TL;DR: Shopify's cost has three layers: the subscription ($25–$399/month, $2,300+ for Plus), card processing on every sale, and a third-party transaction fee of 2%, 1%, 0.6%, or 0.2% by plan if you use any processor other than Shopify Payments. The part they no longer publish anywhere public is the card rates themselves. Here's the full fee map, verified against Shopify's own pages this week.
We checked three official Shopify pages while writing this: the pricing page, the Shopify Payments page, and the help-center article titled "credit card rates." None of them displays an actual card rate. The pricing page lists the third-party penalty fees prominently; your real processing rate now lives only inside your own admin, under Settings → Payments.
That's worth pausing on. The fee you pay on every single sale is the one number the public pages no longer show.
As a payment processing ISO, reading merchant statements is our day job, so this post does what Shopify's pricing page doesn't: lays out every published fee with a source, labels the widely-reported rates you should confirm in your admin, and runs the per-sale math that shows what a $100, $20, and $10 order actually costs.
What are Shopify's subscription fees in 2026?
Answer capsule: Per Shopify's pricing page (checked July 2026): Basic is $25/month ($19/month billed annually), Grow is $65/month ($49 annual), Advanced is $399/month ($299 annual), and Plus starts at $2,300/month. The subscription is the predictable layer; processing is where the real money moves.
Two things about the subscription tier worth knowing before the processing math:
The plan names changed. If you're comparing against an older article quoting a "$79 Shopify plan" or a "$39 Basic plan," that's stale. The current lineup is Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus at the prices above.
Shopify bills on thresholds, not just monthly. Per Shopify's billing documentation, fees like third-party transaction charges and app subscriptions accumulate during your cycle, and "billing thresholds are monetary values that trigger a new bill whenever the cost of your account activity exceeds the threshold amount." Cross your account's threshold mid-cycle and the charge comes then, not at month-end. If you've ever been surprised by a mid-month Shopify bill, this is why.
What does Shopify Payments charge per transaction?
Answer capsule: Shopify no longer publishes exact card rates on its public pages. The widely-reported US online rates are 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow, and 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced, with premium cards (business, corporate, Amex) around 3.5% + 30¢ on Basic. Confirm your exact rates in Settings → Payments; they're plan- and region-specific.
What Shopify's help center does confirm officially: cards are split into "Standard" (consumer) and "Premium" (business, corporate, Amex) classifications with premium priced higher; manually entered payments carry higher fees; in-person rates run lower than online rates; and international cards add "an additional charge above the base rate."
Here's the per-sale math at the widely-reported Basic online rate of 2.9% + 30¢, because the flat fee is the part sellers underestimate:
| Order size | Processing cost | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| $100 sale | $3.20 | 3.2% |
| $20 sale | $0.88 | 4.4% |
| $10 sale | $0.59 | 5.9% |
The percentage is the same on every sale. The 30¢ isn't. A store with a $12 average order pays a meaningfully higher effective rate than a store selling $200 orders on the identical plan, which is why "what rate do you pay" is the wrong question and "what's your effective rate" is the right one. That's the same statement math we walk through for card-present merchants, applied to ecommerce.
What is the third-party transaction fee, and when do you pay it?
Answer capsule: Use any payment provider other than Shopify Payments and Shopify adds its own fee on top of what that provider charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, and 0.2% on Plus (Shopify pricing page, July 2026). Per Shopify's docs, PayPal and manual payments are excluded when Shopify Payments is active, and Plus merchants may have the fee waived by location.
This is the fee that quietly decides who processes your payments, so run the stack:
A Basic-plan merchant who prefers an outside processor pays that processor's rate, say a typical 2.9% + 30¢, plus Shopify's 2% on the same transaction. Call it roughly 4.9% + 30¢ all-in. On $30,000/month in sales, the 2% alone is $600/month, $7,200/year, paid to Shopify for not using Shopify Payments.
That's not an accident of pricing; it's the business model. The fee shrinks as your plan fee grows (2% → 1% → 0.6% → 0.2%), which means the "penalty" for processor choice is really a toll that you prepay through higher subscription tiers. For most merchants under roughly $20–30K/month, the toll makes Shopify Payments the rational default, which is exactly what it's designed to do. Where the math starts favoring a dedicated merchant account despite the toll is volume: as ticket sizes and monthly totals climb, interchange-plus pricing on a real merchant account beats flat-rate by enough to swallow the fee. We covered how that pricing model works in interchange-plus, explained.
What does a real month on Shopify actually cost?
Answer capsule: A Basic-plan store doing $15,000/month at a $50 average order (300 orders) pays roughly $25 subscription + $525 in processing at the widely-reported 2.9% + 30¢ (300 × 30¢ = $90 of it just fixed fees), before apps, themes, or shipping. Call it ~3.7% of revenue to sell, excluding apps, and apps are rarely zero.
The subscription is the smallest line in the real total. Run a representative Basic store:
- Sales: $15,000/month across 300 orders ($50 average order)
- Subscription: $25
- Processing at 2.9% + 30¢: $435 in percentage + $90 in fixed fees = $525
- Total before apps: $550/month, about 3.7% of revenue
Now the two levers most sellers miss. First, the fixed fee: those 300 orders paid $90/month in 30¢ increments, and at a $20 average order the same revenue costs $135 more in fixed fees alone (750 orders × 30¢). Second, premium cards: every corporate and Amex checkout runs at the higher premium rate, and you don't control which card your customer pulls out. From the statements we audit, the gap between a merchant's quoted rate and their effective rate is usually the story of those two levers, and ecommerce statements are no exception. Card mix matters because the wholesale cost underneath (interchange averaging around 1.81% + 10¢ on credit, per the Federal Reserve-derived benchmarks we use in our savings calculator) varies far less than what flat-rate pricing charges above it.
Which Shopify fees can you actually reduce?
Answer capsule: Four of them. Annual billing cuts the subscription roughly 20–25% at current published prices. Moving up a plan tier drops both the card rate and the third-party fee, which pays for itself at a computable volume. Raising average order value dilutes the 30¢ fixed fee. And past sufficient volume, a dedicated merchant account on interchange-plus can beat flat-rate by more than the third-party toll costs.
In rough order of effort:
Annual billing is the free one: $25 → $19 on Basic, $65 → $49 on Grow, $399 → $299 on Advanced, per the current pricing page. If you're staying on Shopify either way, monthly billing is a convenience fee.
Plan-tier math has a break-even you can compute. Grow costs $40/month more than Basic and (per the widely-reported rates) drops your online rate by 0.2%. At $20,000/month in card volume, that 0.2% is $40; above it, the upgrade pays for itself on processing alone, before the third-party fee drop from 2% to 1% even enters the math.
Average order value is the quiet lever: the 30¢ is per-transaction, so bundles, minimums, and free-shipping thresholds that raise AOV cut your effective rate without touching your plan. The broader fee-reduction playbook applies here too.
Processor choice is the structural one, and it's volume-gated by the third-party toll covered above. The honest framing: below roughly $20–30K/month, take Shopify Payments and optimize the other three levers. Above it, get an interchange-plus quote and do the comparison with your real card mix; that's a statement-level exercise, not a rate-card comparison.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Shopify take a percentage of my sales?
Not as a platform commission. Shopify's per-sale take arrives through processing: either Shopify Payments' card rate, or the third-party transaction fee (2%/1%/0.6%/0.2% by plan) stacked on your outside processor's rate. Either way, a slice of every sale reaches Shopify; it's just labeled processing rather than commission.
What is the Shopify billing threshold?
A plan-based dollar amount that triggers a mid-cycle bill. Per Shopify's billing docs, third-party transaction fees, app charges, and other fees accrue toward your threshold, and crossing it generates an immediate bill rather than waiting for month-end (their example uses a $400 threshold). Monthly subscription fees count toward the running total but aren't billed through thresholds. You can see yours in the Current billing cycle section of your admin.
Is Shopify still $40 a month?
No — that figure is stale content. Current published pricing (July 2026) is $25/month Basic, $65 Grow, $399 Advanced, with annual billing dropping those to $19/$49/$299, and Plus starting at $2,300/month.
Is it cheaper to sell on Etsy or Shopify?
Different cost shapes. Widely-reported Etsy fees stack a $0.20 listing fee, a 6.5% transaction fee on the total including shipping, and US payment processing of 3% + $0.25, which typically lands around 12–15% of a sale before optional ads (confirm current numbers on Etsy's fee page; it blocks automated access). Shopify's take is the subscription plus ~3–5% effective processing. Low-volume sellers often net more on Etsy despite the higher percentage because there's no subscription; past a few thousand dollars a month, Shopify's fixed-plus-percentage model usually wins. The marketplace also owns the customer relationship on Etsy; on Shopify you do.
How do I find my actual Shopify Payments rate?
Settings → Payments → Shopify Payments in your admin. Since the public pages no longer display rates, your admin is the only authoritative source for your store's numbers, and it's worth screenshotting them next to a month's statement to compute your effective rate. If that number surprises you, that's the conversation we have every day.
Shopify publishes its subscription prices and its third-party penalties in large type, and its card rates nowhere at all. That asymmetry tells you which number they'd rather you not comparison-shop.
We're an ecommerce payments shop; comparison-shopping that number is literally our service. If you want to know what your store's effective rate is and whether a dedicated merchant account beats it at your volume, send us a statement.
ClickWerxs facilitates merchant account applications and provides ongoing account management as an authorized representative of our banking and processing partners. Approval, rates, and terms are determined by the issuing processor and acquiring bank — ClickWerxs does not guarantee approval for any merchant account application. Processing rates and fee structures cited in this post reflect publicly available industry data and general ranges; your actual rate depends on your industry, volume, and card mix. This post is not legal or financial advice. For a custom quote, see clickwerxs.com/payments/get-a-quote.
Kaleb Dickhaut — Founder, ClickWerxs. Kaleb built ClickWerxs from the ground up — from payment processing ISO to the Command Center platform to the AI SEO methodology the blog runs on. He has onboarded hundreds of small businesses onto payment and CRM systems. linkedin.com/in/kaleb-dickhaut
Sources
- Federal Reserve Board, Regulation II debit card interchange fee standard — covered issuers may not receive more than $0.21 plus 0.05% of transaction value, plus a $0.01 fraud-prevention adjustment where eligible. federalreserve.gov
- Processing rates, fee ranges and effective-rate figures in this post are industry-typical ranges compiled from published network schedules and from accounts reviewed in the ClickWerxs ISO portfolio. They are not quoted rates. Interchange itself is set by Visa and Mastercard on published schedules that change twice yearly; your actual cost depends on card mix, MCC, ticket size and volume.
- Competitor and platform pricing referenced in this post is taken from each company's published pricing or legal pages as of the date noted in text, and is subject to change without notice. ClickWerxs does not link to competitor websites; references are given in text so they remain verifiable. No affiliation is implied.
- ClickWerxs ISO portfolio, aggregate observation — patterns described from merchant accounts under ClickWerxs management. Anonymized and reported in aggregate; individual account terms vary. Operator data.
ClickWerxs facilitates merchant account applications and provides ongoing account management as an authorized representative of our banking and processing partners. Approval, rates, and terms are determined by the issuing processor and acquiring bank — ClickWerxs does not guarantee approval for any merchant account application. Processing rates and fee structures cited in this post reflect publicly available industry data and general ranges; your actual rate depends on your industry, volume, and card mix. This post is not legal or financial advice. For a custom quote, see clickwerxs.com/payments/get-a-quote.