Shopify pricing: Which Shopify plan is best for building your online store?

Shopify’s pricing plans vary dramatically to cater to all needs and budgets. For a few pounds a month, Shopify can help you start selling online for the first time; increase your monthly outlay to double or triple digits, however, and this website builder can provide powerful business support. The question is: which Shopify pricing plan should you pick?

The Shopify plan we recommended for most users is Shopify Basic, which normally costs £25/mth (£19/mth if you pay annually) and is currently slashed to just £1/mth for the first three months, after three days free.

That’s quite some offer – but what do you get for your money? And how do Shopify’s other price plans compare?

View offers at Shopify

Why should I choose Shopify as my website builder?

The best website builders are drag-and-drop online tools for creating fully featured, great-looking websites without needing any coding or web design skills.

Most website builders have a speciality. For example Smugmug excels at photo portfolios, and Squarespace has a particularly professional look. For selling online, though, Shopify is the one to go for. Its templates can’t match Squarespace for sheer gorgeousness, but its service is packed with ecommerce functions that genuinely help you sell.

Shopify’s ecommerce features include…

• Integrated sales channels including eBay, Amazon, Facebook and Instagram
• A suite of mobile tools so you can manage your online store anywhere
• A built-in inventory system, so you can easily add and edit new and existing items
• The ability to make groups in collections to help keep your store organised
• Point of sale (POS) devices so you can take payment in person
• An App Store for adding extra functions to your store

Shopify pricing explained: How much does it cost?

Even when not dangling its £1/mth carrot, Shopify’s plans start affordably, at just £5/mth to host your online selling spree. Not a bad little cash converter in these strapped times.

However, the £5/mth plan (Shopify Starter, fomerly known as Shopify Lite) doesn’t include the usual website building tools. Instead, it’s a simple tool for adding products to any website or blog, then applying basic order management and analytics tools.

The cheapest of the main plans is Shopify Basic, which ordinarily costs £25/mth if you pay monthly, or £19/mth if you pay annually. That may sound a lot, given that Wix (our best all-round website builder) charges less than £6/mth for a site with free domain and unlimited bandwidth. 

But Wix doesn’t specialise in helping you sell stuff. Shopify does, and for under £20 per month it’ll help you shift a lot more than 20 quid’s worth of items. It’s a business investment – and it’s £1/mth for the first three months right now, as we’ve already mentioned.

Moving up the plan price scale, the minimalistically named Shopify plan costs £65/mth (monthly) or £49/mth (annually) and adds more powerful sales, marketing and analysis tools. The Advanced plan (£344/mth; £259/mth) offers serious support for a growing international business. We’ll go into more detail about these plans below.

Does Shopify have a free plan?

Shopify doesn’t have a free plan, but all its plans include a free 3-day trial. You don’t even have to hand over your card details to get started.

Will Shopify give me a free domain name?

Unusually for a website builder, Shopify doesn’t include a free domain name with its plans. However you can buy one from the domains section of the Shopify website. Expect to pay around £10/year for the first year. The domains section also has a ton of good advice about choosing a good domain name, along with info on subdomains and country codes.

Which Shopify price plan is best for me?

Here’s the nitty gritty on each of Shopify’s main plans, starting with Basic. You can upgrade to the next plan up whenever you want.

1. Shopify Basic: £1/mth for three months, then £25/mth (monthly) or £19/mth (annually)

This is the best value Shopify plan, ideal for small businesses with a low monthly volume of sales. Its drag-and-drop page builder makes easy work of creating and customising your online store for web and mobile, complete with blog and unlimited product pages. The templates are less appealing on the eye than Squarespace’s, but they’re still top quality.

You get tools to manage all your products, orders and customer information, including abandoned shopping cart recovery, discount codes, gift cards, automated marketing tools, sales analysis reports and two staff accounts. The Basic plan also includes multiple sales channels including eBay and Amazon, plus 24/7 support and a free SSL certificate. With the current £1/mth deal, you’d be wise to start here.

2. Shopify: £65/mth (monthly) or £49/mth (annually)

If your business is growing enough to be making a few thousand pounds per month and regularly ship overseas, this is the plan for you. It charges lower transaction fees and credit card rates than the Basic plan (see table below for details), and adds powerful analysis reports that lift the lid on your sales trends and customer behaviour.

3. Advanced Shopify: £344/mth (monthly) or £259/mth (annually)

If you’re a large online store making £10,000+ per month, and you have a substantial customer base, a few staff and an international presence, this will be money well spent. You get third-party calculated shipping rates so you can give your customers various shipping options, and duties and import taxes are estimated at checkout so there are no nasty shipping survises for your customers. Your website is unlimited, including products and storage, so you can post as many videos and images as you want.

* Third-party transaction fees apply if you don’t use Shopify Payments

** Prices correct as of April 2023

What is Shopify Payments?

Shopify Payments is Shopify’s own payment gateway. Payment gateways are those embedded tools that process and authenticate payments within an online store, so the customer doesn’t have to go to another site to pay. PayPal is the best-known example, but others include Square and Stripe.

If you’re setting up shop with Shopify, it makes sense to use Shopify Payments as your gateway, because it reduces your transaction fees to zero. It also lets you view your payments in real time. It’s free to use; just select it when setting up your Shopify store.

If you’d rather stick with another payment processor, however, Shopify will charge a fee of between 0.5% and 2% per transaction, depending on the price plan you’re on.