Shopify fee calculator
Free, no sign-up, runs in your browser.
Shopify takes no commission on a sale. What you pay is a monthly subscription and a card processing fee, which makes it the opposite shape to a marketplace: expensive at low volume, cheap at high volume, and completely insensitive to the price of what you sell.
What {platform} charges
| Marketplace commission | 0% |
|---|---|
| Per-order fee | $0.00 |
| Payment processing | 2.9% + $0.30 |
| Monthly subscription | $39.00 |
The same product at three prices
One product — $29.99 list, bought for $8.00, $1.50 inbound, $0.50 other costs — priced at three points, because the fee rate you actually pay depends on the price.
| Price | Fees | Fee rate | Profit | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $15.00 | $1.13 | 7.5% | $3.87 | 25.8% |
| $29.99 | $1.56 | 5.2% | $18.43 | 61.5% |
| $75.00 | $2.87 | 3.8% | $62.13 | 82.8% |
Notice the fee rate falls as the price rises. That is the fixed component — a per-order charge or an amortised subscription — spreading over a bigger sale. It is why a channel that looks expensive on a cheap item can be the cheapest on an expensive one.
How it compares
On this product at this price it places 2 of 9. WooCommerce (own store) leaves $0.39 more per unit. That gap is only part of the story: a marketplace brings traffic your own store has to pay for, so budget the advertising that replaces it before switching.
What to watch
The subscription is the whole decision. At 50 orders a month Basic adds about $0.78 per order; at 1,000 it adds four cents. Work out your own crossover rather than following a plan comparison written for someone else's volume.
Questions
How much does Shopify cost per sale?
On our $29.99 example, $1.56 — around 5.2%. Almost all of that is card processing; the subscription part depends entirely on how many orders you spread it over.
Which Shopify plan should I be on?
Compare the monthly step up against the processing rate you save. Grow costs more per month than Basic but processes at a lower rate, so it pays off above a volume you can calculate exactly — switch channel in the compare tab to see all three priced on your own product.
Is Shopify cheaper than Amazon?
Per transaction, almost always, because there is no commission. Per sale made, often not: Amazon brings the buyer and Shopify does not. Add what you spend on advertising per unit under “other costs” and run the comparison again — that is the honest version.
Rates on this page are the published schedules as of 2025-01-15 and are applied by the same code the calculator runs. Marketplaces reprice — confirm against your own seller dashboard before setting a price.