Shopify review: what the tag says, what the till takes

This Shopify review starts where most of them stop: at the moment the invoice arrives. Shopify is the most complete piece of commerce software a small merchant can rent, and that is not a controversial claim. The controversial part is the price, because Shopify's price is not a number. It is a number plus a percentage plus a fixed amount per order plus whatever your app drawer has quietly accumulated, and the first figure is the only one anybody advertises.

So we have priced it the way a shop prices anything: read the tag, then check what it rings up as. On 20 September 2026, Shopify's own pricing page showed Basic at $19 a month on annual billing. Every independent rate sheet we checked the same day put the standard Basic rate at $29 annual, $39 monthly. A store turning over $4,000 a month across 80 orders on that plan pays $169. All three of those numbers are true. Only one of them is what you pay.

What you are actually renting

Strip the marketing and Shopify is four things bolted into one subscription: a storefront renderer, a checkout, an inventory and order system, and a payments business. The fourth one is the point. Shopify's plan fees are a rounding error next to its payments revenue, which is why the pricing behaves the way it does — cheap-looking at the front, percentage-based underneath.

Understanding that reframes every decision you will make on the platform. The plan you choose barely changes what the software can do; the catalogue, the themes and nearly all the features are the same from Basic upward. What the plan changes is your processing rate, your staff headcount and a short list of operational extras. You are not buying features by the tier. You are buying basis points.

The plans, at the rates you will be charged

Below are the standard published rates as of 20 September 2026 — the figures every independent source agrees on, and the ones to plan against. Shopify was separately running a promotional price on the two entry tiers that same day; that is the next section.

Annual billing takes 25% off Basic, Grow and Advanced. Starter has no annual option. Because the figures on Shopify's own pricing page move with promotions and with the country you are browsing from, treat the table above as the planning baseline and the live page as a snapshot. The staff-account numbers are the most underrated column in that table: Basic gives you one login, which means a single shared password the moment you hire anybody, and that is how small merchants end up on Grow long before the processing rate justifies it.

Starter deserves its own warning. It is $5 and it is not a shop. It sells through links, social posts and messaging, and it cannot publish a storefront. It also charges 5% on everything, including through Shopify Payments. The full picture is in our Shopify Starter plan review.

The tag problem, and why we date everything

On 20 September 2026, shopify.com/pricing displayed Basic at $27 monthly and $19 on annual billing, and Grow at $72 and $54. Advanced and Plus appeared at their standard rates on the same page. Entry tiers discounted, upper tiers untouched — the signature of a promotional offer, and one that varies by country and by session.

Promotional pricing is normal retail, and we are not accusing anyone of anything. But it means a price you read in a review written three months ago, or in another country, is evidence of very little. Every figure here carries the date it was checked, and we quote the standard rate as the plan price.

The same page was advertising 1% back on sales as subscription credit, capped at $4,500 on Basic and rising with the tier — time-limited, not a plan feature. And the standing introductory offer, three days free then $1 a month for three months, covers the subscription only. Processing is charged in full from your first sale, which surprises people who have budgeted for a dollar.

The honest way to price Shopify is to ignore the front page entirely, take the standard rate for your tier, add your own revenue multiplied by the card rate, and treat any discount you are offered as a bonus rather than a budget.

Payments, and the price of leaving

Shopify Payments is the default processor and, on US standard cards, it costs 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow and 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced. Use it and Shopify's own transaction fee is zero. Use anything else and Shopify adds a fee on top of whatever that gateway charges you: 2.0% on Basic, 1.0% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus.

On a $4,000-a-month Basic store that penalty is $80 a month — $960 a year — and it buys you nothing. It is not a processing cost; it is a charge for declining to use Shopify's processor. Legitimate reasons to pay it exist, mostly regional availability and existing merchant relationships, but fewer than merchants think.

Two rates get missed in every summary. Premium cards — which Shopify defines as domestic commercial, corporate or business-tier cards, and all domestic American Express — bill higher on every plan; on Basic the premium online rate is 3.5% + 30¢ rather than 2.9%. And cards issued abroad add a percentage point, with a further 1.5% if a currency conversion is involved. A US Basic store taking a European card with conversion is paying 5.4% + 30¢, nearly double the headline. If you sell internationally or B2B, your blended rate is not the one on the pricing page. The mechanics are unpicked in our guide to Shopify Payments and the gateway surcharge.

What a real month costs

Take the $4,000-a-month store, 80 orders, $50 average basket, on Basic at the standard annual rate with Shopify Payments and US standard cards. Processing is 2.9% of $4,000, or $116. The per-order fee is 30¢ eighty times, or $24. The plan is $29. Total: $169 a month, of which the subscription is 17%. The effective take rate on revenue is 4.2%.

Now the upgrade question, because almost everyone gets it wrong. Moving that store to Grow saves 0.2 percentage points of processing — $8 a month at this volume — and costs $50 more in subscription. Grow is $42 a month worse. The crossover is $50 divided by 0.002, which is $25,000 a month in card revenue. Below that, Basic is cheaper on rate alone. The Grow-to-Advanced crossover, by the same arithmetic, is $110,000 a month.

You will read that Grow starts paying off at $8,000 or $10,000 a month. That is only true if you also need the five staff accounts and the better shipping discounts, which many growing stores genuinely do. It is not true on rate. Upgrade for the operational features and treat the rate saving as a rebate; upgrading for the rate alone before $25,000 a month costs you money. Every figure here, with the working, sits in Shopify pricing, plan by plan.

Apps and themes: the two lines nobody budgets

The App Store is Shopify's real advantage and its real cost. Somewhere between 17,000 and 18,000 apps were listed as of mid-2026 — the counts vary by source enough that we will not pretend to a precise figure — and roughly 45% offer a free plan or trial. Almost any requirement has an answer. Almost every answer is a monthly subscription.

A basic stack of reviews, email, an upsell tool and an SEO helper typically runs $50 to $150 a month, and stores at scale commonly pass $300. None of it appears in any pricing comparison, and it compounds: apps are added during a busy week and removed approximately never. We have broken the arithmetic down in what Shopify apps actually cost.

Themes are the gentler line. Shopify's free first-party themes are genuinely good, and Dawn will carry a store further than most merchants expect. Paid themes in the Theme Store run from about $180 to $350 for most, up to around $500 at the top, and they are one-time purchases for a single store rather than subscriptions. In a market that has monetised everything else by the month, that is worth acknowledging. The detail is in our note on Shopify theme costs.

Email is the pleasant surprise. Every paid plan includes 10,000 sends a month, abandoned-checkout automations are free and do not count against that, and overage is $1 per 1,000. For a store of the size we have been costing, marketing email is effectively free.

Where Shopify is unmatched

The checkout. Not because of any particular conversion statistic — the widely-quoted figure of up to 36% better conversion comes from a study Shopify commissioned, which is worth knowing before you repeat it — but because it is a hosted, PCI-compliant, relentlessly optimised checkout that you are never asked to maintain. It handles wallets, fraud analysis and address validation without a decision from you. For a merchant without a developer, that is the whole ballgame.

Second, the operational spine. Inventory, orders, customers, shipping labels, discounts and multi-location stock are one system, not five integrated ones. Retail merchants feel this most: the till and the website share stock without middleware. Our Shopify POS review covers where that stops being free.

Where it will fight you

URLs, first. Shopify hardcodes /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/ into its router and you cannot remove them. You cannot build hierarchical category paths, and the platform generates a separate product URL for each collection a product sits in, producing duplicate paths that canonical tags mostly, but not entirely, contain. Anyone arriving from a platform with free URL control finds this genuinely irritating. We have written up the Shopify URL structure problem and the workarounds that exist.

Checkout customisation, second. checkout.liquid is finished — deprecated for the core steps in August 2024, retired for Plus thank-you and order-status pages in August 2025, with the non-Plus cutoff on 26 August 2026, now behind us. The replacement is checkout extensibility, and several of its more powerful surfaces, including payment and delivery customisation and order routing, are Plus-only. What you can and cannot change now is set out in Shopify checkout: what you can still change.

Third, content. Shopify's blogging and page tools are adequate and no more, and a brand whose growth strategy is editorial will spend the whole time pushing against a system built around products.

Who should not buy this

Anyone selling under roughly $1,200 a month. Our arithmetic puts the Starter-to-Basic crossover at about $1,143 in monthly sales; below that, the fixed cost of a real plan works against you.

Content-first brands where products are a secondary revenue line. Merchants with heavily bespoke checkout requirements and no appetite for Plus pricing. And anyone who needs URL structures Shopify will not produce — if organic search architecture is the centre of your strategy, know the constraint before you commit, not after. The full list is in what Shopify is bad at.

The verdict

Shopify earns 8.7 out of 10 here, and the three-tenths it loses are all about disclosure rather than engineering. The software is excellent. The commercial model is legitimate. The pricing presentation makes it unnecessarily hard for a merchant to know what they will pay, and a platform this dominant could afford to be plainer.

If you sell physical products at real volume and have no wish to become a systems administrator, buy Basic on annual billing, use Shopify Payments, start on a free theme, and add apps only when one is costing you money by being absent. Recheck the plan question at $25,000 a month. And whatever the pricing page shows you on the day, work out your own number first.