Marketplace
Shopify
A complete storefront that handles inventory, payments, and shipping. Expensive past the first year, and built for products rather than services or subscriptions.
Our assessment
What is good
- +Everything needed to run a shop — payments, shipping, inventory — in one system
- +No hosting, SSL certificates, or payment gateway to set up separately
- +Visual editor that works without touching code
- +24/7 support via email and live chat on all plans
What to know first
- −$960 over three years on Basic, before transaction fees — far more than hosting alone
- −1–2% fee on every sale unless you use Shopify Payments and accept their terms
- −Built for physical products; subscriptions and services require paid extensions
- −Customisation beyond templates requires learning Liquid or hiring a developer
- −One staff account on the $29 plan — a problem if more than one person manages the shop
Buy it for
Someone launching a product-based shop who wants working checkout and inventory management from day one, and who has the margin to carry a $29 monthly overhead.Do not buy it for
Anyone selling services, subscriptions, or digital-only products as the primary offering. Anyone processing enough volume that a 1–2% transaction fee becomes the largest line item.The full read
Shopify runs an online shop without requiring hosting, a payment gateway, or separate software for stock control. You add products, set prices, and the platform manages the cart, checkout, and order tracking. It competes with WooCommerce and Squarespace Commerce, not with managed WordPress or cPanel hosting.
The entry plan costs a dollar a month for three months, then $29 monthly on an annual contract. That comes to $960 over three years. The mid-tier plan is $79 after the same introductory period — $2,610 over three years — and the top plan is $299 monthly, or $9,870. Those are software subscription prices, not hosting prices, and they sit in a different budget. A Hostinger plan costs $108 over the same period; Shopify Basic costs nine times that.
The Basic plan charges 2% of every sale made through Stripe, PayPal, or anything other than Shopify's own payment processor. Move to the $79 plan and that drops to 1%. The $299 plan takes 0.6%. If you process $2,000 a month on Basic, the transaction fees alone cost $480 a year — more than the subscription. Use Shopify Payments and the fee disappears, but you are then locked to their gateway and subject to their decisions about what you may sell and when they hold funds.
It handles physical goods well: weights, dimensions, shipping calculators, inventory alerts. It is less suited to bookings, memberships, or anything sold on a recurring contract unless you add paid extensions. The theme editor is visual and does not require code, but customising beyond the template means hiring a developer or learning Liquid, Shopify's own templating language.
Support is email and live chat on all plans, available every hour of the day. Phone support appears only on Plus, the plan that starts at $2,300 a month. The help documentation is thorough and the community forum is active, which matters more here than with simpler tools — you will use both.
The three-year total looks high next to hosting because it is not hosting. It is a storefront, a payment system, and a back office, and the question is whether $29 monthly is cheaper than building the same thing yourself. For someone selling fifty products with no technical background, it probably is. For someone already running WordPress with light transaction volume, it probably is not.
Written 2026-09-01 by payless.host. Performance figures come from independent testers who publish their method. The section above is our own assessment. The prices below are copied from the provider's pricing page and are not affected by it.
What it costs
Shopify's entry plan is listed at $1 a month for the first 3 months, and $29 a month after that. The last column combines the two into the total for thirty-six months.
Prices read from the provider's own pricing page on 2026-09-01.
https://www.shopify.com/pricing
Where the introductory term or the renewal rate is not published, the three-year column is left blank rather than estimated.
We earn a commission when someone buys through our links. It has no effect on the figures above, which are read from the provider's own page and published as they are.