Shopify

The audience Shopify addresses is unusually broad for a single product line. The Shopify pricing page labels Basic as a plan for solo entrepreneurs, Grow as a plan for small teams, Advanced as a plan for global reach, and Plus as a plan for complex businesses, with a separate enterprise track for brands running B2C, B2B, and retail in one place. Shopify's homepage illustrates the same spread by featuring Guests on Earth, described as a home-launched business now doing $4M+, alongside Mattel selling direct to shoppers worldwide.

Day-to-day work in Shopify happens inside the admin. A merchant adds products, picks a prebuilt theme or generates a storefront from a prompt, connects a domain, and switches on payments, while Shopify POS keeps in-store and online stock in sync. Sidekick, the commerce assistant Shopify builds into the admin, is aware of store data and can answer questions or complete tasks, Shopify Flow automates triggers such as tagging high-value customers, and Shopify Markets handles currencies, local payment methods, translated storefronts, and duty estimates for cross-border orders.

Developers get a distinct surface in Shopify. Hydrogen is the React-based headless framework from Shopify that deploys free on Oxygen, Checkout Kit embeds Shopify Checkout into a mobile app, and the Shopify CLI scaffolds apps and themes locally. Shopify also publishes the Universal Commerce Protocol as an open standard so AI agents can discover products, build carts, check out, and track orders, and mock.shop lets a developer send GraphQL queries against demo product data with no store or auth required.

Pricing on the crawled Shopify page is quoted in euros with a monthly and yearly toggle. Basic is €28 per month billed monthly or €21 per month billed yearly, Grow is €78 or €59, Advanced is €384 or €289, and Shopify Plus starts at €2,100 per month. Shopify additionally publishes an Agentic plan at €0 per month for selling through AI channels where the merchant pays only when a sale happens, and POS Pro is a €79 per month per location add-on. Card rates sit on top of the subscription: 1.9% + €0.25 online on Basic, 1.8% on Grow, 1.6% on Advanced, and 1.4% on Plus.

Most constraints in Shopify are plan gates rather than absent features. Shopify allows 5 additional staff accounts on Grow and 15 on Advanced, permits one headless storefront below Plus against 25 on Plus, marks checkout customization as Limited on Basic, Grow, and Advanced, and charges 1% up to $99 USD per month once a store passes 50 synced marketplace orders. Shopify Payments is unavailable in some countries, which pushes those merchants onto third-party gateways and the matching transaction fee of 2% on Basic down to 0.2% on Plus. Shopify's trial copy also differs by page: the Shopify pricing FAQ describes a free 3-day trial then €1 per month for an introductory period, while Shopify's llms.txt states "Try Shopify for free, then keep building for $1/month for 3 months."

Against category peers, Shopify trades away the file-level control of a self-hosted cart for an operations bundle that already contains payments, POS, capital, tax, and an app ecosystem the homepage puts at 21,000+ commerce apps. Merchants who need full checkout code control, unlimited staff seats, or more than one headless storefront hit the Plus threshold at €2,100 per month, which is a large jump from Advanced. Shopify's own conversion claims should be read as vendor claims: Shopify says its checkout "converts 15% better on average than other platforms" and that Shop Pay converts up to 50% higher than guest checkout, citing an external study with a global consulting firm in April 2023.