Shopify Pricing UK (2026): Plans, Fees and the Real Cost of Running a Store

How much does Shopify cost in the UK?

Shopify costs £19 to £259 a month in the UK if you pay yearly, or £25 to £344 if you pay monthly. Shopify Plus starts at around £1,800 a month. On top of that you pay card fees of 1.5% to 2% plus 25p per online order, plus whatever your apps cost.

Last updated 26 October 2026. All prices and fees were checked on that date unless a table says otherwise.

This guide covers every Shopify pricing plan in the UK, the transaction fees, Shopify Plus pricing and the real cost of Shopify once a store is trading. The plan fee is the smallest part of the bill for most stores. Once you’re doing real volume, card fees overtake it quickly, and apps usually aren’t far behind. So the question isn’t really “which plan is cheapest”. It’s “which plan costs least at my revenue”.

We’ve been building websites since 2015 and are a Shopify Plus Partner, working mostly with UK brands turning over £1m to £5m. So this guide is written from what we see on real invoices, not just the pricing page.

What changed in Shopify pricing in 2026

Shopify didn’t put any plan prices up this year, but it changed what you get for them. If you read a pricing guide from before the summer, some of it is now wrong.

• Core B2B is on every plan. Since 2 April 2026, company accounts, up to three B2B catalogues and payment terms work on Basic, Grow and Advanced. You no longer need Plus just to sell wholesale.
• Free A/B testing. Shopify’s new Rollouts feature lets you test theme and checkout changes on Grow and above, which used to need a paid app.
• Scripts are gone. Shopify Functions fully replaced Shopify Scripts on 30 June 2026. If your Plus store relied on Scripts for discounts, that logic needed rebuilding.
• Starter is closed. The £5 plan is no longer open to new stores.
• A free Agentic plan. Shopify launched a $0 plan in the US that sells your products through AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity, with no website. You only pay card fees on sales.

Source: Shero Commerce on the Summer ’26 Edition

Shopify pricing plans compared

New UK stores can choose from four plans: Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. Paying yearly knocks about 25% off Basic, Grow and Advanced.

UK prices checked 26 October 2026.

What about the £5 Starter plan?

You probably can’t have it. Shopify’s help centre says Starter is only for merchants who are already on it, and you can’t switch back to it once you’ve moved up. Lots of pricing guides (including some big agencies) still list it as the cheapest way in. For a new store in 2026, Basic is the real starting point.

Starter never gave you a proper online store anyway. It was for selling through links and social media.

The staff account catch

Basic has no staff accounts at all, only the owner’s login. This trips people up more than any feature does. The moment someone else on your team needs their own login, you’re on Grow.

Freelancers, agencies and developers don’t count. They get collaborator access, so we can work on a Basic store without you upgrading.

What else changes as you go up

• Reporting. Basic gets the standard reports. Grow and Advanced add more depth, and Advanced adds custom reports.
• Shipping. Live carrier rates at checkout (DHL, UPS and so on) are included from Advanced.
• Selling abroad. Every plan includes Shopify Markets for currencies and languages. Advanced lets you change your theme, checkout and pricing per country.
• Inventory. Basic, Grow and Advanced all allow 10 locations. Plus allows 200.

Sources: Shopify Community, Starter availability, ExpertSure UK price check, October 2026, Russ Digital on UK staff limits

Shopify pricing in other countries

Shopify sets its prices and card rates country by country, based on where your store is registered. The plans and features are the same everywhere. Only the price and the card fees change.

Plan prices by country (per month)

Online card rates by country (Shopify Payments)

Card fees in the US and Canada are much higher than in the UK. A US store on Basic pays 2.9% where a UK store pays 2%. That’s down to how card fees are regulated in each market, not Shopify.

What this means if you sell abroad from the UK

Your fees follow where your store is based, not where your customers are. A UK store selling into the US still pays UK plan prices and UK card rates, but a few things change:

• EU cards count as international. Since Brexit, a card from a customer in France or Germany is charged at the international rate, not the standard UK rate.
• Amex and overseas cards cost more. On Basic, they’re 3.1% + 25p rather than 2% + 25p.
• Currency conversion. If customers pay in euros or dollars, Shopify charges around 2% to convert it to pounds.

For brands selling heavily into one market, a separate store registered in that country can work out cheaper. That’s a decision for your accountant as much as for us, because it brings tax and company admin with it.

Tax on the subscription

Some countries add sales tax to the Shopify bill itself, such as 23% VAT in Ireland and 10% GST in Australia, unless you’re registered and exempt. Also note that Shopify’s German, French and Dutch pricing pages show prices in US dollars, so the eurozone figures above come from Shopify Ireland.

Source: Shero Commerce, prices checked against each country’s Shopify pricing page on 1 October 2026

Shopify transaction and card fees in the UK

If you use Shopify Payments, you pay one card fee per order and Shopify doesn’t add anything on top. If you use another payment provider, Shopify charges its own extra fee as well.

The 25p matters more than people think

The percentage gets all the attention, but the fixed 25p hits small orders hard. Here’s what Shopify takes on Basic at different order values:

If your average order is under £30, your real card cost is well above the headline 2%. That’s worth knowing before you set a free delivery threshold or run a discount.

Other fees to watch

• Currency conversion. Sell in euros or dollars and Shopify charges around 2% to convert the payout back to pounds. Amex and overseas cards (including EU cards since Brexit) cost more too, 3.1% + 25p on Basic.
• Using PayPal alongside Shopify Payments. Customers paying through PayPal pay PayPal’s rate. You only pay Shopify’s extra provider fee if another gateway replaces Shopify Payments as your main one.
• Refunds. Card fees on refunded orders aren’t usually returned to you, so a high returns rate quietly adds to your cost.
• Chargebacks. Each disputed payment costs £10 on top of the lost sale, though Shopify can return it if you win. Also note that on stores opened since May 2025, orders paid with gift cards or store credit can attract the third-party fee.

If you’re not using Shopify Payments as your main gateway, check that first. On Basic, the extra 2% Shopify fee on a £20,000 month is £400, which is more than most stores spend on their plan in a year. Unless your products are restricted by Shopify Payments, switching is usually the quickest saving there is.

Sources: ExpertSure UK card rates, Shugert on Plus third-party fees

Shopify Plus pricing in the UK

Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a three-year contract or $2,500 on a one-year contract, which works out at roughly £1,800 to £1,950 depending on the exchange rate. Bigger stores pay a percentage of their sales instead, once that percentage is higher than the flat fee.

The variable fee has gone up

This is where most guides are out of date. For years the figure everyone quoted was 0.25% of monthly sales. Shopify no longer publishes a single rate, and recent reports put new contracts at around 0.35% (three-year) to 0.40% (one-year) of online sales, with B2B sales charged at a lower rate of about 0.18%.

In practice:

So for most brands in the £1m to £5m range, you’ll be on the flat fee. Get the variable rate, the crossover point and any cap written into your contract before you sign.

What you get for the money

• A checkout you can customise with your own fields, logic and branding
• Up to nine extra stores for other countries or brands
• The deepest B2B and wholesale tools (core B2B moved to every plan in April 2026)
• Unlimited staff accounts and 200 inventory locations
• Shopify Flow, Launchpad and more automation
• Lower card rates you can negotiate
• Priority support and a merchant success contact

When is Plus worth it?

We don’t think revenue alone should decide it. A £2m brand selling only DTC in the UK can do very well on Advanced. A £1m brand selling in five countries, each needing its own store and checkout, might get its money back from Plus in a few months.

Move to Plus when you need something only Plus does, like checkout changes, expansion stores or advanced wholesale, or when the lower card rate genuinely saves more than the fee. We’d rather a brand spent that £1,800 a month on marketing until it has a real reason to switch. Plenty of brands we work with stay happily on Advanced for years.

Sources: Amp on Plus starting prices, Aureate Labs on the variable fee, Elogic on Plus total cost

Extra costs that aren’t on the pricing page

Apps are the cost that grows fastest once a store is up and running. Here’s everything else to budget for.

Apps

Most stores need apps for things like reviews, email marketing, subscriptions, loyalty, search and returns. Plenty are free to start but charge more as you grow, usually by order volume or subscriber count. A lot of them bill in US dollars, so your costs move with the exchange rate.

Our rule of thumb: look at your app bill every quarter. It’s common to find two apps doing the same job, or one nobody has opened in months. Before installing anything, check whether Shopify now does it natively. Bundles, Flow automations and simple subscriptions all have free Shopify-made options now, which wasn’t the case a couple of years ago.

Theme

Shopify’s free themes are good, and we build plenty of stores on them. Paid themes from the Theme Store are a one-off cost of a few hundred pounds (priced in dollars) and give you more layouts and features. A fully custom design is a separate project, covered further down.

Domain and email

A .co.uk or .com domain costs roughly £10 to £20 a year. Shopify doesn’t include business email, so your hello@yourbrand.co.uk address needs Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, charged per person per month. Shopify Email is a marketing tool for newsletters, not an inbox.

Selling in person

Shopify POS Lite comes with every plan. If you run a shop or regular pop-ups, POS Pro adds staff permissions, better stock control and retail reporting, charged per location per month (£69 in the UK, checked 1 October 2026). Card readers and terminals are a separate one-off purchase.

VAT

Two separate things here:

1. VAT on your Shopify bill. If you’re VAT registered, Shopify uses the reverse charge, so you won’t see VAT on the invoice. If you’re not registered, 20% is added.
2. VAT on your sales. You must register once your taxable turnover goes over £90,000 in any rolling 12 months. The threshold rose from £85,000 in April 2024, and some guides still quote the old figure. Shopify can calculate VAT at checkout, but registering and filing is still down to you.

Sources: ExpertSure on VAT and email, Protax on the 2026 VAT threshold

What Shopify really costs: three worked examples

For a typical UK brand, Shopify costs somewhere between 2% and 3% of online revenue once you add up plan, card fees and apps. Bigger stores pay a smaller percentage.

We’ve assumed a £60 average order, every order paid online through Shopify Payments, and yearly billing. App spend is our estimate, so swap in your own.

A few things jump out.

Grow beats Basic even at £250k. Grow costs £30 a month more, but the lower card rate saves about £62. The switch pays for itself from about £10,000 a month in sales.

At £1m, Advanced isn’t worth it on fees alone. It saves £167 a month in card fees but costs £210 more. It starts paying for itself at about £105,000 a month, or roughly £1.26m a year. Below that, only go Advanced if you need the staff accounts, carrier rates or per-country customisation.

At £5m, Plus costs more than Advanced on fees. Even at the lowest published Plus card rate, you’d pay roughly £850 a month more than on Advanced. Brands this size move to Plus for checkout control, extra stores or advanced B2B, not to save on fees. A negotiated card rate can close that gap, so it’s worth asking.

Want this worked out for your own store? Send us your last few Shopify and app invoices and we’ll show you where the money goes and which plan makes sense.

Which Shopify plan should you choose?

Pick the plan that’s cheapest at your monthly sales, then move up early if you need a feature only the next plan has.

The fixed 25p is the same on every plan, so it doesn’t change these break-even points. Only the plan fee and the percentage matter.

Upgrading and downgrading

You can change plan whenever you like from your Shopify admin. Upgrades start straight away. If you’ve paid yearly, check how Shopify will treat the unused part of your plan before you downgrade.

One warning: if you’re on the old Starter plan and move up, you can’t go back to it.

Monthly or yearly?

Pay monthly for the first few months while you find your feet. Once you know which plan suits you, switch to yearly and save about 25%. On Advanced that’s £1,020 a year.

How to cut your Shopify bill

Most stores we look at could save money without changing anything a customer would notice.

1. Pay yearly. It’s about 25% off. On Grow that’s £192 a year for doing nothing.
2. Use Shopify Payments. It removes Shopify’s extra fee of up to 2% on every order.
3. Check you’re on the right plan. Use the break-even points above. Too low costs you in card fees, too high costs you in subscription.
4. Raise your average order. Because of the fixed 25p, bigger orders cost less as a percentage. Bundles and free delivery thresholds help.
5. Cut your apps. Look for duplicates and anything Shopify now does for free, like A/B testing, bundles and basic B2B.
6. Ask about card rates on Plus. The published Plus rate is a starting point, and volume brands can negotiate.
7. Watch your returns. Card fees on refunded orders don’t come back, so fewer returns means lower fees.

Is Shopify more expensive than WooCommerce or Magento?

On paper, sometimes. In practice, rarely, because the cheaper platforms move the cost onto your hosting bill and your developer’s time.

WooCommerce is the one people most often pick to save money. The software is free and payment providers like Stripe have competitive card rates. What catches people out is everything around it: plugin updates that break things, security patches, slow hosting, and a developer on call when checkout stops working on a Saturday.

We migrate a lot of stores from WooCommerce to Shopify, and the reason is almost never the monthly fee. It’s usually the time and money spent keeping the old site running, and a slow, fiddly checkout that’s quietly costing sales.

For the full comparison, read our Shopify vs WooCommerce guide.

How much does it cost to have a Shopify website built in the UK?

A UK agency will usually charge from about £3,000 for a theme-based Shopify store to £50,000 or more for a fully custom build. Freelancers tend to come in lower, from around £1,000.

Here’s how our own packages compare:

What pushes the price up

• Migrating from another platform. Moving products, customers, orders and redirects from WooCommerce or Magento adds time, especially if you care about keeping your Google rankings. And you should.
• Integrations. Connecting to an ERP, stock system or warehouse is often the biggest unknown in a quote.
• Custom features. Product builders, subscriptions, bundles and B2B pricing all add development time.
• Content. Copy, photography and product data are often left out of a quote and become a surprise later.

What a cheap build often costs you

The build price is a one-off. A store that converts badly costs you every single month. If a £3,000 site converts at 1% and a better one converts at 1.5%, a store doing £500,000 a year is leaving roughly £250,000 on the table. That’s why we’d always rather talk about what the site needs to do than start with a number.

See our Shopify web design service or get in touch for a quote.

Sources: Osdire on UK Shopify development costs, Silicon Technix on UK web design costs