Shopify fee calculator

What a Shopify sale actually costs

With Shopify Payments, an online card order pays a processing rate that depends on your plan — in the US that runs from 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic down to about 2.5% plus the same $0.30 on Advanced. Rates differ by country, which is why the fields above stay editable rather than hard-coded. There are no per-listing fees, no final-value fees and no commission of any kind.

A worked comparison makes the size of the gap obvious. A $50 order with free shipping costs 2.9% + $0.30, which is $1.75 — a take rate of three and a half per cent. The identical order on a marketplace charging 13.6% or 15% hands over $6.80 to $7.50 before anything else. Over a hundred orders that is a difference of roughly five hundred dollars.

That spread is the entire argument for owning a storefront, and it is also the reason the comparison is incomplete: the marketplace fee includes an audience and the Shopify figure does not.

Read next:The same sale on all six marketplaces

The fee Shopify does charge: the plan

Your real fixed cost is the subscription, and it only makes sense amortised over volume. A $39-a-month plan is $1.30 per order at thirty orders a month, $0.39 at a hundred, and $3.90 at ten. It is not in the per-sale breakdown above because it is not a per-sale fee — but it is the number that decides whether the storefront is cheaper than a marketplace for you specifically.

The crossover is worth computing rather than guessing. Take your plan price, divide by your monthly orders, add the processing from the calculator above, and compare that total against what the same orders would cost at 6.5% plus 3% + $0.25 on Etsy or 13.6% plus $0.40 on eBay. Below roughly fifteen to twenty orders a month the marketplaces' pay-per-sale model is usually cheaper despite the far higher rate; above it the storefront wins, and keeps winning as volume grows.

Most sellers who run both are effectively paying the marketplace for discovery and the storefront for margin on the customers discovery already gave them.

The surcharge for not using Shopify Payments

Skip Shopify Payments for a third-party gateway — PayPal standalone, Stripe direct, a local provider — and Shopify adds a transaction surcharge on top of whatever that gateway charges. It is around two per cent on Basic and shrinks on higher plans, which usually makes Shopify Payments the cheap default wherever it is available.

Where it is not available, or where a local method genuinely converts better, the surcharge is a real cost to model: put the gateway's own rate in the fields above and add the surcharge to your costs rather than pretending the difference is zero.

This is the closest thing Shopify has to a marketplace commission, and it is worth naming for that reason: it is a fee for routing money outside the platform, not a fee on the sale.

The cost that is on no invoice: being found

On Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Walmart and Depop, the fee buys placement in a search that shoppers are already running. On your own store there is no such search. Your product pages either rank on Google or they do not, and if they do not, the traffic has to be bought — which is a cost with no line on any fee schedule and frequently larger than every marketplace fee on this page combined.

That changes what the product page has to do. The product title and the first stretch of the description carry the job that marketplace search fields carry elsewhere, because they are what Google reads and what shows in the result. Shopify tags, meanwhile, are internal — they drive collections and filters in your own store, and search engines do not read them as keywords. Treating them as SEO is one of the more common ways a Shopify catalogue is optimised for nothing.

That is the part of the problem this site works on, and it is a different problem from the fee.

Read next:Shopify product SEO, in depthShopify product tag generator

When a marketplace is cheaper than your own store

Three situations, all common. Low volume, where the plan divided by a handful of orders exceeds any commission you would have paid. A brand-new catalogue with no traffic, where a marketplace's audience is the entire product. And single, seasonal or experimental items that do not justify the fixed cost of a storefront at all.

Three situations where the storefront wins. Repeat customers, who cost nothing to reach a second time and on whom you keep the whole margin. High-ticket items, where a few percentage points is real money per order. And any catalogue that has already built organic traffic, where the commission would be a tax on demand you generated yourself.

Most sellers end up on both, which is why the same product is usually written twice — once for a marketplace's search and once for Google. Rewriting for a second platform is a separate tool on this site.

None of this is a recommendation about where to sell. It is arithmetic plus a named trade-off, and the trade-off is the part the arithmetic cannot settle.

Read next:Rewrite a listing for another marketplaceCross-listing SEO, platform by platform

Free on this page, and what the Shopify generator writes

The fee is the marketplace's decision and it does not move. What the listing says is yours, and that is the part this site was built to write.

Questions, answered