What does Shopify cost per sale?

On the Basic plan in the UK, a £60 order taken through Shopify Payments costs £1.45 in card fees — 2% + 25p — and if you took 40 orders that month the £25 subscription adds another £0.63, so Shopify has cost you £2.08, or 3.5% of the order. That is the number sellers quote when they say Shopify is cheaper than a marketplace, and it is the wrong number, because it leaves out the only thing a marketplace was ever charging for: the buyer. The rest of this page does the full sum, from Shopify’s own published pricing page, read on 25 September 2026.

What Shopify charges, from Shopify

Shopify's cost splits into two completely different kinds of charge, and almost every argument about whether it is expensive comes from mixing them up. There is a subscription, which you pay whether you sell anything or not, and there is a rate on each transaction, which you only pay when money moves. The plan you are on changes both, and it changes them in opposite directions: the more you pay per month, the less you pay per sale.

Every figure in the table below is taken from Shopify's own UK pricing page, read on 25 September 2026 and linked at the foot of this page. These are the United Kingdom figures. Shopify publishes a separate pricing page for each country it operates in, and both the subscription prices and the card rates differ between them — if you are not selling from a UK account, open your own country's pricing page and read the numbers off that before using any of the arithmetic here.

Two things in that table are worth pausing on before anything else.

The first is that the card rate barely moves. Between Basic and Advanced the subscription goes up by nearly fourteen times — £25 to £344 on monthly billing — and the card rate falls by half a percentage point, from 2% to 1.5%. The flat 25p per transaction does not move at all; it is 25p on every plan including Plus. So the plan ladder is not really a payments ladder. It is a features ladder with a small payments discount attached, and the crossover arithmetic later on this page shows how much revenue you need before that discount is worth anything.

The second is that the third-party transaction fee moves ten times as much as the card rate does. It runs 2%, 1%, 0.6%, 0.2% down the plans. That is the fee Shopify charges for processing payments through somebody else's gateway rather than through Shopify Payments, and it has its own section below, because it is the single largest thing a seller can do to their own cost per sale without noticing.

The same pricing page publishes a set of rates that are not the headline one, and they matter if your customers are not all paying with a standard UK-issued card. On the Basic plan, Shopify lists the online Amex card rate at 3.1% + 25p and the online international rate at 3.1% + 25p, against 2% + 25p for the standard rate. The same spread runs down the plans: 2.7% + 25p on Grow, 2.5% + 25p on Advanced, 2.3% + 25p on Plus. In-person card rates are separate again, listed at 1.7% on Basic, 1.6% on Grow and 1.5% on both Advanced and Plus, with no flat per-transaction amount attached. The plan cards themselves say "card rates from" each headline figure, and those Amex and international lines are what the word "from" is doing.

Alongside the plans, the page lists two things that change the monthly number without being a plan at all. POS Pro, the version of Shopify's till software aimed at physical shops, is an add-on at £69/mo per location. And at the top of the page Shopify was running an introductory offer on 25 September 2026: three days free, then £1/month for three months. That offer is real and it is also the reason a lot of people conclude Shopify costs almost nothing — they are reading their first three invoices. Price your margins off the standing rate, not the introductory one, because the fourth invoice is the one you will be living with.

A 60 pound order on the Basic plan, line by line

One order. A £54.00 item with £6.00 delivery charged, so £60.00 goes through the card. UK seller, Basic plan on monthly billing, paid through Shopify Payments with a standard UK-issued card, no third-party gateway involved.

The card rate applies to the amount that goes through the card, which is the whole basket the buyer pays — item, delivery, and any tax you have added to it. It is not charged on the item price alone.

Shopify has taken 3.47% of that order. You bank £57.92, and out of that you still have to pay for the item, the packaging and the actual delivery label — none of which appear anywhere in a platform fee comparison, and all of which are usually far larger than the platform fee.

Now notice how unstable that 3.47% is. The £1.45 is fixed for that order; the £0.63 is not a real per-order charge at all, it is a monthly bill divided by however many orders happened to land that month. Change the order count and nothing about the order changes, but the headline percentage moves a long way:

At five orders a month Shopify is taking more than a tenth of every sale. At four hundred it is taking a fortieth. The platform did not change its prices; you changed the denominator. This is the thing that makes "is Shopify expensive" an unanswerable question in the abstract — it is expensive at low volume and cheap at high volume, and the entire difference is one fixed cost being spread.

Here is the general form. It is worth writing on the inside of your eyelids, because almost every mistake sellers make about platform costs is a mistake about one of these three terms:

True cost per sale = transaction fee on the order + (monthly subscription + monthly app charges) ÷ orders that month + cost of acquiring that customer

Most fee comparisons show you only the first term. The spreadsheets sellers keep usually show the first two. The third term is the one that decides whether leaving a marketplace made you money, and it is the subject of the last section on this page.

If you want to see what any of this does to a specific product rather than a generic order, the margin calculator takes the order value and what actually landed in your account and returns the gross margin, which is the number the fee percentage is really an argument about.

The fee for using someone else's gateway

This is the expensive one, and it is expensive in a way that does not look like a fee.

Shopify runs its own payment processing, Shopify Payments. If you use it, you pay the card rate in the table above and nothing else. If you instead take payments through a different gateway — your own merchant account, a processor you already had before you opened the store, a local provider that supports a payment method your customers want — Shopify charges a third-party transaction fee on top of whatever that gateway charges you. On Basic that is 2% of the order. On Grow 1%, on Advanced 0.6%, on Plus 0.2%.

It is worth being precise about when it bites, because Shopify's own help pages are specific. Shopify's page on third-party payment providers states that third-party transaction fees apply on all third-party and alternate payment gateways even when Shopify Payments is activated, and that if you have Shopify Payments activated then PayPal and manual payments are excluded from those fees. Shopify's Shopify Payments fees page states that stores are not charged third-party transaction fees for orders processed through Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Shop Pay Installments and PayPal Express. Shopify Plus stores using Shopify Payments as their sole provider have the fee waived; combined with third-party providers, it applies.

Put that on the £60 order. On the Basic plan, routing it through an outside gateway costs:

We have deliberately not put a number on G. Gateway pricing is set by the gateway, not by Shopify, and a figure invented here would be worse than no figure at all — go and read your provider's published rate card, because it is the only place that number exists. But you do not need G to see the shape of the problem. Shopify's third-party fee alone, before the gateway has charged you a penny, is £1.20 against the £1.45 the whole transaction would have cost through Shopify Payments. If your gateway charges anything close to a normal card rate, you are paying roughly twice to process the same order, and the second payment buys you nothing your customer can see.

This changes the plan maths completely, which is the part almost nobody works out. If you are on Shopify Payments, moving from Basic to Grow saves you 0.3 percentage points on card rates. If you are on a third-party gateway, the same move saves you a full percentage point — the third-party fee halves from 2% to 1%. The next section does both sums side by side, and the difference between them is startling.

There are perfectly good reasons to be on an outside gateway: Shopify Payments is not available in every country, and some businesses have processing arrangements they cannot or should not unwind. The point is not that using one is a mistake. The point is that it is a priced decision, the price is published, and a lot of sellers are paying it without having ever seen it, because it arrives as a line on a monthly Shopify bill rather than as a deduction from each order.

Where the monthly fee stops mattering

The upgrade question has an exact answer, and it is one line of algebra. Two plans cost the same when the extra subscription you pay equals the transaction savings you get back. Below that revenue the cheaper plan wins; above it the dearer one does.

Crossover revenue per month = (difference in monthly subscription) ÷ (difference in transaction rate)

The flat 25p is identical on every plan, so it cancels out and can be ignored entirely. Only the percentage part matters.

Basic to Grow, on Shopify Payments. The subscription gap on monthly billing is £65 − £25 = £40. The rate gap is 2% − 1.7% = 0.3%.

£40 ÷ 0.003 = £13,333 per month

Check it. At £13,333 of monthly card volume, Basic costs £25 + (2% × £13,333) = £25 + £266.67 = £291.67. Grow costs £65 + (1.7% × £13,333) = £65 + £226.67 = £291.67. Identical, to the penny.

On yearly billing the gap narrows to £49 − £19 = £30, and the crossover falls to £30 ÷ 0.003 = £10,000 per month.

Grow to Advanced, on Shopify Payments. The subscription gap on monthly billing is £344 − £65 = £279. The rate gap is 1.7% − 1.5% = 0.2%.

£279 ÷ 0.002 = £139,500 per month

On yearly billing: (£259 − £49) ÷ 0.002 = £105,000 per month. That is somewhere between £1.26m and £1.67m a year of card volume before the Advanced card rate pays for the Advanced subscription. Which means that for the overwhelming majority of stores, Advanced is not a payments decision at all. If you are on it below that revenue, you should be on it for the features Shopify attaches to it — fifteen staff accounts against five, live third-party shipping rates, regional pricing — and not because somebody told you the card rate was better. It is better. It is nowhere near £279 a month better.

Now run exactly the same algebra for a store on a third-party gateway, where the gap is the third-party transaction fee rather than the card rate:

A third-party-gateway store on yearly billing should be on Grow from £3,000 a month of revenue. A Shopify Payments store on monthly billing does not reach the same decision until £13,333. Same platform, same plans, same published rates, and the right answer is more than four times apart depending on one setting most sellers configured once and never revisited.

There is a second thing hidden in the first table on this page, and it is the one that actually determines your floor. As order volume rises, the subscription share per order goes to nothing, and the cost per sale converges on the transaction rate plus the flat 25p spread over your average order value:

Floor cost per sale = card rate percentage + (25p ÷ average order value)

On Basic, that floor is 2% + (£0.25 ÷ £60) = 2% + 0.42% = 2.42% at a £60 average order. At a £20 average order it is 2% + 1.25% = 3.25%. At a £150 average order it is 2% + 0.17% = 2.17%. The subscription washes out with volume; the 25p never does. If you sell cheap things, the flat part of the card rate is permanently the second-largest fee you pay, and no plan upgrade touches it, because 25p is 25p on Plus too. Raising your average order value — bundles, minimum orders, a second item in the basket — is the only lever that moves it, and it is a pricing lever rather than a platform one.

If you want to know what monthly volume you actually need before any of these crossovers are even relevant, the break-even calculator answers the prior question: how many sales a month it takes to cover your fixed costs, subscription and apps included.

Apps, the line nobody budgets for

Ask a seller what Shopify costs them and they will tell you the plan price. Look at their actual Shopify invoice and the plan price is frequently the smaller half of it.

Shopify's own billing documentation describes three separate kinds of app charge. Recurring app charges are for the recurring use of an app, such as a monthly subscription payment; they are included in your regular Shopify subscription bill and billed every 30 days on their own independent billing cycles. Usage charges vary based on how much you use the app or its services and are added to your next invoice based on when the usage occurs. One-time charges are payments for specific features or services and are billed separately from your regular subscription.

We are not going to quote a price for any app, because app prices are set on each app's own listing and a made-up average would be exactly the kind of number this page exists to argue against. Go and read your own last three Shopify invoices and add up the app lines. That is your real figure, and it is the only one worth putting in a spreadsheet.

What we can do is show you what any figure does to your cost per sale, because a recurring app charge behaves identically to the subscription: it is a fixed monthly amount divided by however many orders you took.

Read the £100 row against the worked example earlier. At 40 orders a month, £100 of apps adds £2.50 to every order — more than the £2.08 that Shopify's own subscription and card rate cost combined. The platform fee argument that everybody has is about the smaller number. On a £60 order that takes the real platform cost from 3.47% to 7.63%, and there is no plan change and no gateway change that addresses it, because it is not Shopify's charge.

Two practical consequences follow, and neither requires you to cancel anything.

First, recurring app charges dilute with volume and usage charges do not. A £40/month app costs you £4.00 an order at ten orders and 10p an order at four hundred. An app that charges per order, per email sent or per lookup performed costs you the same per order at any volume — it is a percentage fee wearing different clothes. When you are choosing between two apps that do the same job, that distinction is worth more than the headline price, and which one is cheaper genuinely flips depending on where your volume is heading.

Second, apps accumulate in one direction. Nobody schedules a review of them. The honest test is per order rather than per month: an app costing £19 a month sounds like nothing and is 48p on every one of your 40 orders, which on a £60 order with a 30% gross margin is about 2.6% of your gross profit for that app alone. Some will clear that bar comfortably. The ones that do not are usually the ones nobody has opened in six months.

The comparison sellers get wrong

Here is the argument that sends people to Shopify, stated as fairly as we can: a marketplace takes double-digit percentages of every order forever, Shopify takes about 3%, so build your own store and keep the difference. The arithmetic in that sentence is correct. The conclusion does not follow, and the reason is one word long.

The marketplace fee is not a payments fee. It is a customer acquisition fee. You are paying it because somebody who had never heard of you typed something into a search box on a site they already trusted and found your product. Shopify sells you a shop. It does not sell you a high street to put it on.

So do the comparison properly. Same order both ways: a £54.00 item with £6.00 delivery, £60.00 in total, sold by a UK seller. The marketplace figures below are Etsy's, taken from Etsy's own Fees and Payments Policy, Etsy Payments Policy and Regulatory Operating Fee help article, all read on 25 September 2026 — a 6.5% transaction fee on the item price plus what you charge for delivery, payment processing of 4% + £0.20 for a UK bank account, a 0.48% Regulatory Operating fee for UK sellers, and a 0.20 USD listing fee. Our separate guide to what Etsy takes works those through in more detail.

11.6% against 3.5%. The own-store column is £4.86 per order better. That £4.86 is the entire point of this page, and it is not profit. It is your budget for getting that buyer to your store. Spend less than £4.86 acquiring the order and you are ahead of the marketplace. Spend more and the marketplace was cheaper, no matter what the fee percentages say.

Acquisition allowance per order = marketplace cost per order − own-store cost per order

Then convert that allowance into the unit you can actually control, which is the cost of a visit:

Affordable cost per visitor = acquisition allowance ÷ visitors needed per order

If your store turns one visitor in fifty into a buyer, you need fifty visits per order, so £4.86 ÷ 50 = 9.7p a visit. If it turns one in a hundred into a buyer, £4.86 ÷ 100 = 4.9p a visit. Those are your real numbers to check, and the conversion rate is yours, not ours — take it from your own analytics rather than from anybody's benchmark. Now go and look at what a click costs in your category. For a lot of products that comparison ends the argument in about four seconds, and it ends it in whichever direction it ends it. That is the sum, and it is the one nobody does before migrating.

Three things keep the comparison honest, and two of them cut against the marketplace.

The first cuts for it: marketplace fees are charged only when you sell. Shopify's subscription and your apps are charged whether you sell or not. At five orders a month, our earlier table put Shopify's cost at 10.75% of a £60 order before a single app, which is close to the marketplace's 11.6% and gets worse in any month that goes quiet. A percentage of nothing is nothing. A subscription in a bad month is the same subscription.

The second cuts against it: the marketplace charges for acquisition explicitly too, and separately. Etsy's Offsite Ads fee, per its own policy, is 15% of an attributed order, falling to 12% once a shop has made 10,000 USD in sales over the prior 365 days, capped at 100 USD per order, and the policy states that once a shop has ever reached that threshold the 12% fee applies for the lifetime of the shop. On our £60 order, an attributed sale costs £6.94 + £9.00 = £15.94, or 26.6%. At that point the acquisition allowance is not £4.86, it is £13.86, and the own-store arithmetic looks very different indeed. It is not a coincidence that this is the fee that appears exactly when the marketplace is doing the acquiring — that is what it is charging for, stated plainly.

The third also cuts against it, and it is not a fee at all: acquisition cost on your own store can fall, and marketplace fees never do. A repeat buyer who comes back to your store directly costs you nothing to acquire the second time, so the second order really is the full £4.86 better. The same repeat buyer on a marketplace pays the same 11.6% forever. If your product is bought once, the marketplace's economics are hard to beat, because you pay full acquisition cost every time either way. If it is bought four times a year, the own-store arithmetic compounds in a way the fee table cannot show you. That is a question about your product, not about either platform.

Which is the real conclusion here, and it is deliberately not a recommendation. The platform fee difference on a £60 order is £4.86. Whether that is a good trade depends on your conversion rate, your cost per click, your repeat purchase rate and your order volume — four numbers that live in your business and in nobody's pricing page. Work them out before you move, not after.

Two things this page deliberately does not tell you. Whether VAT is charged on your Shopify subscription, your app bills or your transaction fees depends on your own VAT status and where you are registered, and that is a question for your accountant rather than for a fee table. And chargebacks, refunds, currency conversion on cross-border orders and the delivery labels themselves all have costs that vary by provider and by order — your own payouts report is the only place those exist accurately, and none of them are in any of the sums above.

Arithmetic and general information only — not financial, tax, legal or investment advice. Your own figures, and your own accountant, decide what any of this means for you.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Shopify take per sale?

On the Basic plan in the UK, Shopify Payments charges 2% + 25p on the amount that goes through the card, so a 60 pound order costs 1.45 pounds to process. On top of that you pay the monthly subscription whether you sell or not: 25 pounds a month on monthly billing, or 19 pounds on yearly billing. Spread across 40 orders that adds about 63p per order, taking the real platform cost on a 60 pound order to 2.08 pounds, or 3.47%. Rates differ by plan and by country, so check your own country pricing page.

What is the Shopify third-party transaction fee?

It is a fee Shopify charges when you process payments through a gateway other than Shopify Payments, and it is charged on top of whatever that gateway charges you. On the UK pricing page it is 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Shopify states that stores are not charged third-party transaction fees for orders processed through Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Shop Pay Installments and PayPal Express, and that if Shopify Payments is activated then PayPal and manual payments are excluded.

At what revenue should I move from Basic to Grow?

Divide the subscription gap by the rate gap. On Shopify Payments with monthly billing that is 40 pounds divided by 0.3%, which is 13,333 pounds of card volume a month; on yearly billing it is 30 pounds divided by 0.3%, or 10,000 pounds a month. If you use a third-party gateway the third-party fee halves from 2% to 1%, so the gap is a full percentage point and the crossover falls to 4,000 pounds a month on monthly billing or 3,000 pounds on yearly billing.

Is Shopify cheaper than selling on a marketplace?

Per order, usually yes on the fees alone. On a 60 pound order a UK Etsy seller pays about 6.94 pounds in fees against about 2.08 pounds on Shopify Basic at 40 orders a month, a difference of 4.86 pounds. But the marketplace fee is buying you the customer and Shopify is not, so the 4.86 pounds is your acquisition budget rather than extra profit. If your store converts one visitor in fifty, that allows about 9.7p a visit. Compare that with what a click actually costs you.

Do Shopify apps count as part of the cost per sale?

Yes, and they are often larger than the subscription. Shopify bills recurring app charges on your regular subscription bill every 30 days, adds usage charges to your next invoice, and bills one-time charges separately. A recurring app charge behaves exactly like the subscription: divide it by your monthly order count. At 40 orders a month, 100 pounds of apps adds 2.50 pounds to every order, which is more than the subscription and card fee combined on a 60 pound sale.

Sources

• Shopify UK pricing page (plan prices, online card rates, Amex and international rates, in-person rates, third-party transaction fees, staff accounts, inventory locations, POS Pro add-on) — checked 2026-09-25
• Shopify Help Centre - Third-party payment providers (when third-party transaction fees apply) — checked 2026-09-25
• Shopify Help Centre - Shopify Payments fees (which payment methods are exempt from third-party transaction fees) — checked 2026-09-25
• Shopify Help Centre - App charges on your Shopify bill (recurring, usage and one-time charges) — checked 2026-09-25
• Etsy Fees & Payments Policy (listing fee, 6.5% transaction fee, Offsite Ads fees) — checked 2026-09-25
• Etsy Payments Policy - payment processing fees by country (UK 4% + 0.20 GBP) — checked 2026-09-25
• Etsy Help - What is a Regulatory Operating Fee? (UK 0.48%) — checked 2026-09-25

Other guides

• How much does Etsy take from a sale?
• How to build a cash flow forecast
• Agency utilisation rate: the formula, and the denominator that decides it