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Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that features an interactive and user-friendly interface to set up your store. But most businesses face trouble in opting for the right Shopify pricing plan.
The Shopify team features 5 different packages to choose from, namely Shopify Lite, Basic Shopify, Shopify, Advanced Shopify, and Shopify Plus. It’s difficult to decide which one is worth investing in to set up a compelling and practical eCommerce store. Keep in mind that you don’t need to spend money on features that will remain irrelevant to you. You need to look for the practicality and usability of each plan to get the most appropriate one for your business.
In this blog post, we will discuss Shopify pricing plans and compare their features to give you an idea about each of them.
Shopify Pricing Plans – A Comparative Analysis
Before we discuss Shopify price variations with their features, it’s vital to note that there are 3 main Shopify plans available, other than the free trial version.
These Shopify price plans include:
1. Basic Shopify
It is the most budget-friendly option that comes for $29 / month. It features all the fundamental utilities that are vital to starting and managing a new eCommerce store, including 2 employee accounts, round-the-clock support, unlimited utilities, and a dedicated blog section. You also offered a complimentary SSL license, discount offers, and recovery for cart abandonment.
2. Shopify
It is the standard and mid-range plan but a little bit expensive. This standard plan costs $79 / month. It offers everything you can avail yourself of in the Basic Shopify plan, such as discount codes and an interactive sales dashboard, as well as 5 employee accounts.
3. Advanced Shopify
This plan is a complete package and costs $299 per month. The Advanced Shopify plan offers 15 employee accounts, including other utilities that are being offered with Shopify’s standard package. You can leverage a high-end reporting and insights dashboard along with third-party shipping charges.
Shopify pricing plans
Each of these plans also features different Shopify Payment conditions. For example, your online banking or credit card charges include:
- With Basic Shopify Package – 2.2% including 30 cents
- With Shopify (Standard) – 2.6% including 30 cents
- With Advanced Shopify Package – 2.4% including 30 cents
Apart from that, additional charges are included with payment providers other than Shopify payments which are 2% for Basic Plan, 1% for Standard Plan, and 0.5% for Advanced Plan.
The Shopify Basic Plan also features Shopify POS applications as well as external POS applications. In comparison, the Shopify and Advanced Shopify plans offer hardware support, staff POS utilities, and support for multiple inventory locations.
Let’s discuss and compare all these plans with some additional plans in detail.
The Shopify Lite Plan
Overview
This plan costs $9 / month and offers you utilities for selling your products on social media platforms like Facebook, receiving credit card payments, as well as placing Click to Buy buttons. Shopify lite is not a dedicated online platform with a shopping cart, but it serves small businesses well. You can also use it to add action buttons on your existing eCommerce site or blog site.
A recent feature utilizes the Facebook Messenger application to engage directly with customers making it a perfect tool for providing an eCommerce experience to Facebook’s audience.
For Whom is this plan best?
The core purpose of Shopify Lite is to add eCommerce features to your existing website, blog, or Facebook page. Therefore, you require a fully functional website with all the necessary features. For instance, you can add Shopify Lite to your WordPress website.
The Basic Shopify Plan
Overview
The Basic Plan is a complete package for SMBs looking for a fully supported eCommerce platform. It features a discount coupon generator, fraud analytics, and the freedom to upload an infinite number of items to showcase on your storefront. All you have to do is manage all your products and orders on a fully functional Shopify site. You don’t need any other website to support any functionality.
Some other benefits include complimentary SSL support, shipping labels, never-ending data storage, and round-the-clock support.
For Whom is this plan best?
If you require a complete eCommerce store with optimum functionality, refrain from investing your limited budget for any extra features that come with more expensive Shopify plans, Shopify basic serves you well. You can also opt for this plan if you don’t have any existing website you need with Shopify Lite.
The Shopify (Standard) Plan
Overview
Being one of the most preferred and optimum solutions, the Shopify (Standard) Plan costs $79 / month, making it much more expensive than its entry-level Shopify counterpart. But it comes along with some interesting features and utilities.
You can upload an unlimited number of items and leverage everything you are offered with Basic Plan. Additionally, you can access other utilities like Shopify POS, discount or promo cards, a professional dashboard, and recovery for cart abandonment. The cart abandonment recovery utility is one of the main reasons people often prefer choosing the Shopify Plan. Card Abandonment is one of the best ways to generate leads and re-engage them for further nurturing to lock the sale.
Card abandonment also offers a bright side that a person is more likely to become a customer if approached rightly with limited-time discount offers & creating a sense of urgency. The best aspect is that the abandoned cart utility pushes autogenerated emails based on the templates or approach you to choose. For instance, if a user leaves a cart without purchasing anything, you can either push them a discount coupon or a reminder email after a particular time.
This feature serves as a most compelling package as around 70% of prospects abandon their carts but lets you generate 55% more sales revenue when re-engaged in a personalized fashion. It’s vital to re-engage these prospects and determine why they left their sales journey in between.
For Whom is this Shopify plan best?
This standard package serves SMBs that are eager to scale up their store and want to leverage unlimited products and unlimited storage facilities to achieve their objective. Once your eCommerce business starts generating $5,000 / month in sales, the standard package is a great deal. The most remarkable feature is the abandoned cart recovery utility that allows you to significantly improve your RoI.
The Advanced Shopify Plan
Overview
This costs $299 / month and offers all the necessary features that come along with the preceding packages, including an advanced reporting dashboard and calculating third-party shipping charges. Unlimited product uploads are still in place, along with a further decrease in transaction fees going down a bit when using external payment gateways.
The most remarkable feature of the Advanced Shopify package is that everything is unlimited, including storage. You can easily upload as many products as you want and post as many video tutorials or product images as needed to improve the customer experience. It also offers an Abandoned cart recovery tool.
In the advanced package, you can give dashboard access to 15 staff members. The Shopify shipping discount is another distinguishing feature that makes it outstand the other plans.
For Whom is this Shopify plan best?
The Advanced Shopify Plan is the best option for businesses that would rather prefer their shipping handled by third-party vendors. It’s also recommended for businesses that generate a significant amount of revenue and require an advanced reporting dashboard. You can save a notable amount of money with the reduced transaction fees and Shopify shipping discounts, making it eye candy for eCommerce businesses generating $10,000 in sales monthly.
Shopify Plus Plan
Overview
Shopify Plus is an enterprise-grade platform. It offers utilities that are centric on marketing and design aspects instead of order management. It offers a fully managed website, and you exclude any type of transaction fees. It offers 200 TB of gigantic storage, which is more than enough to sustain the need of stores with a comprehensive product portfolio.
Price: You need to communicate with the sales representative of Shopify. Theoretically, it stands somewhere around $2000 per month.
For Whom is this Shopify plan best?
Enterprise-grade eCommerce entities are recommended to leverage this state-of-the-art tool. It’s high-end features and expensive pricing makes it an irrational choice for SMBs. But if you have a decent number of in-house or remote, and you don’t want to invest too much time and resources in managing your orders, Shopify Plus is the way to streamline this channel.
FAQs
That’s it for learning which Shopify plan is right for you.
Below are some frequently asked questions about Shopify’s pricing structure with to-the-point answers and recommendations from skilled individuals.
1. What is the monthly and annual expense of Shopify?
As we have discussed earlier, there are 3 primary plans with different Shopify fee structures: Basic Shopify plan with $29 per month, Shopify (Standard) plan with $79 per month, & Advanced Shopify with $299 per month. If you opt for an annual plan, you can further discount like:
- 10% discount for an annual plan (Lump Sum Payment)
- 20% discount with 2 years plan (Lump Sum Payment)
- 25% discount with 3 years (Lump Sum Payment)
2. Does Shopify possess any transaction charges? Or what are the credit card fees on different plans?
If you opt for Shopify Payments, it possesses no fees on any transaction. Whereas, using third-party payment gateways such as PayPal, you have to pay additional fees based on your Shopify package, which is:
- Basic Plan with 2% / transaction
- Standard Plan with 1% / transaction
- Advanced Plan with 0.5% / transaction
Irrespective of your payment gateway, you will also have to pay credit card processing fees if your customer pays via a credit card while making a purchase. It also depends on your subscription plan, that is:
- Basic Plan with 2.9% including 30cents / transaction
- Standard Plan with 2.6% including 30cents / transaction
- Advanced Plan with 2.4% including 30cents / transaction
3. What are Shopify Payments?
As the name suggests, Shopify Payments are its payment gateways. If you choose Shopify payments as your transaction mode, you will not have to pay any additional transaction fees on top of credit card processing charges.
If you opt for any external payment gateway like PayPal, you will have to pay additional fees based on your subscription model:
- Basic Plan with 2% / transaction
- Standard Plan with 1% / transaction
- Advanced Plan with 0.5% / transaction
4. Does Shopify possess any initial setup fees?
No. You don’t have to pay any additional charges apart from Shopify’s monthly or annual fee as well as the aforementioned per-transaction charges.
5. Is there any freemium version of Shopify available?
Shopify is not a freemium platform. You can get started with Shopify with their 14-day free trial version. During the trial period, you can develop and set up your store to make it available to your prospects.
In order to start entertaining customers and lock sales, you will have to choose any of paid Shopify plans.
6. Is it mandatory to provide Credit Card credentials to start using a free trial on Shopify?
No. Shopify offers a 14-day free trial without asking for your credit card credentials. You can test its environment, check out its interactive layout, and even start setting up your store to make it visible to the audience. At the end of your trial period, you will be asked for the conversion to any of paid packages of your choice by adding your credit card credentials.
7. Which Shopify plan serves you best for SMBs?
The Basic Shopify plan best serves the purpose of entry-level businesses or startups. It costs $29 per month. If you opt for an annual package, 2 years package, or 3 years package, you will get a relaxation of 10%, 20%, or 25%, respectively.
There is no kind of charges when it comes to setting up or launching your store.
8. Which platform is more budget-friendly, Shopify or WooCommerce?
No. For instance, launching a new eCommerce store on Basic Shopify with an annual package costs you $312 per year. Whereas launching a similar WooCommerce store will cost $15 for the domain name and $70 to $120 for web hosting. It makes WooCommerce less expensive than Shopify. But, if you opt for WooCommerce, you need to be familiar with developing websites and eCommerce stores from scratch or hire/outsource resources for hassle-free development.
In the case of Shopify, all technical aspect is covered by Shopify itself. It includes store development, maintenance, security, etc. In other words, all you have to do is just focus on handling the orders and entertaining your customers.
9. How many users does Shopify support?
Shopify allows you to set up employee accounts. But the number of users depends on the package you’ve subscribed for, that is:
- Basic Plan with 2 employee accounts
- Standard Plan with 5 employee accounts
- Advanced Plan with 15 employee accounts
10. How many products can I showcase on my Shopify store?
Shopify doesn’t restrict the number of products you can upload to showcase on your store. You can easily upload and sell an unlimited number of products on all Shopify plans.
11. How many sales and website visitors can I entertain on my Shopify site?
There is no such restriction either. You can let your store grow organically without spending a single penny as long as you can. You can handle unlimited store visitors and deal with an unlimited number of orders on all Shopify plans.
End Words
Shopify fees, along with other charges, are one of the primary aspects that most businesses can find difficult to grasp while developing their online presence. For a broader picture, you need to put in the additional charges like transaction fees and credit card charges along with subscription fees.
Still, with a little bit complex pricing model, Shopify is one of the most preferred and effective eCommerce platforms in the market. With a huge range of essential eCommerce utilities, interactive dashboards, and a rich community of store designers and eCommerce enthusiasts, Shopify is a great platform for any business to make a debut in the digital world.
Although Shopify isn’t the most budget-friendly eCommerce platform, it is one of the best solutions for businesses who are concerned about investing their hard-earned money to develop an effective eCommerce store. Shopify prices aren’t irrelevant from any perspective – mainly when you consider the value addition and ease of use that you get in exchange for your investment. However, they’re not suitable for small eCommerce businesses that lack a significant budget to invest in their online presence.
On the contrary, if you have a significant investment to choose any top-of-the-line Shopify plan, or you want to incorporate Shopify Payments into your plan, you can notably ease the burden on your budget and enjoy a range of functionality-rich eCommerce utilities.
By opting for the right Shopify plan as per your specific needs and after evaluating your business model, you can set up an effective and cost-effective eCommerce platform. This comprehensive Shopify guide has revealed some extra pieces of information that are mandatory to make a rational decision & boost your experience.
