Running a Shopify store gets sold as cheap, and on day one it is. The Basic plan costs less per month than a team lunch and a store can be taking orders within a week. The bill that matters arrives later, once the store is turning over real money and every sale carries a processing fee, every new requirement adds an app subscription and every change to the theme needs someone who knows what they are doing.
For an established NZ retailer, the plan fee ends up as one of the smallest lines in the running cost of the store. The larger costs move with revenue, and they move whether anyone is watching them or not. What follows is a working model of what a Shopify store costs to run each year, built from Shopify's current published rates and a set of clearly labelled assumptions you can swap for your own numbers.
Three layers of running cost
The first layer is fixed: the Shopify plan, your domain, the email platform at its base tier and any app billed at a flat monthly rate. These costs barely change between a slow month and a record one.
The second layer scales with sales. Payment processing is the big one, charged as a percentage of every order plus a fixed amount per transaction. Some apps also price on order volume or revenue, and email platforms price on list size, which grows with the customer base.
The third layer is people and expertise: the hours spent keeping the theme, apps and integrations working, fixing what breaks when an app updates and adding the features the business needs next. It is the layer most owners leave out of the budget, and the one that decides whether the other two keep working.
The Shopify plan itself
Shopify lists its plan prices for New Zealand in US dollars, so the NZD cost moves with the exchange rate. At the time of writing, the published rates are:
- Basic: US$39 a month billed monthly, or US$29 a month billed yearly
- Grow: US$105 a month billed monthly, or US$79 a month billed yearly
- Advanced: US$399 a month billed monthly, or US$299 a month billed yearly
- Shopify Plus: from US$2,300 a month on a three-year term or US$2,500 a month on a one-year term, with larger and more complex businesses moved to a variable platform fee based on revenue
Shopify revises these from time to time, so check its NZ pricing page when you set the budget. Yearly billing saves roughly a quarter of the monthly price on every plan below Plus, which makes it the obvious choice once you know the store is staying on that plan for twelve months.
Our guide to Shopify plans and when standard Shopify stops being enough covers the feature differences between tiers. For running costs, what matters is the sales volume at which a higher plan pays for itself through lower fees.
Payment processing, the line that grows fastest
Shopify Payments charges a card rate on every online order, and the rate falls as you move up the plans. The current NZ rates for online standard cards are 2.65% plus 30c on Basic, 2.45% plus 30c on Grow, 2.35% plus 30c on Advanced and 2.25% plus 30c on Plus. International cards cost more, from 3.3% plus 30c on Basic down to 3% plus 30c on Plus.
The international rate deserves attention from any NZ store with a strong Australian customer base. On Grow, an Australian order paid by an Australian card costs 3.2% plus 30c to process against 2.45% plus 30c for a domestic one, so a store doing a third of its sales across the Tasman pays noticeably more in processing than its headline rate suggests.
The third-party provider fee
If you process payments through a provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of whatever that provider charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. A store on Grow doing $100,000 a month through a third-party gateway pays $1,000 a month to Shopify for the privilege, before the gateway's own fees. An alternative provider can make sense for an existing banking relationship, but take the fee as a deliberate decision with a number attached.
When a higher plan pays for itself
The gap between Grow and Advanced on domestic cards is 0.1 percentage points. On $100,000 of monthly online sales, that saves $100 a month in processing, against a plan price difference of US$220 a month on yearly billing. On rate savings alone, Advanced only starts paying for itself once monthly online sales run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Stores move to Advanced earlier for its reporting, staff accounts and duty and tax features, and those are better reasons, but make the move with the arithmetic done rather than on the assumption that the bigger plan saves money.
Apps, the cost that creeps
Most established Shopify stores run a stack of apps covering reviews, search and filtering, subscriptions, loyalty, shipping rules, product options, accounting sync and email capture. Each one looks inexpensive on its own. Most bill in US dollars through the Shopify invoice and many have moved to pricing tiers tied to order volume. Very few get cancelled when the feature they provided stops being used.
Beyond the subscription total, apps cost the store itself: apps that load scripts on every page slow the site down, and overlapping apps fight each other in ways that surface as bugs at checkout. Our piece on cleaning up a Shopify app stack without breaking anything sets out how to cut the list safely. As a running-cost habit, review the app bill every quarter and ask of each line whether the store would lose money without it.
The people layer
Shopify is maintained by Shopify, which removes server updates and security patching from your list. What remains is everything built on top of the platform. Themes need updating as Shopify releases new features, apps change their behaviour after updates, integrations with accounting, freight and inventory systems need someone watching them and the business keeps asking for new landing pages, new collections and new promotions.
Whether a staff member, a contractor or a studio on a support arrangement does that work, it belongs in the running cost of the store. Our website maintenance cost guide breaks down what ongoing support covers and what it costs in New Zealand, and the comparison between monthly support and an in-house hire is useful if you are deciding between the two.
Integrations
Integrations sit across both the app layer and the people layer. A connection to Xero, a freight platform or an ERP carries a subscription for the connector and time from someone who understands both systems whenever a field mapping changes or an order fails to sync. Skyrocket scopes and manages those connections with the relevant platform partner, and the ongoing cost of keeping them healthy should be in the budget from the day they go live. Our guide to the integrations a NZ Shopify store needs covers which ones earn their keep.
A worked example: a $1.2 million online store
Here is a running-cost model for a NZ retailer doing $1.2 million a year online, or $100,000 a month, with an average order of $120. That works out to about 833 orders a month. The plan and processing figures use Shopify's published rates. The app, email and support figures are assumptions for the example, and you should replace them with your own.
- Shopify Grow plan, billed yearly: US$79 a month, or US$948 a year
- Payment processing, all domestic cards: 2.45% of $100,000 is $2,450, plus 833 orders at 30c, which is about $250, for roughly $2,700 a month or $32,400 a year
- Apps, assumed: $900 a month, or $10,800 a year
- Email platform, assumed: $400 a month, or $4,800 a year
- Support and development hours, assumed: $1,500 a month, or $18,000 a year
Excluding the plan, that comes to $66,000 a year, or 5.5% of online revenue, and the plan fee adds roughly another tenth of a percentage point. This is before advertising, freight, stock or staff, and payment processing alone accounts for almost half of it.
Change one assumption and the picture shifts. If a third of the orders were paid with international cards, processing would rise by around $250 a month. If the store ran its payments through a third-party provider, Shopify's 1% fee on Grow would add $12,000 a year. If the app stack had grown to $2,000 a month without anyone noticing, which happens in stores that have added features for five years without removing any, apps would overtake the support budget.
Costs that sit next to the platform
Freight is the cost that most often leaks through the store unnoticed. When the shipping rates shown at checkout do not match what the courier charges, the difference comes out of margin on every order. Our guide to getting checkout shipping rates to match what you pay covers how to close that gap.
Site speed is a running cost of a different kind. A store slowed by years of added apps and theme patches loses sales without anything appearing on an invoice, and the cost shows up as a conversion rate drifting down while traffic holds steady.
How to budget the year ahead
Build next year's running-cost budget from your actual numbers, in this order. Pull twelve months of Shopify invoices and payout reports, which give you the plan, app charges and processing fees as they really landed. Split processing into domestic and international so you can see what the Australian share of your sales is costing. List every app and mark the ones you would not reinstall today. Add the support hours you used, including staff time.
Then forecast forward against your sales target. Processing scales with revenue, so a 30% growth target means roughly 30% more in processing fees. Check whether the forecast volume changes which plan makes sense, and whether any app's volume-based pricing tips into a higher tier. If the total running cost as a share of revenue has been rising for two years, a website audit will show where the money is going and which parts of the stack are no longer earning their place.
Common questions
How much does it cost per month to run a Shopify store in New Zealand?
The plan itself runs from US$29 to US$299 a month on yearly billing below Plus. For an established store the larger costs are payment processing, at 2.25% to 2.65% plus 30c per domestic online order depending on plan, app subscriptions and support hours. In our worked example, a store doing $100,000 a month in online sales spends around $5,500 a month on running costs before advertising, freight and stock.
Are Shopify plan prices charged in NZD or USD?
Shopify lists its plan prices for New Zealand in US dollars, so the NZD amount on your card statement moves with the exchange rate. Payment processing rates through Shopify Payments are shown in NZD. Most app subscriptions also bill in US dollars, so a weaker New Zealand dollar raises your fixed running costs without any change to the store.
Is it worth upgrading from Shopify Grow to Advanced to save on fees?
On processing fees alone, only once sales are high. Advanced saves 0.1 percentage points per domestic online order compared with Grow, which is $100 a month on $100,000 of sales, against a plan price difference of US$220 a month on yearly billing. The stronger reasons to move are Advanced's reporting, extra staff accounts and international selling features, so judge the upgrade on those.
What does Shopify charge if I don't use Shopify Payments?
Shopify adds a transaction fee on every order processed through a third-party provider: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. That sits on top of the provider's own processing fees. For a store turning over $1.2 million a year on Grow, the Shopify fee alone would be $12,000 a year, so the alternative provider needs to bring something worth more than that.
How much should I budget for Shopify apps?
Budget from your own stack, because two stores of the same size can run very different app bills. Pull your Shopify billing history and list each app with its monthly cost and the feature it delivers. Remove anything the store would not miss. Watch for apps priced on order volume, which rise as the store grows, and for overlapping apps, which cost twice and slow the site down.
