Selling online in New Zealand used to mean assembling the machinery yourself. A merchant facility negotiated with the bank, a payment gateway bolted on top of it, a server sitting in a rack somewhere off Karangahape Road, compliance paperwork nobody on the team fully understood, and an unspoken hope that the whole arrangement would hold on the one December afternoon when everybody decided to shop at once.
Shopify is what happened when that entire layer became something you rent by the month.
It is hosted commerce software. You pay a subscription, Shopify runs the infrastructure and owns the checkout, and you get an admin where products, inventory, orders, customers, discount logic, shipping rules and content live in one system. Nothing is installed on a server you are responsible for. Nothing needs patching at eleven o'clock on a Friday night because a certificate expired.
That sounds like a convenience story. It is really a capital allocation story. Every hour your business is not spending on payment infrastructure is an hour it can spend on the product, the photography, the range, the reason someone chooses you over the other three brands in the category. Shopify's actual proposition is that the boring, expensive, load-bearing parts of commerce should be somebody else's permanent problem.
The checkout is the product
Everything else Shopify sells is downstream of one thing, and it is worth being blunt about which thing.
Shopify's checkout has been tested across hundreds of thousands of stores and hundreds of millions of transactions. Shop Pay remembers a shopper's card and address from a purchase they made at a completely different store two years ago, so a returning customer who has never bought from you before still arrives at your checkout with their details already filled in. Apple Pay, Google Pay and the accelerated wallets sit above the form. Fraud analysis runs underneath it. Shopify's own testing puts the conversion difference at around 15% against other platforms, which is a vendor figure rather than an audited one, though anyone who has watched the same catalogue move between platforms will recognise the direction.
No individual business, at any size a New Zealand or Australian company is likely to reach, could fund the research programme that produced that checkout. You get it for the price of a monthly subscription. When Skyrocket rebuilt Clean Collective across Australia and New Zealand, conversion rate went up 103% and sales went up 28%, and a meaningful share of that came from decisions the platform had already made correctly before anyone opened Figma.
What Shopify costs in 2026
Shopify bills New Zealand and Australian merchants in US dollars, so the real number moves with the exchange rate. All figures below are USD and exclude GST.
There are four plans, and the shape of the ladder is simple: the more you pay, the less each transaction costs you.
- Basic, $29 a month billed yearly. The store owner account only. Online card rates from 2.65% + $0.30 NZD. A 2% surcharge if you process through a gateway other than Shopify Payments.
- Grow, $79 a month. Up to five staff accounts. Card rates from 2.45% + $0.30 NZD, and the third-party surcharge halves to 1%.
- Advanced, $299 a month. Up to fifteen staff accounts, live carrier shipping rates and regional storefront control. Card rates from 2.35% + $0.30 NZD, surcharge down to 0.6%.
- Plus, from $2,300 a month. Unlimited staff, a checkout you can rewrite, unlimited B2B catalogues, up to two hundred POS Pro locations and priority phone support. Card rates from 2.25% + $0.30 NZD, surcharge 0.2%.
Basic runs $39 per month if you pay monthly instead of yearly. Plus sits at $2,300 on a three-year term or $2,500 on a one-year term, and merchants above roughly $800,000 a month in sales move onto a variable platform fee negotiated directly with Shopify rather than a flat subscription.
Every plan carries unlimited products, ten inventory locations, the full checkout, more than two hundred reports and support around the clock, which means the cheapest plan on the ladder is a complete commerce system rather than a crippled trial.
That third-party surcharge is the line most businesses miss. Processing payments through anything other than Shopify Payments adds a charge on top of whatever your provider already takes, which on $3M of online revenue sitting on the Advanced plan comes to $18,000 a year. Model it before finance signs a gateway contract on the strength of a banking relationship.
Beyond the subscription, a serious store runs somewhere between six and fifteen paid apps, which lands most businesses between $200 and $800 a month. Physical retail adds POS Pro at $89 per location. None of this is hidden, but it belongs in the business case rather than arriving as a surprise in month four.
Where the business actually runs
The storefront is what your customers see. The admin is what your team sees for eight hours a day, and it is the part that gets skipped in every platform comparison written by somebody who has never had to process a wholesale return.
Inventory sits across up to ten locations on a standard plan, and the count is shared between the website, the retail floor and every marketplace you sell through. B2B catalogues let you show a wholesale buyer their own negotiated pricing behind a login while retail customers see retail pricing on the same products. Staff permissions are granular enough that your part-time weekend person cannot issue a refund. Orders, exchanges, partial fulfilments, gift cards and store credit are all first-class objects rather than apps stapled on afterwards.
This depth is why complicated migrations work. When Skyrocket moved Advintage off Magento, the job carried more than 5,000 SKUs, layered discount and stock management, wholesale pricing and an ERP integration, and it went live with zero customer downtime. That is possible because the operational primitives were already sitting in the platform waiting to be mapped, rather than needing to be built.
Crossing the Tasman
For most New Zealand businesses, Australia is the next market and the one where the pricing gets awkward. Shopify Markets handles it inside the same store: separate currencies, market-specific pricing that is set rather than converted, local domains, plus duties and import tax calculated at the checkout so an Australian customer sees a landed cost instead of a surprise from the courier a fortnight later.
One catalogue. One inventory count. Two markets that each feel local to the person buying. The alternative on most platforms is a second store to maintain or a currency widget that shaves margin off every order without ever appearing as a line item in your accounts.
What Shopify is opinionated about
Shopify makes decisions on your behalf, and those decisions are the reason it works. They are still decisions, so it is worth knowing which ones you are agreeing to.
Below the Plus plan, the checkout is Shopify's rather than yours. You can adjust it within defined limits and you cannot rewrite the flow. That constraint exists because the flow is the thing Shopify has spent a decade optimising, and businesses that rebuild it tend to make it worse. If your model needs a quoting step, an age verification gate or an unusual fulfilment path inside the checkout itself, Plus pricing arrives sooner than the growth curve suggests.
Themes are built in Liquid against a section-and-block architecture. A well-built custom theme looks like nothing else in the category, and it still lives inside Shopify's structure. That structure is what lets your marketing manager build a landing page in an afternoon in year three without booking developer time, which is worth considerably more over the life of a site than a layout that fights the model and gets expensive to maintain.
Content tooling is functional rather than deep. Shopify chose to be a commerce system, and the blog reflects that choice honestly. Brands whose commercial strategy leans on editorial, long-form or a substantial resource library sometimes run a Webflow front end for the brand experience with Shopify handling commerce underneath. Slight Twist works exactly that way, and it took three CSSDA awards including Special Kudos.
Where Webflow and Wix sit alongside it
Webflow is a website platform with a strong CMS and precise design control, and its commerce offering starts at $29 per month on top of a site plan. It suits a short catalogue with straightforward fulfilment very well. It was not built to carry multi-location inventory, wholesale catalogues, retail POS or Shopify's payment infrastructure, and asking it to is how projects go sideways.
Wix runs from $17 per month for Light up to $159 for Business Elite billed annually, with ecommerce opening at $29 on the Core plan. For a sole trader with a dozen products it is a sensible answer at a sensible price, and there is no shame in it being the right call for that business.
The dividing line is what the site is being asked to earn. Revenue that arrives through a cart, at volume, across locations and markets, belongs on Shopify. Enquiry-led revenue, the kind that follows a long considered decision, belongs on Webflow: Heritage Saunas converts at 4.6% against a 2.7% industry benchmark, which is the shape of a business Shopify would be the wrong tool for. Plenty of companies run both motions at once, and the front-end-plus-commerce split is a proven pattern worth pricing properly rather than avoiding.
What a serious Shopify build involves
Installing a theme and loading products is a weekend. The work that decides whether the site returns its cost happens before any of that.
Strategy comes first, and on a Shopify project strategy means something specific. It means mapping how a customer actually moves from first contact through purchase to repeat order. It means settling the app stack deliberately, because every app is a piece of your commercial operation that somebody else controls and prices. And it means integration mapping: most businesses already know their accounting system and their freight partner, so the real question is exactly how those systems will behave once live orders start flowing through them and who owns each connection.
Design and build then move together inside Shopify's theme architecture rather than a design being signed off in isolation and handed across, because designs approved away from the platform produce compromises nobody agreed to and everybody inherits.
Then the team gets trained on running it themselves, properly, before handover.
Common questions
Is Shopify good for SEO?
Site structure, page speed, metadata and schema are all controllable, and Shopify's hosting is quick out of the box. Parts of the URL structure are fixed and the blog is basic, so businesses competing hard on content should plan for that at strategy stage.
Can I move an existing store onto Shopify?
Yes. Products, customers, historical orders and redirects all migrate, and moves from Magento, WooCommerce and older custom builds are routine. The risk sits in redirect mapping and integration cutover rather than in the product data itself.
Do I need Shopify Plus?
Plus makes sense when a specific requirement demands it: checkout customisation, unlimited B2B catalogues, more than fifteen staff accounts, multiple storefronts or Shopify's launch resourcing. At $2,300 a month, the case should come from something you need on Monday rather than something you might want next year.
How long does a Shopify build take?
A custom store with a considered design, migrated product data and two or three mapped integrations runs somewhere between eight and sixteen weeks from strategy to launch. Migrations carrying an ERP connection or wholesale pricing sit at the longer end. The variable that moves the date is rarely the build. It is how quickly decisions get made on the client side about range, imagery and who owns each integration.
What does a custom Shopify build cost in New Zealand?
A theme-store setup with your branding applied runs a few thousand dollars. A custom-designed store with mapped integrations, migration and team training sits in the tens of thousands, and complex commerce carrying ERP and wholesale goes further again. The figure that matters is what the store returns against it, which is why a brief should open with a commercial target rather than a page count.
Skyrocket builds Webflow and Shopify websites for established New Zealand and Australian businesses. If you are weighing a platform decision and want a straight read on which one fits your commercial model, get in touch.
