Race the plans.
Crown the cheapest.
Basic, Shopify, Advanced, same orders, three monthly bills. See which plan actually costs you least at your volume, and what a third-party gateway adds on top.
Stacked bars show where each monthly bill goes. US online card pricing, Jun 2026. Verify current rates on shopify.com.
A higher monthly plan buys a lower card rate. The crossover depends entirely on your volume.
Fixed each month: $39, $105, or $399. It is the part of the bar that never changes with sales, the entry price for a lower rate.
The card rate on every order. Advanced shaves it to 2.5%, so at high volume its bigger plan fee is repaid many times over.
Use a third-party gateway and Shopify adds a transaction fee on top (0.5 to 2%). Shopify Payments waives it entirely, the red band vanishes.
This runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere. Two costs make up your Shopify bill: the monthly plan fee and payment processing. When you use Shopify Payments, card processing runs at your plan’s online rate and the third-party transaction fee is zero. When you bring an outside gateway, you pay that gateway’s own processing rate AND a separate Shopify transaction fee on every order, which is the line most merchants forget. That fee falls as you move up plans, which is why the right plan depends on your order volume, not just the sticker price.
Trying to decide whether a higher plan or a different gateway actually saves money? That is the kind of math we run for clients every week. We help Shopify brands tighten the economics of their store, from plan fit and payment setup to a checkout that converts. Talk to us.
We sweat the unglamorous economics too.
Victoria Garland Creative is a Shopify-only studio. Plan choice, payment setup, and checkout all change what you actually keep. We make sure they pull the same direction.