--- title: "What does Shopify cost per month in the UK?" description: "What a Shopify shop really costs in the UK: plan prices in pounds, card and Klarna rates, POS Pro, apps, postage, returns and three worked monthly bills." date: 2026-08-16 lastUpdated: 2026-08-16 author: "Daniel Whitmore" url: https://storeguides.uk/shopify-cost-per-month-uk/ site: "Store Guides UK (storeguides.uk)" language: en --- # What does Shopify cost per month in the UK? ![Three translucent deep-blue glass blocks of rising height on a dark violet surface, an amber light line running in front of them and a matte black parcel at the right](https://storeguides.uk/images/shopify-cost-per-month-uk-cover-1200.webp) > **The short answer:** Shopify's UK pricing page, checked on 16 August 2026, puts Basic at £25 a month billed monthly and £19 billed annually. Grow is £65 or £49, Advanced £344 or £259, and Plus starts at £1,800 a month. On top of the plan sits the fee on every order: 2% plus 25p on Basic for a standard card, 3.1% plus 25p for American Express and international cards, and 4.99% plus 30p for Klarna. Selling face to face costs 1.7% with no fixed part. Then come apps, a theme, a domain and postage. A small British shop usually lands between £45 and £250 a month before postage. The plan price is the number Shopify advertises. It is rarely the number that leaves your account. This guide adds the lines up in pounds, in the order they reach you: the plan, the fee on every order, the costs that never appear on the pricing page, and postage. Every platform figure carries its date. Where Shopify publishes nothing, this guide says so. ## Table of contents - [Four lines make up the bill](#four-lines) - [Plan prices in pounds](#plan-prices) - [The trial and the £1 offer](#trial) - [What each sale costs you](#card-fees) - [Klarna is the dearest line on the page](#klarna) - [A third-party gateway costs more, not less](#gateways) - [Selling on a market stall or in a shop](#in-person) - [The costs that are not on the pricing page](#hidden-costs) - [Postage, and the returns that follow it](#postage-and-returns) - [Does VAT change the arithmetic?](#vat) - [Three worked monthly bills](#worked-bills) - [What we would actually do](#recommendation) - [Frequently asked questions](#faq) - [Sources](#sources) ## Four lines make up the bill Every Shopify bill in the UK is built from the same four lines. They behave very differently as the shop grows. **The plan** is fixed and easy to budget. It is the only line most people plan for. **The fee on every order** is a percentage of everything you sell plus a fixed amount per order. It starts small and soon becomes the largest Shopify line. **Apps and add-ons** are subscriptions you take out yourself, usually in the first fortnight. **Postage** is not a Shopify charge at all. It still comes out of the same margin, and returns make it worse. Only the first line reads straight off the pricing page. The other three are yours to work out, and that is what this guide does. ## Plan prices in pounds Shopify plans, pricing and features change; always verify the current details on shopify.com before deciding. Disclosure: some of the Shopify links in this guide are affiliate links. Start a plan through one and this site is paid a commission. What you pay is unchanged. The figures below come from [Shopify's UK pricing page](https://www.shopify.com/uk/pricing?ref=PLACEHOLDER_REF), checked on 16 August 2026. The annual column is an effective monthly rate: the full year is charged upfront. | Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | Difference over a year | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Basic | £25 a month | £19 a month | £72 | | Grow | £65 a month | £49 a month | £192 | | Advanced | £344 a month | £259 a month | £1,020 | | Plus | from £1,800 a month | not published | not published | The annual discount is real money and a twelve-month commitment at the same time. On Basic you commit £228 upfront to save £72. That is a sensible bet in month six and a poor one in week one. What separates the plans is invisible to your customers. Basic includes no extra staff accounts, Grow allows five and Advanced fifteen, per the same page. The difference you actually feel is in the fee on every order. ## The trial and the £1 offer The UK page advertised three days free and then £1 a month for three months, checked on 16 August 2026. Read the offer for what it is: time to build. Load real products, set one delivery zone, work out your own numbers. It is a promotion, so check the terms on the page the day you sign up. Two costs sit outside it. The fee on every order applies from your first real sale. And apps bill at their normal price from day one. Use those months to build rather than to trade cheaply. Then month four is not a surprise. ## What each sale costs you This is the line that overtakes the plan, and the UK table has more rows than usually get quoted. | Payment method | Basic | Grow | Advanced | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Standard cards | 2% + 25p | 1.7% + 25p | 1.5% + 25p | | American Express | 3.1% + 25p | 2.7% + 25p | 2.5% + 25p | | International cards | 3.1% + 25p | 2.7% + 25p | 2.5% + 25p | | Klarna | 4.99% + 30p | 4.99% + 30p | 4.99% + 30p | | Cards in person | 1.7% | 1.7% | 1.5% | Source: Shopify's UK pricing page, checked on 16 August 2026. The two middle rows get skipped almost every time. An American Express card costs 3.1% on Basic against 2% for an ordinary debit or credit card. So does a card issued outside the UK, which matters the moment you start selling to EU customers. The fixed 25p matters at the other end of the scale. It is nothing on a £75 order. On a £6 order it is over 4% by itself, before the percentage. Low-value baskets are expensive to process and no plan upgrade fixes that. ## Klarna is the dearest line on the page Pay-later costs the most, and the gap is wide. Klarna is priced at **4.99% plus 30p** on Basic, Grow and Advanced alike. That is roughly two and a half times an ordinary card on Basic. Work it through. A £100 order costs you £2.25 on a standard card and £5.29 through Klarna. On a shop turning over £6,000 a month, moving half the volume to pay-later adds about £83 a month in fees. That is not an argument for removing it. British shoppers expect instalment options on higher-value goods, and a missing option costs orders rather than pennies. It is an argument for knowing your blended rate. One detail changes the plan maths as well: the Klarna rate does not fall when you move up a plan. Only the card rates do. If a large share of your sales are on pay-later, upgrading saves less than the comparison table suggests. ## A third-party gateway costs more, not less This is the most expensive mistake the pricing page allows, and it is usually made for sensible reasons. Take payments through a provider other than Shopify Payments and Shopify adds a surcharge on top of whatever that provider charges you: **2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced** and 0.2% on Plus, checked on 16 August 2026. Look at the size of that on Basic. The surcharge alone matches the entire 2% card rate you were trying to beat. Your outside provider has to be dramatically cheaper before the arithmetic works, and almost none are. The Help Centre sets out the exemptions: orders processed through Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Shop Pay Installments and Paypal Express carry no third-party transaction fee. Nor do manual methods such as cash, cash on delivery and bank transfer. That last exemption is worth money if you sell to businesses. An invoice settled by bank transfer carries no transaction fee at all. ## Selling on a market stall or in a shop The arithmetic flips. Card fees in person are **1.7% on Basic and Grow, and 1.5% on Advanced**, with no fixed 25p. Taking money across a counter costs less than taking it online, and on Basic the gap is a third of a percentage point plus the whole fixed component. In-person selling has its own subscription. **Shopify POS Pro costs £69 a month per location**, per the UK page checked on 16 August 2026. That is per till location, not per business. For a stall that trades two weekends a month, it is a heavy line — let POS Pro follow the takings. ## The costs that are not on the pricing page Four lines surprise almost everyone, roughly in the order they arrive. **A theme, if you buy one.** The theme store lists free themes alongside paid ones. Prices sit in that store and, on the browse page we read on 16 August 2026, did not state a currency — check the amount at checkout. A paid theme is a one-off purchase for one shop, not a subscription, and the free themes are enough to launch. **Apps.** Shopify publishes no typical monthly figure and this guide will not invent one. What can be described is the mechanism: each app looks small on its own, and nothing in the admin totals them for you. Keep the list in a spreadsheet in pounds and read it every month. **A domain.** A `.co.uk` tells a British shopper the shop is here. That is registrar pricing rather than a Shopify figure, and it is billed yearly. **Marketplace syncing.** The UK page includes a set number of synced marketplace orders each month, then charges **1% up to £99 a month**, checked on 16 August 2026. Irrelevant if you sell only through your own shop. A fifth cost hides inside the price your customer sees. Shopify's documentation describes a currency conversion fee built into the displayed price, stated as either 1.5% or 2% depending on where the shop is based. Which figure applies to a UK shop was not stated on the page we read. **Build the shop, then read your own bill:** [Get started](https://www.shopify.com/uk?ref=PLACEHOLDER_REF) — The UK page advertised three days free and then £1 a month for three months, checked on 16 August 2026. Long enough to load real products and price real parcels. *(affiliate link)* ## Postage, and the returns that follow it Postage costs most British shops more per month than Shopify does, and no honest article can price it for you. Rates depend on size, weight and service. Royal Mail Group publishes its own; Evri and the other couriers publish theirs, and all of them change on their own schedules. - Royal Mail, business services: https://www.royalmail.com/business - Evri, business: https://www.evri.com/business Price your three most common parcels before you set a flat rate or a free-delivery threshold. A threshold below your true worst-case cost turns every large order into a loss, and you will not see it until the quarter closes. Returns belong in the same line, and they are not optional here. Under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations, distance-selling customers have a cancellation right, and you refund the outbound delivery you charged at the basic rate. Budget returns as a cost of the postage line rather than as an exception. One plan detail also belongs here: real-time carrier-calculated rates are not available on Basic. If you want the checkout to fetch a live rate, that is a plan decision rather than an app decision. ## Does VAT change the arithmetic? This section is general orientation, not tax advice. What applies to your business is set out by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and your accountant. Two questions get mixed up here. **The fees Shopify charges you** are a business expense, and how it is treated in your books is a conversation with your accountant. **The VAT you charge customers** is what changes your prices. A British shopper expects the price on the product page to be the price they pay, VAT included. Once your shop is registered, part of every sale is not yours. The consequence is easy to miss. Set prices before registration and leave them unchanged afterwards, and you have cut your own margin. Thresholds, rates and deadlines are published by HMRC, and the registration line is covered in our [Shopify UK setup guide](https://storeguides.uk/shopify-uk-setup-guide/). ## Three worked monthly bills The rates are verified; the order volumes are illustrations to replace with your own. Postage is excluded from all three, because it depends on where the parcels go.
49 217 663 Side hustle Growing shop Established shop 0 200 400 600 800 Pounds per month, postage excluded
Monthly Shopify cost at three stages, built from the plan prices and standard card rates on Shopify's UK pricing page, retrieved 16 August 2026, applied to illustrative order volumes. Postage and VAT are excluded.
**The side hustle.** Basic billed monthly at £25, with 30 orders averaging £28. That is £840 in sales, so 2% is £16.80 and the fixed part adds £7.50. About **£49 a month**, and the plan is half of it. **The growing shop.** Basic at £25, 150 orders averaging £38, so £5,700 in sales. Fees come to £114 plus £37.50, and a modest app stack at £40 lands the month near **£217**. Fees are now six times the plan. **The established shop.** Grow at £65, 500 orders averaging £45, so £22,500 in sales. Fees at 1.7% are £382.50 plus £125, apps £90, and the total is about **£663**. The plan is under 10% of the bill. Read the shape rather than the totals. The plan you choose stops mattering quickly. How your customers pay starts mattering a great deal. ## What we would actually do Four decisions, in the order they arrive. **Start on Basic, billed monthly.** The £6 a month saved by paying annually is not worth twelve months of commitment to a shop you have run for a fortnight. **Take payments through Shopify Payments unless you have a specific reason not to.** On Basic the third-party surcharge alone matches the card rate. **Watch the pay-later share.** At 4.99% plus 30p, Klarna is the dearest row on the page and it does not fall when you upgrade. **Move up a plan on arithmetic.** Basic to Grow costs £40 more a month and saves 0.3 percentage points on cards. That pays for itself somewhere above £13,000 a month in card sales, and not before. This is an independent educational site. It is not operated by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Shopify Inc. **Run the numbers on your own products:** [Get started](https://www.shopify.com/uk?ref=PLACEHOLDER_REF) — Load one real product, set one delivery zone and see what the checkout quotes. That is the only version of this arithmetic that belongs to your shop. *(affiliate link)* ## Frequently asked questions ### What is the cheapest way to run a Shopify shop in the UK? Basic on annual billing at £19 a month is the cheapest plan outside Plus, per Shopify's UK pricing page checked on 16 August 2026. The larger savings sit elsewhere: use a free theme, take payments through Shopify Payments rather than an outside gateway, and keep the app list short. Those three choices are worth more each month than the annual discount on Basic. ### Is there a free Shopify plan? No. The UK page advertises three days free and then £1 a month for three months, checked on 16 August 2026. That is a trial followed by a promotion, not a free tier. Card fees apply to real orders throughout, and apps bill normally during the promotional months. ### How much does Shopify take per sale in the UK? On a standard card it is 2% plus 25p on Basic and 1.7% plus 25p on Grow. Advanced is 1.5% plus 25p, checked on 16 August 2026. American Express and international cards cost 3.1% plus 25p on Basic, and Klarna is 4.99% plus 30p across all three plans. Use another gateway and Shopify adds 2%, 1% or 0.6% on top of that provider's own fees. ### What does Shopify cost a year in the UK? On Basic the plan alone is £228 a year billed annually, or £300 billed monthly. Neither figure is the bill. Add card fees on everything you sell, your apps, a domain, a theme if you buy one, and postage. For the growing shop above, Shopify and apps come to roughly £2,600 a year with postage still on top. ### Does Shopify charge VAT on its own invoices? Shopify's pricing page shows the plan prices; how VAT is applied to your own invoice depends on your account details and status. That is a question for HMRC's guidance and your accountant rather than for a guide. Check your first real Shopify invoice before you fix the number in a forecast. ### Is Shopify worth it for a small UK shop? That depends on turnover, and the test is arithmetic. Below roughly £800 a month in sales, the fixed £25 is a large share of the margin and a marketplace listing may cost less. Above that, the plan becomes a small line and the questions that matter are your card rate and your postage. Shopify publishes no break-even figure, and nobody should publish one for it. ## Sources 1. Shopify, "Pricing" (United Kingdom). https://www.shopify.com/uk/pricing — retrieved 16 August 2026. 2. Shopify Help Center, "Pricing plans and billing overview". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/pricing-plans/pricing-overview — retrieved 16 August 2026. 3. Shopify Help Center, "Shopify Payments" (fees). https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/fees — retrieved 16 August 2026. 4. Shopify Help Center, "Local payment methods". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/local-payment-methods — retrieved 16 August 2026. 5. Shopify Help Center, "Currency conversions and exchange rates". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/international/pricing/exchange-rates — retrieved 16 August 2026. 6. Shopify Theme Store. https://themes.shopify.com/themes — retrieved 16 August 2026. 7. HM Revenue & Customs, VAT guidance. https://www.gov.uk/topic/business-tax/vat — retrieved 16 August 2026. 8. Royal Mail, business services. https://www.royalmail.com/business — retrieved 16 August 2026. 9. Evri, business services. https://www.evri.com/business — retrieved 16 August 2026.