Published 2026-10-16

What does Shopify really cost? 

How to calculate the real total cost of ownership (TCO)

The list price is the first thing everyone looks at, but it says surprisingly little about what it actually costs to run your e-commerce business on a platform. The real cost is the sum of everything required to run and grow the business: payments, currency, apps, integrations and the work around them. Here, we break Shopify down all the way through, because it’s a platform many compare against, and give you a method you can use to assess any platform in the same way.

In short:

The price of an e-commerce platform tells you very little about what it actually costs to run. The real cost is the total cost of ownership (TCO), made up of seven cost areas: platform, payments, currency, apps, implementation, migration and internal time. This article breaks down what Shopify costs and how to compare TCO across any e-commerce platform, including concrete calculation examples. With Shopify, the licence fee is rarely the biggest cost. The real weight sits in payments, currency conversion when you expand, and apps for essential functionality. At lower volumes in a single market, Shopify is often cost-effective, but costs rise significantly with volume and the number of currencies.

Why Shopify’s list price tells you so little about your actual cost

We break the real cost of an e-commerce platform down into seven cost areas. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is the term for calculating everything you pay over time to own and run the platform: licence, payments, apps, currency, implementation, migration and the internal time it takes. The licence fee is often the smallest of them, but usually the only one you see directly in a proposal.

You see it most clearly in hindsight: the budget that looked tight in the proposal breaks once the payment fees and app costs have landed.

Kristian Iveling, CEO at Viskan, puts it like this: "It’s not the monthly fee that determines what a platform costs you, but the total of everything you pay to run and grow the business over time. In Shopify’s case, the platform itself is the smallest part: more than 75 per cent of what customers pay goes to payments and other services, not the licence. If you only compare licence prices, you miss the biggest part of the real cost."

How to build a realistic TCO calculation

The seven cost areas below are the general method, regardless of platform. You fill them in for the solution you’re evaluating, and you calculate them both at your current volume and at the volume and in the markets you plan to reach. That difference is what determines whether a platform holds up over time, not today’s list price.

1. Platform fee: fixed fee and any variable fee above a threshold.

2. Payments: processing fees per payment method, plus any additional fee for using an external payment provider.

3. Currency: conversion fees, payout fees and conversion that is not refunded on returns.

4. Apps: all recurring add-on functionality, multiplied by the number of stores.

5. Implementation: setup, theme and configuration.

6. Migration: one-off cost and lead time to move over.

7. Internal time: administration, sync and ongoing maintenance.

In the calculation examples that follow, we apply the method to Shopify and the Viskan E-commerce Platform, and compare the ongoing monthly costs: platform, payments, currency and apps. You then add implementation, migration and internal time based on your own situation; we come back to those under "The hidden one-off costs".

Two calculation examples: what TCO looks like in practice

The tables below are based on real customer calculations and follow the seven cost areas above. The comparison is made against the Viskan E-commerce Platform, and we’re open about the fact that these are our own calculations, prepared for real customers, with Viskan’s variable licence fee included. Read them as an illustration of the method, not as a price list: your actual cost depends on volume, product range, payment methods and negotiated agreements. All amounts are shown in SEK per month. Shopify’s prices in USD have been converted at an exchange rate of 9.70 SEK/USD. Payments are often the heaviest cost area, which we come back to straight after the examples.

Calculation example 1: the B2C brand growing from small to large

Where Shopify lands in the calculation depends on where you are in your growth journey. We show three volume stages that a B2C brand with many SKUs typically passes through. The figures are based on real customer calculations, and the platform choice shifts realistically with scale, from Grow to Shopify Plus.

Phase 1 – Start: revenue of around SEK 3.7 million per year, one market. At this volume, Shopify is an excellent choice. In practice, the total cost is broadly even between the platforms, and the simplicity and low entry price are a real advantage.

Rates: Klarna via Shopify 2.9% + SEK 4/order, via standalone payment provider 1.2% + SEK 1.2/order. Shopify also prices in USD in the Swedish market. Amounts in SEK are converted as of 2026-09-25.

Notice the pattern already here: Shopify has a low platform fee but a high payment cost, Viskan the reverse. At this volume, they cancel each other out.

The calculation is based on Shopify’s built-in payments. The alternative, bringing in an external payment provider with a lower rate, triggers Shopify’s additional fee, removes support for multi-currency and requires a separate store per currency. In other words, the lower rate comes with costs on other lines.

Phase 2 – Growth: around SEK 12 million per year, still one market. As volume increases, payments pull the calculation apart, even though the market stays the same.

Rates: Klarna via Shopify 2.9% + SEK 4/order, via standalone payment provider 1.2% + SEK 1.2/order. Amounts in SEK are converted as of 2026-09-25.

The gap is now around SEK 9,600 per month, just over SEK 115,000 per year, almost entirely from payment processing. Otherwise, the platforms are doing the same job.

Phase 3 – Expansion: around SEK 24.5 million per year, with part of sales in foreign currency. Now all the cost drivers kick in at once: the company has moved up to Shopify Plus, payment volume is higher, currency conversion is added, and an app stack starts to build. With multiple currencies, you effectively have two routes on Shopify. Either you run a single store with Shopify Payments and pay a currency conversion fee on every international order (column one), or you set up a separate store per market so you can use local payment providers and avoid the conversion fee (column two), but then you add gateway fees, sync apps and double the admin work instead. There’s no route that avoids the cost, it just changes shape.

How much agency support you need depends on the platform and how it prices support and SLA. An app-heavy setup typically requires more ongoing agency support.

The point: multi-store is not a free way out. The cost just moves, from currency conversion to gateway fees and sync apps. Whichever setup you choose, Viskan comes out lowest, at around SEK 45,000 less per month than Shopify with one licence.

The conclusion is not that Shopify is wrong, but that the best choice changes with scale. If you choose a platform for where the business is today, without calculating where it’s going, you risk paying for that decision for years.

Calculation example 2: the B2B company adding digital sales

B2B companies selling to both businesses and consumers have a cost logic that’s easy to misunderstand, and it can pay off significantly to get it right. The example below is based on real customer calculations and describes a company expanding its digital sales alongside traditional channels. It has a core B2B business of around SEK 300 million and a smaller B2C part of around SEK 12 million, with B2B handled through its own invoicing.

Here, the difference is around SEK 92,000 per month, just over SEK 1.1 million per year, roughly 60 per cent lower with Viskan. The key point: the B2B business handled through your own invoicing costs SEK 0 in payment fees on both sides. What drives Shopify’s cost is the card-paid online share and the B2C payments.

One warning belongs here: if the same company instead ran the entire B2B business through a payment provider at checkout rather than through its own invoicing, payment costs would explode on both platforms. That underlines a principle more than a platform choice: make sure the platform you choose genuinely supports your own invoicing for B2B, otherwise you lose the fee-free handling of your biggest volume.

Where the biggest cost actually arises

Shopify’s pricing model is built on a low entry price, with revenue instead taken continuously from transactions. It’s a well-thought-through model, and for many merchants an advantage: you get started cheaply. But it also means your real cost sits in usage, not in the licence, and that’s why payments are the cost area most often underestimated when platforms are compared.

You can see the model in Shopify’s own reporting. In the full year 2025, Shopify generated USD 11.6 billion in revenue. Of that, subscription revenue, meaning platform fees, accounted for 24 per cent. The remaining 76 per cent came from the "merchant solutions" segment, whose single largest component is payment processing. The year before, the subscription share was 26 per cent. The figures are available in Shopify’s 2025 annual report (Form 10-K). The weight therefore sits in what customers pay for per transaction rather than the licence, and that balance shifts year by year. That is exactly why you should calculate payments before you compare price.

You see it in your cost in two ways.

First: if you don’t use Shopify’s own payment solution, Shopify Payments, Shopify charges an extra transaction fee. The fee varies by plan: 2 per cent on Basic, 1 per cent on Grow, 0.6 per cent on Advanced and 0.2 per cent on Plus. It is added on top of your payment provider’s own fee, which is worth knowing if you want to use a Nordic payment provider alongside Shopify.

Second, and this is the heavier cost area: with Shopify Payments, you pay Shopify’s processing fees. On public list prices, card transactions sit at around 2.5 to 2.9 per cent plus a fixed fee per order depending on plan, and Shopify states a lower entry level from 2.25 per cent on Plus. Nordic payment providers often offer lower rates, and the difference has a major impact when volume starts to matter.

The difference becomes concrete on Klarna and cards, the two most common payment methods in Nordic e-commerce. On a Klarna payment, the gap between Shopify’s fee and a standalone payment provider’s can be more than one and a half percentage points plus a few kronor per order. At SEK 1 million in monthly sales, that corresponds to tens of thousands of kronor per month.

Kristian Iveling, CEO at Viskan, explains: "The low entry price is attractive, but payments are where the cost builds as you grow. If you don’t calculate them from the start, you’re only comparing half the cost."

What is included in Shopify’s list price, and what isn’t?

Shopify’s published price covers the platform and core functionality, but not payments, apps or international operations. Shopify has several tiers, from Basic to the enterprise-level Shopify Plus, and prices them in USD even in the Swedish market. Plus is the tier growing and multi-market businesses typically end up on, and it is priced like this (2026):

- Base fee: Shopify’s pricing page lists Shopify Plus from USD 2,300 per month. On a one-year contract, the level is usually stated as USD 2,500 per month.

- Variable platform fee: above a threshold of around USD 800,000–1,000,000 in monthly sales (GMV), the fee shifts to a share of revenue, in the region of 0.25–0.40 per cent, capped at around USD 40,000 per month.

- Expansion stores: up to nine are included on Plus, after which a fee is added per store per month.

This is the floor, not the ceiling. Everything related to payments, international sales and functionality beyond the core is added on top, and that’s where most of the cost arises.

What happens to the cost when you expand into new markets?

International expansion is the single biggest cost driver in a Shopify setup. That’s because several fees stack on top of each other, and they hit exactly the sales you want to grow.

- Currency conversion fee: Shopify charges 1.5 or 2 per cent per international order, depending on where the store is registered, on every order paid in a currency other than your payout currency, according to Shopify’s own documentation.

- The fee is not refunded on returns: the conversion fee you paid on an order is not returned when the item is sent back, as Shopify itself states. So on ranges with a high return rate, you pay conversion on revenue you never keep.

- Shopify Payments required for true multi-currency: the ability to take payment in local currencies depends on Shopify Payments, which Shopify states directly on its pricing page. Without it, you lose that functionality, and the cost instead moves to the bank’s exchange or to Shopify’s Multi-Currency Payout fee of around 1 per cent on non-home currencies, according to Shopify’s terms.

- Multi-store or separate stores: if you choose separate stores per market to work around the currency limitations, you pay a licence per store, and most apps charge per store. Even development stores can drive app cost.

- Sync between stores: inventory, products, variants and content must be kept in sync between stores. That sync is not built in, but requires apps that each carry an ongoing cost, and all content also has to be managed per store.

Worth pausing on: in practice, every new market becomes its own installation. In Shopify’s documentation on expansion stores, it is clear that each store operates completely independently, with its own data, settings and configurations, and that products, collections and inventory are not synced between stores. Changes in one store do not carry through to the others. Shopify instead points users to third-party apps or ERP systems if they need to keep, for example, inventory tied together.

So if you choose separate stores per market, the route many take to work around currency and payment limitations, you are not running one platform across multiple markets. You are running several standalone installations that you have to connect yourself.

The cost shows up in two places. On the price tag: most apps are billed per store, even development stores can drive app cost, and on lower plans you pay a separate subscription for each store. On Plus, up to nine expansion stores are included, but app fees still remain per store. In the work itself: products, variants, prices, translations and all content are managed separately in each store, and because inventory is not shared, you risk selling the same item twice if the sync fails.

Serkan Selcuk, Product Owner at Viskan, explains: "Every function you have to solve with an external app becomes a recurring cost and an integration that needs maintaining. In a multi-store setup, that multiplies by the number of stores, and that’s where the real complexity starts to build."

The app stack: recurring costs that keep building

Shopify’s core is deliberately lean, and functions you might expect as standard are handled through apps that each carry an ongoing cost. What often needs to be added: 

- Multilingual and currency support (for example Weglot or Shopify Markets)

- Tag management and tracking (for example Google Tag Manager via Elevar)

- Helpdesk and customer service

- ERP and PIM integration, often with custom integration when it comes to variant level

- Bundles, mix-and-match and lookbooks

- Redirects to preserve SEO during migration

- GA4 integration

For a mid-sized company, the app stack often lands at several thousand to tens of thousands of kronor per month, and the cost multiplies in a multi-store setup. There is also a technical effect: the more apps in the frontend, the greater the risk that load time deteriorates, which in turn affects both conversion and search visibility.

The hidden one-off costs

Beyond the ongoing fees, there are costs that don’t show up in a monthly budget but still have a clear impact on TCO. The biggest ones:

- Migration: moving onto the platform is a project in itself, often with significant cost and lead time.

- Custom development: adaptations and custom integrations, especially against ERP at variant level, require developers.

- Theme: a premium theme or a bespoke frontend is a separate cost.

- API limitations: lower plans have lower API caps, which can become a bottleneck for companies with PIM, ERP or multiple data flows.

- Internal time: admin per store and managing sync between markets ties up hours that are rarely included but are still a real cost.

What you should demand from any platform

Whichever platform you end up with, there are five requirements that protect your TCO over time. They are not tied to one vendor, but to how the cost actually builds up:

- Ready-made core functionality without ongoing app costs. The more functions you expect as standard (product information, order management, content, customer management) that instead require separate monthly billed apps, the higher your TCO becomes. Map what is included and what is an add-on.

- A cost that does not multiply per market, so you can expand on the same platform without licences and apps stacking up per store.

- Transparent and competitive payment solutions. Check how payment cost develops as volume increases and you expand, and whether you are free to choose the payment solution that makes the most sense, or whether the platform locks you into its own and charges extra fees if you choose another.

- Support for your own invoicing in B2B. A lot of B2B sales are done against invoice. A platform that supports that lets you handle large B2B volumes without a transaction fee per order, instead of forcing sales through a payment provider that charges on every transaction.

- Automatic upgrades, so the platform develops continuously rather than through expensive rebuild projects.

These are exactly the areas where platforms differ most, and why Viskan has built its e-commerce platform with core functionality built in, payments kept independent and upgrades handled automatically. The point of this article, though, is the method, not the vendor: calculate the seven cost areas for your actual volume and your expansion plans, and you’ll make a decision that holds up.

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