing that punishes exactly the merchants doing well enough to expand, and for a pricing page that does not make the free tier's capabilities obvious.

Start on the free in-person selling that comes with your plan. Move to Pro when you hire your second member of counter staff or open your second door, whichever arrives first — not before. The current hardware options and per-location terms are on Shopify POS.