A Guide To Shopify Pricing: Which Shopify Plan Is Best

Shopify is one of the most utilized platforms for E-commerce development, and this platform is also among those which provides more excellent services for your store. Here is a detailed description of what Shopify is? What are the charges involved? What are the different plans that you have? Let’s begin by discussing the Shopify platform.

Shopify can be defined as an application that allows you to build your online store. You can run it in a web browser; all you need is an internet connection. You are not required to install any software to use it, and you don’t need to buy hosting either. The distinct functionality you get on Shopify depends totally on the pricing plan you choose. All Shopify plans permit you to sell an infinite number of goods; only one of them allows you to select a ‘theme’ that you can utilize to market your products well. A ‘theme’ is a template or web design. Shopify is software that works as an assistance tool – this implies that you don’t have a duplicate of the software. Rather, you need to pay a monthly fee to use it.

Understanding Pricing plans:

Whether it is a full-fledged multi-functional website, or a two-page display portfolio of your products without the need for payment system and integration of cart and checkout facilities, Shopify in UAE has plans for everyone, with variable pricing suiting all your needs. There is also a free version available which can be tried before any upfront investment to know the feel of the working of the platform. Based on your needs, you can select from various plans available. It is crucial to understand which method fits best for your investment.

You can select from five Shopify plans:-

(1) Shopify Lite — $9 per month

(2) Basic Shopify — $29 per month

(3) Shopify — $79 per month

(4) Advanced Shopify — $299 per month

(5) Shopify Plus — It is variable but usually costs around $2000 per month

Additionally, if you have a planned budget, you can reduce your Shopify fees by buying a yearly or biennial plan. They provide 10% and 20% discounts for one year or two years of assistance, respectively. A free Shopify trial version is also available, which helps you understand the design of software and what plan is right for you. Lastly, a new add-on called ‘Shopify POS Pro‘ is also available. It unlocks more exceptional point-of-sale functionality. It will cost $89 monthly.

To understand in-depth, let’s discover the features of each of the Shopify plans. This knowledge will help you understand what all things are included in each plan and what all things shall be additional if you need to buy them separately. Therefore, the pricing plans along with the feature description will allow you to gather a good amount of data to make a wise decision based on your requirements and necessities.

Shopify Lite

At a $9 monthly plan, ‘Shopify Lite ‘serves one of the most economical ways of retailing goods online. Although, you need to be conscious that it doesn’t equip you with an entirely functional online store.

Instead, it enables you to

• Sell on Facebook
• Sell products on an existing website
• To Utilize Shopify as a back-end arrangement for selling goods in market stalls, gigs, or events.

In ‘Shopify Lite’, you get a ‘Buy Button’ that permits you to embed your goods into other websites.

This operates in a similar but better way to Paypal, in that you add a snippet of the key to your website and your product’s details, along with a choice to buy that product that resembles your site.

Any modifications you make to your products will be automatically displayed on your site. In addition, you can control everything from Shopify’s interface. This plan is perfect for anyone with an existing website that desires to add manageable E-commerce functionality. For instance, you might already have a WordPress blog that you like to embed products on.

Selling Digital Products:

Shopify seems to be unique amongst the important website builder platforms in providing appropriately for this. You’ll be required to install a free ‘Digital Downloads’ app and make a few alterations to your Shopify settings; the correct tax rates will automatically be applied.

The ‘Shopify Lite’ plan may operate out better for many people who set up their site on a different platform. In addition, the ‘Lite’ plan offers a relatively low-cost workaround.

The other excellent thing about Shopify and digital products is that the file size limit is pretty generous compared to its opponents. Digital products of 5GB in size can be quickly sold.

Connecting Facebook:

If you are interested in selling only on Facebook and aren’t worried about creating a store, then ‘Shopify Lite’ is a likely great option. You can publish products to your Facebook page on a ‘Shop’ page just by some settings.

Moreover, Shopify Lite is a logically great option for those who own physical shops and require a solution for treating payments and handling their inventory.

It also allows you to take payments via smartphone using just a card reader and Shopify app. So every time you make a sale, Shopify will make a record of this and renew your inventory, therefore, suggesting you’re unlikely to run out of stock when you need it most.

Although 24/7 assistance is involved with the plan, this is confined to live chat and email only; you won’t converse with anybody in person on call.

As a whole, Shopify Lite is best fitted to retailers who

• Want to add E-commerce functionality to an existing website or blog
• Wish to sell on Facebook
• want a platform to process payments and manage inventory if they sell physically
• are comfortable with only having no phone support
• Want affordable access to abandoned cart saving functionality.

Basic Shopify

‘Basic Shopify’ comes at $29 monthly charges, which is the most affordable Shopify plan enabling you to create a fully functional online store.

‘Basic Shopify’ includes the following core features:-

• A fully functional website version of your shop
• Eligibility to sell an immense number of products
• Two separate logins
• 24/7 assistance via phone, email or live chat
• Manual order production (allowing you to create a new order and enter card payments in Shopify for sales you’ve made offline)
• creation of a Discount code
• A free SSL certificate (this will permit you to host your shop securely utilizing the HTTPS protocol)
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Working blog
• Gift cards
• Discounted shipping rates
• Ability to print shipping labels
• Fraud analysis (this allows you to spot fraudulent transactions)

An essential thing you get with ‘Basic Shopify’ that you don’t get on ‘Shopify Lite is a convenient and entirely functional online store. This also includes blogging functionality, which is required for producing traffic. You receive all the ’embeddable’ and ‘sell in-person’ functionality that comes with Shopify Lite, but importantly, you get a website that you will be able to host on as your domain.

Let’s look in a bit more depth at some of the key features you get on the ‘Basic’ plan that you will not get on ‘Lite’, like templates, more support, blogging and abandoned cart saver.

Templates:

Once you have selected the ‘Basic Shopify’ plan, you can decide from an extensive range of templates. There are nine free ones and 65 paid ones.

The free Shopify themes are perfectly usable (and you can quickly twitch them quite widely by adding CSS and HTML), but if you favour using a paid theme, they can cost you anything between $140 and $180. Shopify’s theme store is straightforward to scan. It gives many search filters which you can use to find a proper theme for your Shopify site.

You can separate all the templates using some criteria, including paid vs free, industry, layout type and visual effects. One thing that’s crucial to consider is the themes because you may need to deal with a third party if you need any assistance with installing or configuring them. Shopify only maintains themes that the company has developed itself. This indicates that Shopify will assist you with any query about the free ones, but you may be referred outside if you purchase a paid theme.

Support:

Although customer support is combined with Shopify Lite, it is confined to email and chats only. ‘Basic Shopify’ gives you phone support in addition.

This is given using a callback request system.

A Blog:

If you want to grow the sale of products online, you must blog; it’s an essential part of any good inbound marketing approach. It produces appropriate keyword-rich content that can make your site more noticeable in search results and enhance traffic significantly.

‘Basic Shopify’ equips you with a blog for issuing relevant keyword-rich content.

Shopify’s blogging feature doesn’t equal WordPress in functionality. For example, it doesn’t promote content versioning, and the post categorization options are relatively limited — but that said, it’s usable and, with the publication of good content, can promote an inbound marketing campaign very well.

Transaction fees and credit card fees:

When it arrives at transaction fees, they are the equivalent of ‘Shopify Lite’. There aren’t transaction fees if you use Shopify Payments. Credit card fees are also identified as the ‘Shopify Lite’ ones: 2.9% + 30c if a purchase has been processed online and 2.7% + 0c if a purchase is made using the Shopify point of a sale card reader device. The rates vary by country, and you may experience cheaper rates than the above, depending on the territory you’re working from.

Overall, ‘Basic Shopify’ is good for merchants who

• Have a limited budget but need a well-specced online store
• Do not need exceptional selling or reporting functionality (more on that below)
• Want to use blogging to allow attracting inbound traffic

Shopify

The next plan to analyze is called ‘Shopify’, and it is priced at $79 per month.

The essential extensions that the ‘Shopify’ plan brings over ‘Basic Shopify’ are:-

• Professional Reporting
• Lower transaction and credit card fees.
• Want to use USPS Priority Mail Cubic pricing (For US users only)

Professional reporting

In-depth writing functionality is a significant omission from the ‘Basic Shopify’ plan and one of the most influential reasons you might want to opt for the ‘Shopify’ plan over ‘Basic.’

With ‘Basic Shopify’, the reporting functionality is considered vital in preservation with the plan name. Upgrading to the ‘Shopify’ plan will give you access to a more extensive range of comprehensive summaries, including:

• Sales reports
• Retail sales reports
• Marketing reports
• Customers reports

USPS Priority Mail Cubic

US users who renew to the ‘Shopify’ plan can obtain use of USPS Priority Mail Cubic® pricing, which are reduced rates on priority mail for parcels that measure lower than 20 pounds or measure lower than 0.5 cubic feet in capacity.

Lower transaction and credit card fees

The ‘Shopify’ plan also delivers more economical transaction fees than both the ‘Basic and Lite’ plans, along with lower costs for using an outside payment gateway.

As for credit card fees, you should expect to spend 2.6%+30c for transactions done online and 2.5%+0c for point-of-sale transactions (US rates).

If you are utilizing an external payment gateway, the purchase fee applied by Shopify on this plan would be 1%.

Overall, The ‘Shopify’ plan is suitable for dealers who

• Have a high amount of online commerce or expect them :

If sales levels are extraordinary satisfactory, the lower transaction fees will help offset the higher monthly cost

• Need professional reporting
• Prefer to avail of decreased shipping prices
• Require to use Cubic Pricing with USPS Priority Mail.

Advanced Shopify

With the upgrade to ‘Advanced Shopify’, you receive two key highlights that are not involved with the plans explained above. First, it provides advanced report building as well as accurate time carrier shipping quotations from third parties.

You also receive significantly lower credit card rates (and lower transaction fees while using a third-party payment gateway).

Advanced report building

The ‘Advanced Shopify’ plan enables you to handle your Shopify data more efficiently and generate your custom reports.

You can pick various dimensions and utilize them to produce bespoke reports, which can be saved and referred to in future. You also get the option to apply many filters to your data to get a sense of what suits your business activities.

In summary, this functionality is for business people who want to dig down into their sales data widely, intending to tweak their sales processes to the nth degree.

Consequently, these reporting characteristics are of utmost use to retailers selling various goods, as doing so will give a vital enough amount of data to make the high-level report options worth using.

Third-party real-time carrier shipping

Actual time carrier shipping functionality indicates that the exact shipping rates that ships charge for shipping a customer’s order are generated automatically at checkout.

Depending on the area and country you reside in, you can get this functionality on more affordable Shopify plans as long as you are happy to use Shopify’s favoured providers via the ‘Shopify Shipping’ service. However, if you expect to use Shopify with a carrier that isn’t part of the ‘Shopify Shipping’ service, you will have to use the ‘Shopify Advanced’ plan to avail of third-party calculated shipping rates. This feature implements a system to calculate a carrier’s shipping rates automatically at the specific time an order is assigned.

You can update Shopify’s settings to mark these up to add a handling fee or down for compensating for a shipping rate that you feel may discourage customers from making a purchase.

Transaction fees and credit card fees:

Of the four Shopify plans pointed to SMEs, ‘Advanced Shopify’ extends the low transaction price. With other plans, you will not have to pay transaction fees.

The US credit card fee is 2.4% + 30c for online transactions, and 2.4% + 0c for point-of-sale ones. Utilizing a prominent payment gateway costs 0.5% in transaction fees.

Overall, The ‘Advanced Shopify’ plan is fit for merchants who

• Have a very high quantity of online traffic (or expect them): as with the ‘Shopify’ program, if sales levels are large ample, the lower business fees could contribute considerable gains
• Demand advanced reporting features
• Require real-time carrier shipping presented by third-party performances.

Buying a pre-built Shopify store

Have you heard of the Shopify ‘Exchange Marketplace’ term? Well, then you should. It tells you about the pre-built Shopify stores that you can purchase online and customise according to your requirements. These platforms can be bought for a specific amount from the Shopify platform and can be used without any upfront development and designing hassle.

This feature helps you to get things done quickly and get your store established without the requirement of any experienced developer and designers.

Apart from these, you can get your free trials on Shopify:

Free trials

If you’re still uncertain about which Shopify program will operate best for your business, you can get a free analysis of the merchandise and choose your system after your free trial.

It enables you to examine the product’s central functionality and determine which Shopify pricing program might be the best fit.

The Bottom Line:

Shopify being one of the prominent platforms and being the user-choice for the E-commerce development, your online shop will always be the best when developed with Shopify. Be it integration with inventory, be it the third party payment, be it orders or storage, Shopify have all the plans to satisfy all your needs. It also helps you with marketing and advertising apart from the brand identity building. Choose a plan that suits your business requirement and allows you to save money with the advanced Shopify pricing plans.