When starting your online store, there are a lot of Shopify plans to sift through. But which one is right for you and your business?
Whether you aim to be the next Amazon or you just want to see if your handmade jewelry could become a secondary revenue stream, your online store begins with a web host. Needless to say, Shopify’s reputation is well-regarded in the retail vertical.
Surely, by now, you’ve been sucked in by the free trial, but once those 14 days are up, it’s time to pay the piper. And that means picking a plan. Let’s delve into the features of each Shopify plan — considering pricing, payment features, and other factors — to help you make the optimal decision for your budding business.
Shopify Pricing Plans: Comparison Table
Shopify pricing options are broken down into three main plans: Basic, Standard, and Advanced. Two additional solutions, Shopify Lite and Shopify Plus, are available but less advertised. I’ve mapped out the costs associated with each option in a handy-dandy table below.
| Lite | Basic | Standard | Advanced | Plus | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price: | $9 per month with a BUY NOW button | $29 per month | $79 per month | $299 per month | Custom |
| Transaction Fees: | 2.9% + $0.30 | 2.6% + $0.30 | 2.4% + $0.30 | ||
| Description: | A starter plan for smaller merchants to sell on Facebook, promote products on a site or blog, and accept credit card payments | A basic plan for small- to mid-sized merchants to get started | A plan for fast-growing companies | A premium plan for companies requiring additional features for scalability | An enterprise-grade plan for large-scale businesses and high-volume merchants |
- Sell via social media or hosted commerce platform
- FREE website builder and hundreds of themes
- Unlimited products and unlimited bandwidth
- PayPal or Shopify point-of-sale systems
- Advanced reporting and real-time shipping updates
- Try Shopify FREE for three days.
Toby Sembower
Shopify is easily one of the more well-known ecommerce web builder platforms in the hosting industry. Plans are fully hosted, include a free site builder tool, and allow you to showcase an unlimited number of products with unlimited file storage as well.
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 3-Day FREE Trial | Unlimited | FREE Subdomain | 5 minutes |
Shopify Basic, Standard, and Advanced all allow unlimited product display, including digital goods, and customers can log in as repeat visitors. While 24/7 email, phone, and chat support is standard across these main plans, the similarities end there.
Unfortunately, none of the Shopify plans include a domain name. You can use one you already own or purchase a new domain through Shopify, but better, more economical options exist.
3 Alternatives to Shopify Plans
We obviously think Shopify is pretty great, but the all-star ecommerce platform ain’t the only fish in the sea. Check out these other options below for building your online store, processing payments, tracking inventory, and marketing your products.
The best programs for building online stores enable you to maximize your sales without getting bogged down in all the technical details involved with maintaining and growing a website. Learn which companies have the best resources, support, themes, and ecommerce systems to keep things running smoothly:
- Best for new stores wanting a fully managed WooCommerce setup
- Recommended by WordPress.org, LiteSpeed, NVMe, free CDN
- Kodee AI agent manages products, orders, and updates
- Object cache reduces store response times by up to 3x
- Daily backups, malware scanning, DDoS protection, free SSL
- Get started on Hostinger now.
Sead Fadilpasic
As the shared hosting market has become more saturated, things like unlimited storage, bandwidth, and email accounts have become the norm.Hostinger, however, goes above and beyond the norm by also giving users an unrestricted number of websites, databases,...
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 30 days | 50 GB – 100 GB NVMe | FREE (1 year) | 3 minutes |
2. Shopify.com
- Best for stores prioritizing conversion — checkout beats competitors by up to 36%
- Sidekick AI assistant helps run and grow your store
- Sell on social, marketplaces, POS, and Shop app
- 8,000+ apps in the Shopify App Store
- 3-day free trial, no credit card required
- Get started on Shopify now.
Toby Sembower
The great thing about Shopify is how the feature set centers around ecommerce, a focus of many shared hosting shoppers.Shopify plans are fully hosted, but most of the company's plans are significantly more costly than a majority of the shared hosts we've come...
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 3-Day FREE Trial | Unlimited | FREE Subdomain | 5 minutes |
- Best for budget-conscious stores on enterprise Google Cloud infrastructure
- Save up to 83% — limited time offer
- Google Cloud, multilevel caching & 170+ CDN edge points
- AI bot protection stops 95% of malicious traffic automatically
- Autoupdates for WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP, and MySQL
- Get started on SiteGround now.
Lynn Cadet
The legendary WordPress experts at SiteGround have extended their expertise to online stores delivered through WooCommerce. Enjoy managed updates and industry-leading support with SiteGround’s cloud-driven infrastructure.
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 30 days | 10 GB SSD - 100 GB Google Cloud SSD | FREE (1 Year) | 6 minutes |
See other ecommerce hosting options »
Shopify Starter Plan (Shopify Lite Plan)
Shopify Lite serves as the entryway into mainstream Shopify eCommerce options. This plan is the only one of the five solutions that’s not fully hosted, meaning you have to sign up with a host to actually have an online storefront outside of social media.
Shopify Lite allows users to sell products on Facebook, integrate them into their existing blog or website (which you’ll have once you sign up with for one of the aforementioned hosting plans), and accept payments for items for less than half the cost of Shopify Basic. Needless to say, this starter plan offers the best value, particularly when paired with a high-value, low-cost host.
- Sell via social media or hosted commerce platform
- FREE website builder and hundreds of themes
- Unlimited products and unlimited bandwidth
- PayPal or Shopify point-of-sale systems
- Advanced reporting and real-time shipping updates
- Try Shopify FREE for three days.
Toby Sembower
Shopify is easily one of the more well-known ecommerce web builder platforms in the hosting industry. Plans are fully hosted, include a free site builder tool, and allow you to showcase an unlimited number of products with unlimited file storage as well.
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 3-Day FREE Trial | Unlimited | FREE Subdomain | 5 minutes |
Because this Shopify Plan does not come with an online store, you’ll need to sign up for a separate web hosting account to truly leverage your selling power. Never fear, though — even affordable hosting services come with plenty of user-friendly website and online store templates to help you get started. Here’s one of our favorites:
- Best overall value: Nothing at this price comes close feature-for-feature.
- AI builds your site in minutes — no technical skills needed
- Up to 3 websites with free SSL
- Weekly backups and managed WordPress
- 2 business mailboxes free for 1 year
- Get started on Hostinger now.
Sead Fadilpasic
As the shared hosting market has become more saturated, things like unlimited storage, bandwidth, and email accounts have become the norm. Hostinger, however, goes above and beyond the norm by also giving users an unrestricted number of websites, databases, FTP users, subdomains, and parked domains for most plans.
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 30 days | 20 GB SSD | FREE (1 year) | 3 minutes |
More cheap hosting for Shopify users »
2. Shopify Basic Plan Features
Shopify Basic is the cheapest of the main plans, but unfortunately, that’s not saying much. Compared to other eCommerce site-building services, Shopify charges a premium rate for the point-of-sale system, promotional code generator, and fraud analysis tools. Shopify team members pride themselves on the platform’s eCommerce-specific functionality. In other words, you don’t sign up for Shopify to host your blog or post your résumé.
3. Standard Shopify Features
Standard Shopify includes the expected POS system, promo code engine, 24/7 support, and unlimited product display offering covered in Shopify Basic, with the added benefit of gift card capabilities and reporting tools. To us, this hardly seems worth the $30-some-odd hike in price, but, to each his/her own. The abandoned cart recovery tool is a feature intended to help justify the cost, but Shopify’s app marketplace offers much cheaper options to achieve the same result.
4. Advanced Shopify Features
As you might have guessed, every feature included in the aforementioned plans comes standard with Advanced Shopify, which introduces advanced reporting features and real-time carrier shipping. Advanced Shopify is certainly the most expensive of the three main plans, but the credit card fees are the lowest of them all, and the eCommerce analysis tools are competitive with popular analytics services.
5. Shopify Professional Plan (Shopify Plus Plan)
Shopify Plus is so exclusive, we’re not even quite sure what it entails… Just kidding, but the vague “enterprise-grade solution” description does leave much to be desired from a product marketing perspective.
Our takeaway is this: If you’re a heavily trafficked online merchant dealing with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly revenue from your hundreds of pages’ worth of product inventory, you can give Shopify a call for a free consultation, and the Plus team will craft a custom-ish solution to reinforce your already successful brand.
That said, if you’re seriously in the enterprise class, you’ve probably outgrown the concept of a fully hosted platform. Chances are your site (i.e., your business) will perform best when supported by a hosting service that can handle the kind of traffic and monetization you’re expecting. You probably need a VPS or a dedicated server that can handle enterprise needs, and we can help with that!
Our Recommendation: Web Hosting Plans with Free Shopify Plugin
Honestly, it was difficult for me to give a rundown of some of Shopify’s plans knowing much more feasible, affordable, and support-savvy services exist. Factoring in the cost, the hardware capabilities, the range of eCommerce tools available and how to employ them, we recommend using a WordPress host and installing the free Shopify plugin. You’ll get all the commerce bang for way fewer bucks. Check out the top WordPress host to get started.
- Best overall value: The most complete managed WordPress hosting at this price
- Kodee AI Agent manages your WordPress site via simple chat
- LiteSpeed servers boost site speed by up to 40%
- WAF, malware scanner, DDoS protection, and auto-updates
- Free migrations — 85% completed in under 5 minutes
- Get started on Hostinger now.
Sead Fadilpasic
As much as we love WordPress, one of our biggest pet peeves is when hosting providers exploit the popularity of the world's most-used content management system by offering so-called WordPress hosting that, in reality, is exactly the same as the host's shared server plans. Fortunately, Hostinger's ultra-fast infrastructure and easy access to SSL certificates and backups sets up the company to outperform the vast majority of the violators of our admittedly made-up rule.
Go to full review »| Money Back Guarantee | Disk Space | Domain Name | Setup Time |
| 30 days | 20 GB SSD – 100 GB NVMe | FREE (1 year) | 4 minutes |
More WordPress hosting for Shopify users »
Not Convinced? Try Shopify Free for 14 Days
Remember, you don’t have to make this decision straight out of the gate. Shopify’s free trial is a great opportunity to get your feet wet within the platform, play with the interface, and determine whether you could see your business growing from Shopify’s foundation. Should you decide the five plans we’ve discussed today are not up to snuff, fret not. There are tons of quality, reputable hosts for eCommerce to consider instead.
