Shopify is the shortest path from an idea to a shop that takes money. It is also a platform you rent rather than own, and the monthly plan is the smaller half of what you will actually pay. Everything we know about both halves lives here.
Our position, in one paragraph
If you want to be selling this month and you would rather spend your attention on products and customers than on hosting, updates and payment plumbing, Shopify is very hard to beat and we say so plainly. What you are buying is a checkout that converts without any work from you, and an app for every gap. What you are giving up is control: you cannot take the store with you, the content tools are an afterthought, and there is an extra cut on every order unless you use Shopify’s own payments.
Who should walk away
Three cases come up often enough to name. If content is your acquisition channel — if the plan is to rank for what you write and sell on the back of it — the blogging tools will fight you every week. If you sell a handful of high-value items a month, the fixed monthly cost is hard to justify against a simpler checkout. And if owning your data end to end is a requirement rather than a preference, a hosted platform is the wrong shape of answer. Each of those has a better option, and the comparisons above name it.
How the numbers on these pages are produced
Prices come from a live account rather than the pricing page, because the two do not always agree once currency and regional pricing are involved. Each page carries the date its figures were last checked. When a figure is out of date, it is a bug and we would like to hear about it.
Start your free trialSponsored link
We earn a commission if you sign up through the links on this page. We pay for every tool we test and no brand sees a draft before it goes live. How this site makes money.