Shopify Fees Explained: What You Actually Keep on Every Sale

Shopify takes two things out of every sale: a payment processing fee and, separately, a flat monthly subscription. On the Basic plan (as published for US sellers in 2026), online card processing through Shopify Payments is 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, and the plan costs $39/mo billed monthly or $29/mo billed annually. On a $50 order that means $1.75 in processing and $48.25 in your pocket, or 96.5% of the order.

Shopify itself takes no cut of the sale beyond processing, with one exception: if you use a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a surcharge (2% on Basic). This guide works through the real per-order math, the plan tiers, how the fixed $0.30 quietly punishes small orders, and how Shopify's cost actually compares with Etsy's.

How much does Shopify take per sale?

On Basic with Shopify Payments, Shopify takes 2.9% + $0.30 per online card order and nothing else per sale. On a $50 order that is $1.75. There is no listing fee and no commission on the item price. Your monthly plan fee ($39, or $29 on annual billing) sits on top and is fixed no matter how much you sell.

That structure is the whole point of Shopify. Marketplaces charge you a percentage of every sale because they are bringing you the buyer. Shopify is not bringing you the buyer, so it charges rent instead of commission. The per-sale cost is close to raw card processing; the fixed cost is what you pay for the storefront.

Worked example: a $50 order on Basic

Now run the same order through a third-party gateway. Shopify charges a 2% surcharge on Basic for not using Shopify Payments, and your outside gateway still charges its own processing on top. If that gateway happens to charge a similar 2.9% + $0.30, the order looks like this:

The $1.00 difference looks trivial on one order. At 300 orders a month it is $300 a year for choosing a different checkout, which is most of a year of the Basic plan. That is the surcharge working as designed: it exists to make Shopify Payments the obvious choice.

Shopify pricing: the plan tiers

Plans, as published for the US in 2026. Annual billing saves roughly 25% on Basic, Grow and Advanced. Note that the middle tier used to be called "Shopify" and is now "Grow".

Card processing is deliberately not in that table, because the published rates step down as you move up the tiers. Basic is 2.9% + $0.30 online and 2.6% + $0.10 in person through Shopify POS. Grow and Advanced get lower published rates than Basic. Check Shopify's current rate card for your plan rather than trusting a number you read in a blog post, including this one.

Two more things that change the arithmetic for new stores. Shopify runs a $1/month promo for the first 3 months on Basic, Grow and Advanced, so the first quarter of a new store costs almost nothing in subscription. And the gateway surcharge is the single biggest lever on the higher plans: on Advanced, moving from a third-party gateway to Shopify Payments saves 0.6% of gross revenue, which at $500k a year is $3,000.

Does Shopify charge a transaction fee?

Only if you do not use Shopify Payments. With Shopify Payments enabled, the third-party transaction fee is $0 and you pay processing alone. Use an outside gateway and Shopify adds a surcharge on every order: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus, charged on top of whatever that gateway charges you.

This is the fee people most often get wrong when they compare Shopify to a marketplace. Shopify does not take a commission on the item price. It takes rent (the plan) plus processing. The "transaction fee" is better understood as a penalty for routing money outside Shopify's own rails, and for most US sellers it is entirely avoidable.

Do I have to use Shopify Payments?

No, but you pay for the privilege of not using it. Shopify supports many outside gateways; it just adds the surcharge above. The genuine reasons to use an outside gateway are narrow: your business category is not supported by Shopify Payments, you are in a country where it is not offered, or you already have a merchant relationship with better negotiated rates.

If none of those apply, the math almost always points to Shopify Payments. It also means chargebacks, refunds and payouts all live in one system, which makes reconciliation less painful. Every extra processor you add is another statement to match at month end.

What is the real total cost of a Shopify store?

The plan and the processing are only the part Shopify prints on the pricing page. A working store usually carries four cost lines:

• Subscription. Fixed and predictable: $39/mo on Basic monthly, $29/mo annual. This is the one you can forecast exactly.
• Payment processing. 2.9% + $0.30 per online order on Basic, lower on higher plans, 2.6% + $0.10 in person. Scales with revenue.
• Apps. Real money and highly variable. Subscriptions, reviews, email, upsells, inventory sync. Some are free, many are monthly, and they stack quietly. Audit them quarterly.
• Theme. Free themes exist and are genuinely fine. Paid themes are a one-time cost, and a custom build is a much larger one.

Shipping, packaging, returns and ad spend sit outside Shopify's fees entirely but land on the same P&L. The honest way to think about it: Shopify's own take on a $5,000 revenue month at Basic is about $214 (100 orders at $50 means $175 in processing plus the $39 plan), which is 4.3% of gross. Apps and ads are what usually make a store expensive, not Shopify.

How the $0.30 changes the math by order size

The percentage part of the fee is neutral. The fixed $0.30 is not, and it is why small-basket stores struggle. Here is the same Basic rate across four order values:

A $5 order gives up almost three times the percentage a $200 order does, on identical published rates. Add the subscription and it gets worse: 40 orders at $5 is $200 of gross revenue, and the $39 Basic plan alone is 19.5% of that before a cent of processing. The practical takeaways are the ones every experienced seller already knows. Raise average order value with bundles and free-shipping thresholds. Do not sell a $4 item as a standalone SKU. Push toward a $40 to $60 basket where the fixed fee stops mattering.

Is Shopify cheaper than Etsy?

It depends on your volume, not on the rates. Etsy has no monthly fee but takes a real cut of each sale: $0.20 listing fee, 6.5% transaction fee, and around 3% + $0.25 US payment processing, as published. On a $50 order that is roughly $5.20 in fees against Shopify's $1.75. Shopify wins per order by about $3.45; Etsy wins because it costs nothing to keep the lights on.

Divide one by the other and you get the break-even: $39 / $3.45 is a bit over 11 orders. At around a dozen $50 orders a month, Basic pays for itself against Etsy on pure fees. On annual billing ($29/mo) it is closer to nine orders.

But fees are not the trade. Etsy brings its own buyers. Shopify brings none, and the traffic you would have gotten free from Etsy search you now have to buy, earn or already own. A seller with an email list, an audience or paid ads that work is usually better off on Shopify. A seller whose orders come from people typing "handmade ceramic mug" into Etsy is paying that 6.5% for customer acquisition, which is cheap compared with ads. Etsy's optional Offsite Ads program (12 to 15% on attributed sales, as published) is the same idea, priced explicitly.

Plenty of sellers run both, which is the right answer more often than people admit. We break the marketplace side down fully in Etsy fees explained, and line the platforms up side by side in our creator platform fees comparison.

What is the cheapest way to sell on Shopify?

Starter at $5/mo, if you do not need a full storefront. It gives you checkout links and buy buttons you can drop into social posts or an existing site, without the theme, the collections or the rest. For a real store, the cheapest honest setup is Basic on annual billing ($29/mo), Shopify Payments (no surcharge), a free theme and a ruthless app list.

Stack the $1/month promo for the first 3 months on top and a new store's fixed cost is close to zero while you are still figuring out whether anything sells. Upgrade to Grow when the lower processing rate plus the 1% surcharge difference actually pays for the $105 (or $79 annual) price gap, not before. Most stores upgrade too early because the higher plan feels more serious.

How to track what you actually keep

Shopify's admin shows you sales. Your bank shows you deposits. They are never the same number, because payouts arrive net of processing, batched across days, with refunds and chargebacks netted out of whichever payout they happen to land in. Sellers who only look at the sales dashboard consistently overestimate what they made.

Track your Shopify take-home the way you track any other income source: gross, then fees, then what actually hit the account. Earnly puts every payout on one board, so a Shopify month sits next to Etsy, Stripe, PayPal, Gumroad and the rest, with a per-platform fee breakdown, a payout calendar of expected pay dates, and a next-month forecast band that is always labeled an estimate. If you sell on both, the Etsy side lands on the same board. Pricing is Solo $12/mo (yearly), Creator $32/mo and Studio $79/mo; there is no free plan. Earnly is an analytics tool, not a bank, a processor or a lender, and it does not give financial, accounting or tax advice.

For the bookkeeping side, a Shopify payout statement is a list of gross sales, fees and adjustments that has to end up in your ledger. If your books live in QuickBooks, you can turn the payout statement into a QuickBooks-ready file rather than keying every line in by hand. And if you just want to sanity-check a price before you set it, run it through the platform fee breakdown and see the take-home first.

This article is informational only. All fees are taken from Shopify's and Etsy's published rates for US sellers as of 2026 and can change; figures are estimates. Always confirm against your own payout statements.