Shopify's price tag is $39 a month. Its true cost is buried in per-order fees, international surcharges and gateway penalties. Enter your numbers — see what you keep, on every plan, in real time.
| Processing fee | −$1.75 |
| Fees per order | −$1.75 |
Two separate charges hide inside every Shopify sale, and mixing them up is the most expensive mistake new merchants make. The processing fee is what the card network costs — you pay it on every plan, forever. The transaction fee is a penalty Shopify adds only when you route payments through an outside gateway instead of Shopify Payments: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced.
Using Shopify Payments zeroes out the penalty. That single switch is worth more than any plan upgrade for most stores under $20,000 a month.
| Plan (US, monthly billing) | Online card rate | In-person rate | 3rd-party surcharge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic — $39/mo | 2.9% + 30¢ | 2.6% + 10¢ | 2.0% |
| Grow — $105/mo | 2.7% + 30¢ | 2.5% + 10¢ | 1.0% |
| Advanced — $399/mo | 2.5% + 30¢ | 2.4% + 10¢ | 0.6% |
The invisible adders: international cards add +1.5% on every plan; currency conversion adds 2.0%; chargebacks cost $15 per dispute (refunded if you win). A store selling cross-border on Basic with PayPal as its gateway can quietly pay 6%+ per order — more than double the headline rate.
When to upgrade: Grow's lower rate only beats Basic above roughly $33,000/month in revenue; Advanced only beats Grow above roughly $147,000/month. (The break-even point is the same at any average order value — all three plans charge the same flat 30¢ per order, so only the percentage matters.) Below those lines, the cheaper plan wins — run your own numbers above.
Not a commission — you pay the card processing rate (2.9% + 30¢ on Basic) plus the monthly plan. A percentage surcharge of 2%/1%/0.6% appears only if you use a third-party gateway instead of Shopify Payments.
Fees, refunds and chargebacks are deducted from the payout, not from the sales figure. A payout is a batch of transactions, not a day's orders — reconcile it line by line, never one-to-one.
On Basic, Shopify Payments and Stripe are identical (2.9% + 30¢) — but using Stripe directly triggers Shopify's extra 2% surcharge, making it 4.9% + 30¢ in total. PayPal's standard rate (3.49% + 49¢) runs higher on most orders. Offer PayPal alongside Shopify Payments, never instead of it.
The processing percentage applies to the full charge amount — products, shipping charged to the buyer, and tax. The flat 30¢ applies once per transaction regardless of size.
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