What is the cost of Shopify Plus?
If you’re a Shopify business bringing in $1-2M in revenue annually, you may begin to require additional support, customization, and functionality features to meet the increasingly complex needs of your growing business. At this point, perhaps you’ve considered upgrading from a regular Shopify plan to Shopify Plus, Shopify’s enterprise ecommerce platform for high-volume merchants.
Cost is a major concern for merchants who are debating whether it’s time to make the leap to an enhanced ecommerce solution. Because many of the costs associated with Shopify Plus are varied, business owners may feel confused about what they should expect to pay for the platform.
In this article, we’ve broken down the Plus pricing schedule so that you can better understand the true cost of the platform before deciding whether it’s time to upgrade to Shopify’s enterprise solution.
The primary four fees associated with Shopify Plus are the:
Shopify Plus is made for high-volume, growing businesses and operates under the assumption that businesses with higher sales volumes will use more support and resources.
For that reason, Plus prices its platform fee based on usage–meaning the volume of your monthly sales.
While this pricing model is varied, the minimum amount you will pay to use the Plus platform is $2,000 per month. Businesses making over $800,000 per month pay a revenue-based fee that is set at 0.25% of the store’s monthly revenue, capping out at $40,000 per month.
Shopify Payments is Shopify’s “in-house” credit card processing program, which is powered by Stripe, a popular payment gateway provider for ecommerce merchants.
Shopify Payments offers merchant complete payment processing, thereby absolving the need for a merchant account or third-party payment gateway.
It’s worth noting that credit card processing fees vary by country, and Shopify Payments isn’t available in all countries, so check to see if your country is supported.
Additionally, Shopify Payments doesn’t cover certain “high-risk” industries, such as e-cigarettes. If Shopify Payments is unavailable to you for whatever reason, you’ll have to find an third-party payment processing solution.
Here, we’ll cover what credit card processing fees you should expect to pay as a Shopify store in the United States, using Shopify Payments:
If you’re a high-volume merchant with a long history with Shopify, you may have some luck negotiating this rate down, but the outcome will be situation-specific, so don’t bank on a lower payment processing rate when budgeting and calculating overall costs.
If you’re a store that isn’t using Shopify Payments, you should expect to pay an additional 0.15% fee on top of the credit card processing fees you pay to your third-party payment gateway provider.
For some merchants, it’s not worth using Shopify Payments even despite the additional 0.15% fee because they’ve already negotiated a lower credit card rate with their third-party payment gateway. If you’re interested in doing a little gateway shopping, check out the 70+ gateways worldwide that are integrated with Shopify and offer a variety of different credit card rates.
While Shopify Plus already offers a high level of support and functionality, some merchants’ stores may still demand enhanced features that require the use of third-party apps to manage, for example, upsell/offer programs, subscription services, referral programs, product reviews, and more.
It’s difficult to estimate what you’ll pay for these apps because they vary in price, and your shop’s specific needs will dictate how many and which apps you utilize. Note, however, that merchants using Shopify Plus generally spend less per month on third-party apps because the Plus platform itself already offers custom solutions that can be built into the store’s theme.
The price you should expect to pay for routine maintenance as a Shopify Plus store is minimal, especially when compared to other platforms.
Because Shopify is a hosted platform, it manages and maintains its own servers and security and kernel upgrades.
Most merchants ultimately want to know if it’s possible to negotiate any of these fees with Shopify, and sadly, it isn’t.
As we mentioned above, there is the narrow possibility that merchants with long and strong financial histories in their industry might be able to lower their credit card processing fees, but unfortunately, Shopify moved onto fixed pricing in 2017, so the Plus platform fee is no longer negotiable.
This means that you should expect to pay a minimum of $2,000 per month as a Shopify Plus member, and perhaps several hundred to a few thousand dollars more than that based on whether you choose to equip your store with robust features requiring the support of third-party apps.
While this cost may seem steep at first, consider the value of the superior support, customized checkout, and functionality features you will gain access to by using the Plus platform. For many high-volume ecommerce stores, these enhanced solutions are well worth the investment.
If you’re interested in discussing whether it’s time to make the leap to Shopify Plus, learn more here.
Giles Thomas
CEOOptimize your Shopify conversion rates. 5 lesson course, learn 51 ecommerce best practices to get more visitors to buy.
