Setting up a Shopify shop in the UK: the full guide
The short answer: a Shopify shop run from Britain starts at £25 a month on the Basic plan with monthly billing. Pay for the year upfront and that becomes £19 a month, according to Shopify's UK pricing page checked on 6 August 2026. Every online card sale on Basic costs a further 2% plus 25p through Shopify Payments, and swapping in another gateway adds 2% on top. Nothing on that page covers the British side of the job. You register with HM Revenue & Customs yourself, and you register for VAT once your taxable turnover passes £90,000. You also give customers the 14-day cancellation right set out in the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013.
Most people searching for this are not asking a software question. They want to know what leaves their bank account each month, what the taxman expects, and how the parcel reaches a doorstep in Dundee.
This guide walks through the whole sequence in that order. First the decisions you make before opening the admin, then the shop build, the plan choice in pounds, getting paid, VAT, delivery, returns and a pre-launch checklist.
There are two things it will not do. It will not tell you what to do about your own tax position, and it will not quote a figure we could not check against the organisation that published it. Where a number is missing here, it is missing because Shopify, HMRC or the carrier does not publish it in a form we could verify on 6 August 2026.
This is an independent educational site. It is not operated by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Shopify Inc.
What Shopify actually gives a British seller
Hosted shop software is what you are renting. You pay monthly, and in return you get a storefront, a product catalogue, a checkout, and an admin area for orders, customers and reports.
The part that matters to a UK seller is the checkout. Shopify Payments, the platform's own card processing, is available in the United Kingdom — Shopify's Help Center lists the UK among the supported countries. That means you can take card payments without arranging a separate merchant account first.
Timing is on your side, for now. Internet sales made up 29.4% of total retail sales in Great Britain in June 2026. That is the highest proportion since April 2021, in the Office for National Statistics release published on 24 July 2026. Note the geography: the series covers Great Britain, not the whole UK.
None of the British paperwork comes with it. Registering with HMRC, registering for VAT, writing a returns policy that satisfies the Consumer Contracts Regulations — all of that is yours.
Decide these four things before you open the admin
Opening the account takes minutes. Undoing a decision made carelessly in that first hour takes considerably longer.
What you are selling, precisely enough to price postage. Weight and box size drive delivery costs more than anything else on the product page.
How you will trade. Sole trader or limited company, covered in the next section.
Your shop name and domain. The name appears on the invoice, the packaging and the customer's bank statement.
Who takes the money. Shopify Payments or a third-party gateway, a choice with a per-order price attached.
Sole trader or limited company, and telling HMRC
Behind this choice sit two British institutions, and neither appears anywhere in the Shopify admin. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is the tax authority. Companies House is the registrar where a limited company is incorporated.
A sole trader and a limited company are taxed differently, carry different liability, and involve different filing duties. Which suits you depends on your income, your risk and your plans. That is the sort of question an accountant answers in twenty minutes with your figures in front of them.
This guide deliberately stops there. The only UK tax figures verified for this article are the VAT ones below, so restating registration rules or rates from memory would break the site's own evidence rule. Start at GOV.UK and work outwards from HMRC's and Companies House's own pages.
One habit is worth forming early, whichever route you take. Tell HMRC you are trading when you start trading, not when the money gets interesting. The step never appears in Shopify because it is a British obligation, not a platform requirement.
This guide is general orientation, not tax or legal advice. Check HMRC's own guidance or speak to an accountant before you act on it.
Creating the account and building the shop
A 3-day free trial is currently advertised on Shopify's UK pricing page, followed by £1 a month for 3 months, checked on 6 August 2026. Promotions end, so read the offer on the page rather than trusting this sentence in six months.
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.
Sign up at shopify.com/uk, then work through the admin in this order. Shopify moves and renames menu labels from time to time, so treat these as the current shape rather than a permanent map.
- Settings → Store details. Set the shop name, the billing address and the store currency to GBP.
- Products. Add one real product first, with its weight filled in. Postage rules depend on it.
- Online Store → Themes. Pick a theme and customise it; the free themes are genuinely usable.
- Settings → Payments. Activate Shopify Payments or connect a third-party gateway.
- Settings → Shipping and delivery. Build your delivery zones and rates.
- Settings → Taxes and duties. Configure VAT handling once you know your registration position.
- Settings → Domains. Connect the domain you bought, or buy one here.
Resist the urge to add twelve apps in the first week. Each one is a monthly subscription, and the bill compounds quietly.
Choosing a plan: the ladder in pounds
Four plans appear on Shopify's UK pricing page: Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. Checked on 6 August 2026, the UK figures are these.
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing (effective monthly rate) |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | £25 a month | £19 a month |
| Grow | £65 a month | £49 a month |
| Advanced | £344 a month | £259 a month |
| Plus | From £1,800 a month | Not published separately |
Annual billing is not a discount you collect monthly. Shopify's Help Center states that annual billing charges the full year upfront and presents a lower effective monthly rate. On Basic that is a single payment, not £19 arriving twelve times.
Which plan? Basic is the honest starting point for a first shop. The features that pull people upwards are mostly about scale. Shopify's pricing comparison table, checked on the same date, shows what changes: Basic includes no additional staff accounts, Grow supports five and Advanced fifteen. Inventory locations sit at ten on all three. Checkout customisation is "limited" on Basic, Grow and Advanced, and full only on Plus.
One Basic limitation catches UK sellers out. Third-party carrier-calculated shipping — live rates pulled from a carrier at checkout — is not available on the Basic tier, per Shopify's Help Center. If you need Royal Mail's real-time prices in the checkout rather than your own flat rates, that is a plan question.
Selling in person too? Shopify's UK pricing page lists POS Pro at £69 a month per retail location, on top of the plan.
Shopify plans, pricing and features change; always verify the current details on shopify.com before deciding.
Getting paid: Shopify Payments in the UK
Britain is on the list of countries where Shopify Payments works, which the Help Center's supported-countries page confirms. Using it is also the cheapest route, because of how Shopify prices the alternative.
Card rates on the UK pricing page, checked on 6 August 2026, run down the plan ladder. Online: 2% plus 25p on Basic, 1.7% plus 25p on Grow, 1.5% plus 25p on Advanced. In person: 1.7% on Basic, 1.6% on Grow, 1.5% on Advanced, each with no fixed pence element.
Now the expensive bit. Route your orders through a third-party gateway instead of Shopify Payments, and Shopify adds a transaction fee on top of whatever that gateway charges you. It runs at 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Those figures were identical on every locale pricing page checked on 6 August 2026.
Some orders are exempt, and it is worth knowing which. Shopify's Help Center states that no third-party transaction fee applies to orders processed through Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Shop Pay Installments or PayPal Express. The same page adds that manual methods carry none either — cash, cash on delivery and bank transfers.
On the wallets and card brands, Shopify's own country documentation names American Express, Maestro, Mastercard, UnionPay and Visa, alongside Apple Pay, Google Pay and Shop Pay. Klarna appears on Shopify's local payment methods page as available to customers across a range of European countries. Shopify's documentation does not list a UK-only local payment method, and this site will not claim one it has not seen published.
VAT: the £90,000 line and what changes when you cross it
VAT is the tax that separates a UK Shopify guide from an American one. The standard rate is 20% on most goods and services, per GOV.UK's VAT rates page. A reduced rate of 5% covers things like children's car seats and home energy, and a zero rate covers most food and children's clothes.
Registration is not a choice at a certain size. HMRC's guidance sets the threshold at £90,000 of taxable turnover, and you must register when either test is met:
- your total taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000, or
- you expect your taxable turnover to go over £90,000 in the next 30 days.
Timing matters more than most sellers realise. GOV.UK states you must register within 30 days of the end of the month in which you went over. Your effective date of registration is then the first day of the second month after you crossed the line. The deregistration threshold sits at £88,000. Both figures have been unchanged since 1 April 2024, when they rose from £85,000 and £83,000.
So what changes once you are registered? You charge VAT on your sales, and your Shopify prices need to reflect that decision — a £30 product does not become £36 by itself. GOV.UK also lists accounting schemes with thresholds of their own. The Flat Rate Scheme can be joined with taxable turnover up to £150,000 and must be left above £230,000. Cash Accounting and Annual Accounting are joinable up to £1.35 million and left above £1.6 million.
Northern Ireland has extra rules. GOV.UK notes registration duties for acquisitions from the EU over £90,000, and for distance selling from Northern Ireland to EU consumers above £8,818 in total across the EU.
Again, general orientation only. This guide is not tax or legal advice; check HMRC's own guidance or speak to an accountant before you act on it.
Selling to EU customers after Brexit
An order from Dublin or Düsseldorf is now an export, and the European Commission's import rules apply at the other end.
Since 1 July 2021 the VAT exemption for imported goods below €22 has been abolished, so every commercial consignment entering the EU carries import VAT regardless of value. The Commission also states that an import declaration is required for all goods entering the EU, whatever they are worth.
For small parcels there is a simplification. New rules apply to consignments with an intrinsic value not exceeding €150, including a simplified customs declaration. The Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS) is the electronic portal for distance sales of low-value imported goods up to that same €150 limit.
Do not treat this as settled. The Commission published a news item on 15 May 2025 announcing a new approach to VAT for e-commerce imports. Its status and entry into force could not be verified for this guide. Read the Commission's own pages before you build your EU pricing around the €150 regime.
Delivery with Royal Mail and Evri
Almost every British shop's first delivery conversation involves two names: Royal Mail Group, and the courier Evri.
We are not quoting either one's prices here. Royal Mail's website blocked automated retrieval on 6 August 2026, so no Royal Mail rate in this guide would be a verified figure. Inventing one would be worse than leaving the gap. Open the carriers' own pages and price your own parcel: Royal Mail's business parcel services and Evri.
Royal Mail runs two services a Shopify seller should read up on before comparing headline prices. One is Click & Drop, for printing labels. The other is the Online Business Account. Their terms and any volume conditions are set out on Royal Mail's own pages, not here.
Whichever carrier wins, the pricing decision inside Shopify is yours. Free UK delivery is not free; it moves the cost into your product price or out of your margin. Work out which before you put the banner up, and remember that live carrier rates at checkout are not available on the Basic plan.
Returns and the cooling-off period
British distance-selling law gives your customer a cancellation right that has nothing to do with faulty goods. It comes from the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013.
Regulation 30 sets the normal cancellation period. For a sales contract it ends 14 days after the day the goods come into the consumer's physical possession. A person the consumer identified counts too; the carrier does not. Where several items arrive separately, the clock runs from the last of them. For contracts of regular delivery over a defined period, it runs from the first.
GOV.UK's plain-English trader guidance sets out the sequence you actually operate:
- You must offer a refund if the customer tells you within 14 days of receiving the item that they want to cancel.
- They then have a further 14 days to send the goods back.
- You must refund within 14 days of receiving the item back.
Some things are excluded. GOV.UK lists personalised or custom-made items, perishable items, unwrapped CDs, DVDs and computer software, and sealed items that cannot be returned once opened for health or hygiene reasons.
Write this into your shop's returns page in plain English before launch, not after your first refund argument.
Theme, products and checkout
A first shop needs less design than most people assume and better product pages than most people build.
Themes come first, because everything else sits inside one. Shopify's free themes are a reasonable starting point. We will not quote a paid theme price here, because none was verified for this guide.
Product pages carry the weight. Write the dimensions, the materials and the delivery time in your own words, and add the parcel weight so postage calculates correctly. Collections group products for browsing, and are worth setting up before you have fifty items rather than after.
Checkout is where Shopify gives you least room. Customisation is listed as "limited" on Basic, Grow and Advanced, and full only on Plus. For a first UK shop that matters less than it sounds — the default checkout already takes cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Shop Pay.
The pre-launch checklist
Run this before you take the password page down.
- Store currency set to GBP, and prices entered the way you want them displayed.
- Shopify Payments activated, or a third-party gateway connected with its extra fee understood.
- A real test order placed and refunded, end to end.
- Delivery zones and rates covering the UK, with weights on every product.
- A returns policy that reflects the 14-day cancellation right and names the exclusions.
- Contact details and business identity on the shop, so a customer can reach a human.
- VAT position decided: registered, or a note in your calendar to watch the £90,000 line.
- HMRC told you are trading.
- Domain connected and email working from it.
- Apps audited: every subscription you have installed, with its monthly cost written down.
What the first year actually costs
Here is the honest version of the first-year bill. Two lines are verified figures. The rest genuinely depend on you, and this site does not invent them.
| Line | First-year cost in pounds | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify Basic, monthly billing | £25 a month | Shopify UK pricing page, 6 Aug 2026 |
| Shopify Basic, annual billing | £19 a month, charged as a full year upfront | Shopify UK pricing page, 6 Aug 2026 |
| Intro promotion, if you take it | 3 days free, then £1 a month for 3 months | Shopify UK pricing page, 6 Aug 2026 |
| Card fee per online sale (Shopify Payments, Basic) | 2% plus 25p | Shopify UK pricing page, 6 Aug 2026 |
| Extra fee if you use another gateway (Basic) | 2% per order | Shopify UK pricing page, 6 Aug 2026 |
| POS Pro, only if you sell in person | £69 a month per location | Shopify UK pricing page, 6 Aug 2026 |
| Theme | Free themes available; paid theme prices not verified here | — |
| Apps | Depends entirely on what you install; no figure verified here | — |
| Domain | Not verified here; price it where you buy it | — |
| Postage | Royal Mail and Evri publish their own rates; none quoted here | — |
| Accountant, if you use one | Not verified here | — |
The pattern is the point. Your plan is the predictable line, your card fees scale with sales, and the three unpredictable lines — apps, postage and professional help — are where first-year budgets usually break.
Shopify plans, pricing and features change; always verify the current details on shopify.com before deciding.
Frequently asked questions
How much is Shopify a month in the UK?
Basic costs £25 a month on monthly billing, or £19 a month on annual billing, per Shopify's UK pricing page checked on 6 August 2026. Grow is £65 or £49, Advanced £344 or £259, and Plus starts at £1,800. Annual billing charges the full year upfront rather than monthly. Card fees are separate.
Do I need to register for VAT before I open the shop?
Not because you opened a shop. HMRC's threshold is £90,000 of taxable turnover, tested either over the last 12 months or against the next 30 days. That figure has been unchanged since 1 April 2024. Voluntary registration below the threshold is a separate decision for you and your accountant.
Does Shopify Payments work in the UK?
Yes. Shopify's Help Center lists the United Kingdom among the supported countries for Shopify Payments. On Basic, standard online card rates are 2% plus 25p per transaction, checked on 6 August 2026. Using another gateway instead adds a Shopify fee of 2% per order on that plan.
Do I have to set up a limited company to sell on Shopify?
No. Shopify does not require any particular business structure, and the sole trader route is common for a first shop. The choice between sole trader and limited company is an HMRC and Companies House question, not a platform one. It depends on your own figures, so take it to an accountant.
How long do UK customers have to change their mind?
Fourteen days after the goods reach them. Regulation 30 of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 runs the period from the day the goods come into the consumer's physical possession. They then get a further 14 days to return the item, and you must refund within 14 days of receiving it back. Custom-made, perishable and sealed hygiene items are among the exclusions.
Can I still sell to EU customers from the UK?
Yes, but the parcel is an import at the other end. The European Commission abolished the €22 import VAT exemption on 1 July 2021, and an import declaration is now required for all goods entering the EU. Consignments up to €150 have a simplified route, including the Import One-Stop Shop. Check the Commission's current pages before pricing.
Sources
- Shopify, "Shopify Pricing" (UK). https://www.shopify.com/uk/pricing — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- Shopify Help Center, "Pricing plans and billing overview". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/pricing-plans/pricing-overview — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- Shopify Help Center, "Supported countries for Shopify Payments". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/supported-countries — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- Shopify Help Center, "Shopify Payments" (fees). https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/fees — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- Shopify Help Center, "Basic plan". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/intro-to-shopify/pricing-plans/plans-features/basic-shopify-plan — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- Shopify Help Center, "Local payment methods". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/local-payment-methods — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- Shopify Help Center, "Customer payment methods with Shopify Payments". https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/supported-countries/spain/payment-methods — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- HM Government, "VAT rates". https://www.gov.uk/vat-rates — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- HM Government, "Register for VAT: When to register for VAT". https://www.gov.uk/vat-registration/when-to-register — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- HM Government, "How VAT works: VAT thresholds". https://www.gov.uk/how-vat-works/vat-thresholds — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- HM Government, "VAT: increasing the registration and deregistration thresholds". https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vat-increasing-the-registration-and-deregistration-thresholds/increasing-the-vat-registration-threshold — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- The National Archives, The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, Regulation 30, "Normal cancellation period". https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/3134/regulation/30/made — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- HM Government, "Accepting returns and giving refunds: the law". https://www.gov.uk/accepting-returns-and-giving-refunds — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- Office for National Statistics, "Retail sales, Great Britain: June 2026", released 24 July 2026. https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/retailindustry/bulletins/retailsales/latest — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- Royal Mail, "Business parcels". https://www.royalmail.com/business/parcels — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- Royal Mail, "Click & Drop". https://parcel.royalmail.com/click-and-drop — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- Royal Mail, "Online Business Account". https://www.royalmail.com/business/shipping/ways-pay/online-business-account — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- Evri. https://www.evri.com/ — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- European Commission, "Customs formalities for low value consignments". https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/customs/customs-procedures-import-and-export/customs-operations/customs-formalities-low-value-consignments_en — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- European Commission, "Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS)". https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/vat-e-commerce/ioss_en — retrieved 2026-08-06.
- European Commission, "New approach to VAT for e-commerce imports", 15 May 2025. https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/news/new-approach-vat-e-commerce-imports-simplify-trade-and-compliance-2025-05-15-0_en — retrieved 2026-08-06.