Shopify Plus cost: the plan fee, the variable fee and the upgrade project

The plan fee

Shopify publishes Plus pricing by term and by billing currency. For the United States, the Help Center lists $2,500 USD a month on a 1-year term and $2,300 USD a month on a 3-year term, and shopify.com shows the same figures. Shopify describes that price as being for standard setups and integrations, and notes that pricing is subject to change, so check the page on the day you sign.

There are no setup fees on any Shopify plan. The plan includes the main store and up to 9 expansion stores at no extra cost, unlimited staff accounts, unlimited staging stores, 200 inventory locations, the first 20 POS Pro locations, up to 100 themes and 1 TB of file storage per store. Additional stores beyond the ten are $300 USD a month each, or a revenue share across all stores. One contract covers one brand; a second brand needs its own Plus contract.

For comparison, Advanced is $399 USD a month or $299 on yearly billing. So Plus on a 3-year term is $2,001 a month more than yearly Advanced, and the 1-year term is $2,201 more. The when to upgrade guide works through what that buys.

The variable platform fee

This is the part of Plus pricing that Shopify does not put a number on. Its Help Center says that for more complex, higher-volume businesses there might be a variable platform fee based on your revenue and business model, and that the fee is different for B2B and direct-to-consumer orders. The Plus pricing page says the same: more complex, higher-volume businesses switch to a variable platform fee.

Shopify does not publish the revenue threshold where the variable fee replaces the flat price, or the percentage it charges. Both come from the Shopify Plus sales team when they quote you. Three things to do with that quote:

• Get the threshold, the percentage and how B2B and D2C revenue are treated in writing, in the contract.
• Model it against your three-year plan. A flat $2,300 is $82,800 over a 3-year term; a percentage of revenue is whatever your revenue turns out to be.
• Ask what counts as revenue for the fee. Gross merchandise value across all stores in the organization is the usual basis, and expansion stores share the contract.

Payment processing

Plus has the lowest Shopify Payments card rates of any plan, and Shopify says card rates vary by country, so the exact US figure is on the USD table at shopify.com/pricing and on the Payments page in your admin once you are on the plan. What Shopify publishes without regional variation is the fee on a third-party gateway: 0.2% per transaction on Plus for security and compliance, against 0.6% on Advanced, 1% on Grow and 2% on Basic. Orders through Shopify Payments, Shop Pay and Shop Pay Installments are not charged that fee on any plan.

Two Plus-specific items sit in the payments column. Extended authorization lets you hold Visa, Mastercard and American Express authorizations for up to 30 days instead of 7, which matters for pre-orders and made-to-order goods, and Shopify charges 1.75% extra when you capture after the standard 7 days. And if you sell cross-border through Managed Markets, the transaction fee is 3.25% on Plus against 3.5% on other plans.

Apps and tools

Your app bill is the part of Plus cost that is entirely yours to shape. Most of the apps a serious store runs, for email, support, subscriptions, returns, reviews, search, loyalty and analytics, install on any plan and keep their price when you upgrade. We list them by job, without prices, in the tech stack guide.

Two things change on Plus. Shopify’s own Plus-only apps, Launchpad and Combined Listings, are included in the plan. And apps are billed per store, so an expansion store with the same stack as the main store doubles those subscriptions; the Help Center also notes that each live expansion store needs its own theme license. When we model Plus cost for a client, the app column is usually the one with the most room to move, because an upgrade is the natural time to drop the apps that overlap.

Checkout customization is a build cost, not an app cost. Public checkout apps are priced like any other app. A custom app with your own UI extensions and Functions is development work, done once and maintained as Shopify’s API versions roll, and it is the largest variable in an upgrade quote.

What an upgrade project includes

Shopify’s part of the upgrade is the plan switch, which it says happens within 24 business hours of signing, with an onboarding program and the Plus Priority Support contact details sent by email. Everything after that is the project.

The readiness audit comes first and is a fixed price. It produces a written plan: the Plus features you will actually use, every checkout customization and script you rely on and what replaces it, which apps stay, go or need Plus, your B2B catalog and pricing design, your integration load against the new API limits, your staff and permission structure, and a cost model with Shopify’s published fees next to your current bill. Sometimes the recommendation is to stay on Advanced, and the audit is still useful as a roadmap.

The upgrade project is quoted after the audit. It covers setting up the Plus organization, users and groups; rebuilding checkout with UI extensions and Functions on a draft configuration and testing it with live orders; setting up B2B companies, catalogs, price lists and payment terms, including moving any old wholesale channel data; connecting or re-testing integrations; configuring expansion stores and markets where they are in scope; and the switch itself. We record checkout completion, conversion rate by device and order volume before the change and check them for 90 days after.

A store with a stock checkout and no B2B is a short project. A store rebuilding a scripted checkout, adding company-level wholesale pricing and connecting an ERP is a longer one, and the audit is what tells you which you are before anyone quotes a number.

Putting the total together

For your own model, the lines are: the Plus plan fee by term, or the variable fee once quoted; payment processing at the Plus rate on your volume; the app subscriptions you keep, multiplied by the number of stores; any theme licenses for expansion stores; the readiness audit, which is a fixed price; and the upgrade project, which is quoted after it. Put that next to what you pay today on Advanced, including the apps you’d drop, the POS Pro locations Plus includes, and any second store you already pay for separately, and the difference is the real monthly cost of Plus for your business.