Pricing and Key Features

If you want to start making money straight away but don’t want to fork out for one of Shopify’s plans, Shopify does offer a 3-day free trial, plus heavy discounts for the firstt three months, however, we wanted to take a look at their pricing options after the free trial.

Shopify offers seven different pricing packages, although Plus and Enterprise will be overkill for most businesses. Keep in mind, most plans let you save 25% if you pay yearly rather than monthly. Each plan offers an unlimited number of products and file storage for an online store.

Starter

Shopify’s Starter plan comes with the bare essentials for you to start a new business. Only £5 per month, the Starter package offers the following features:

• A simple online store: including product pages, a contact page and Shopify’s fast and secure checkout
• A mobile point of sale: to sell in person anywhere and accept payments with just your smartphone
• Linkpop, the link in bio tool designed for commerce
• Access to Shopify apps
• Shopify order management
• 100 GB file storage limit
• Unlimited bandwidth

The Starter plan lacks a fully fleshed out website but is perfect for selling products through social media, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and anywhere else you might want to share a link to a product. You can also sell in person with Shopify POS. It’s quick and easy to set up, plus it’s already optimised for mobile devices.

Once you’ve created your Shopify account, you can start listing products immediately, with the option of uploading a CSV file or importing a list from another platform.

Basic

Shopify’s Basic plan comes with all the basics for you to start a new e-commerce website to sell your wares online. You get access to essential features like product pages and checkout, along with value-added features like theme editing, blog posts and more.

Starting at £25 per month, the basic package offers the following features:

• Website and blog
• Free SSL Certificate
• 10 inventory locations
• 24/7 chat support
• Localised global selling (3 markets)
• POS Lite

The basic package is just that, however, we think it makes a great starting point for a small business looking to expand their online presence, and start selling to get the hang of things. With a few prompts, Shopify will even help you create the perfect theme for your website.

Grow

The Shopify Grow package is the middle of the road package. It includes everything you’ll need once your business is up and running, and is growing in size, where you just need that little bit extra to keep things ticking along nicely. Along with the features of the Basic account, for £65 per month Grow adds;

• 5 additional staff accounts
• 300 GB file storage limit
• Custom apps using the Shopify APIs

At this point you might also be interested in the wide range of services and tools which can easily be linked to your Shopify account.

At £65 per month, it’s a big leap from the Basic plan, but the other key difference is that each step up in Shopify plan reduces you transaction fees. As your sales increase, you’ll need to crunch the numbers to decide if it’s worth paying for a more expensive plan in order to save money on fees:

Retail

Between Grow and Advanced is the £69 Retail plan. Like Starter, Shopify doesn’t highlight Retail as much as the other plans because they’re intended for selling through channels like social media instead of a full Shopify website.

Along with lower transaction fees than Starter, the Retail plan offers access to a more advanced Point of Sale system with unlimited logins.

Advanced

The Advanced Shopify package for the big boys; businesses that are scaling and growing in size each and every day as well as looking to more countries. At £344 per month, it’s a large dent in your wallet, but in the grand scheme of things, if your business is doing that well that you need to consider this package, it probably isn’t a deal-breaker – especially when your transaction fees become lower. Building on the Grow plan, Advanced adds:

• 15 Staff accounts
• 500 GB file storage limit
• Enhanced live chat support
• 10x checkout capacity
• Up to 2x rate limit on select APIs
• Localised global selling (3 markets) + $59 USD/mo per added active market

Plus

Shopify’s Plus plan is for online retail giants with plans for world domination. It’s a hefty US$2300, available on 1 to 3 year plans, and maxes out every aspect of your Shopify experience. This includes “competitive rates” on high-volume transaction fees. Building on the Advanced plan, Plus adds:

• 200 inventory locations
• 1 TB file storage limit
• Priority 24/7 phone or chat support
• Localised global selling (50 markets)
• Unlimited staff accounts
• Customisable checkout with 40x capacity
• Up to 200 POS Pro locations
• Up to 9 free expansion stores
• Sell wholesale/B2B
• Up to 10x rate limit on select APIs

Enterprise commerce

Like Plus, Shopify’s Enterprise commerce plan is for the real heavy hitters. It doesn’t even list pricing, juts encouraging you to “Get in touch” if you’re in need of build agility, speed to deployment, and enterprise-grade performance.

Pros and Cons

As with any eCommerce platform on the market, there are going to pros and cons; one platform isn’t going to suit all, so we’ve taken the time to find out the good and the bad so you can make an informed decision as to whether Shopify is the right platform for you.

Pros

Around 250 themes – Shopify offers its customers around 250 stunning themes and templates to make their online stores look unique and professional. Shopify’s theme store enables their customers to choose from a collection of paid and free themes dependent on the industry your business caters for (e.g. jewellery, hairdressing, clothing, manufacturing, etc.), so you can choose the right theme to fit your style of the website.

All of Shopify’s themes are checked for quality and compatibility to ensure that they work with the latest version of Shopify.

Tools and Apps – It’s great being able to make a brilliant online store, but with Shopify, you can do so much more. Shopify’s app store lets you choose from more than 8,000 apps to enhance your eCommerce website, such as fraud detection apps, SMS notifications for abandoned carts, store credit add-ons; the list really does go on and on, and this is something we’re very excited about. Not only are these tools available, but they are also both free and paid, so you can choose and trial out different tools to suit your needs.

Whether you’re looking for marketing and reporting applications, social media enhancement, or accounting, Shopify’s apps truly allow you to automate your eCommerce business, making it stand out above the rest.

Expert Customer Support – Comparing our experience of Shopify with other eCommerce providers, Shopify is by far one of the, if not, the best out there for customer support.

Building your own online store is a great feature, but you’re essentially left to your own devices, so if something does go wrong, or you don’t understand something, who do you turn to? Shopify provides quick and helpful answers to the questions we put to them; they’ve been supportive, informative, and won’t leave you in the lurch.

Their database of FAQs are almost endless, yet if you’re still struggling to get hold of an answer, they have phone, email, and chat support at the ready – Shopify certainly excels in this area, we don’t think there’s any better support out there.

Shopify’s Help Center Assistant can even offer personalised answers based on your store.

Cons

Transaction fees – Regardless of the type of pricing plan you choose, Shopify charges a transaction fee for every sale you make through your eCommerce store. This essentially means that Shopify will charge you a % of your sales value, depending on the pricing plan you choose and the card used for the purchase, which we’ve covered in the pricing section above.

However, in the grand scheme of things, this % value mostly remains below 3%, which is essentially a payment to Shopify for powering all of your online sales and the technology behind the platform.

Monthly payments – Covered in the pricing plans above, Shopify’s monthly payment subscription on the face of it can seem a little high; once you get to £344 per month for Advanced an above top package. Although Shopify has a great number of apps to choose from, a lot of which are free, if you do choose to install a paid app, your monthly costs could get a little pricey.

However, again, we have to look at this in the grand scheme of things; how much would you pay an accountant monthly to manage your accounts? If you’re wise about your choices, you can keep your monthly costs down, just pay attention to what you’re adding onto your eCommerce site and be money-wise.

Ease of Use

One of Shopify’s main selling points is how easy it is to use, for beginners, technophobes, experts, etc. Regardless of your experience, you can pick up Shopify pretty quickly, with the comfort of their support should you need it.

From the get-go, Shopify is easy to set up; its interface makes building a shop really simple, with the ability to insert product images, descriptions, and details with ease. You can manage your inventory of products and organise them into categories so it makes them easier to find for your customers.

Shopify’s built-in discount code engine allows you to generate discount codes and promote them with ease, and when is necessary. The creation of your website, as well as online store is just as simple, giving you the option to add a blog to your store to keep your customers engaged.

Shopify accepts payments from more than 100 different payment gateways across multiple countries, making it a great platform regardless of your target market. Your customers can have their own account, so logging in, and return shoppers will also find the process easy.

Dependent on the type of plan you take, you can manage multiple staff logins, setting permissions as you go to ensure your workforce is easily managed.

The whole point of Shopify is that they do the hard work for you; your job is to focus on your business, and their pricing plans sure do reflect this.

From the get-go, Shopify asks a few simple questions to hel you get up and running quickly.

Customer Support

There is really no competition in this area; Shopify’s customer support is highly rated. Shopify respond to their customers in a very timely manner, providing quality information and support that is actually useful.

They talk to you on a personal level, like a human being, and take the time to investigate any issues you are experiencing and ensure that any problems you have are resolved before you disconnect from their support.

We love the fact that you can contact Shopify in numerous ways; via live chat, email, telephone, and of course they have an almost endless list of FAQs if you’re really stuck. FAQs and how-to guides, in our opinion, are essential for customers who need that little extra guidance but like to figure it out for themselves in the first instance.

In our experience, no other competition has come close to Shopify’s customer support – even if for some reason you weren’t 100% keen on their platform, their customer support alone would be a reason to choose them as your number one eCommerce platform.

Marketing

Once you’ve got your online store ready and customers are starting to trickle in, you’ll want your business to focus on marketing; more customers equals more revenue as we know.

Shopify has all the tools ready for you to create stunning and showstopping marketing campaigns, with the ability to manage organic traffic, social media, and to continue to grow your brand.

Shopify is a great choice when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO); it contains clean code, allowing customisable tags, meta descriptions, and more. Whether it’s SEO or AdWords,

Shopify will have your back covered in all areas, making it simple to pull together a successful marketing strategy that will pull in potential customers to your landing pages. Even if you get stuck, there are 100’s of FAQs to help you out, as well as Shopify’s own YouTube channel, containing a plethora of ‘how to’ videos.

Our Conclusion:

There’s no doubt about it, Shopify is most certainly our favourite eCommerce store builder on the market. Shopify is easy to use, regardless of your technical background, making setting up a store extremely simple and stress free.

Their customer support is at the top of their game, and we think that they know this! Shopify is ideal if you’re looking to setup an online store with a professional looking store front and a multitude of apps to help you manage your business, customers, staff, and much more.

Shopify is a strong, stable, and flexible choice as an online platform, allowing their customers the freedom to personalise their eCommerce stores to their liking.

Don’t forget, Shopify offers a 3 day risk-free trial and three months dirt-cheap to test the waters; we have no doubt that you’ll love it just as much as we do!