Shopify Fees Explained (2025)

Fee Overview

Shopify charges sellers in three ways: a monthly plan fee, a payment processing fee on every sale, and — if you use a third-party payment gateway — an additional transaction fee. Most sellers are surprised to find that the payment processing fee alone can eat 3–5% of every sale before they see any money.

Here is a simple way to think about it: every time someone buys from your store, Shopify takes a cut from two places. First, the card processor takes a percentage plus a fixed amount. Second, if you are not using Shopify Payments, Shopify charges an extra transaction fee on top of that. Your monthly plan cost is separate and does not scale with sales.

Shopify Plan Costs

Shopify offers four main plans in 2025. Annual billing saves you about 25% compared to paying month to month.

Most solo sellers start on Basic. The upgrade to the Shopify plan makes sense when your transaction fee savings exceed the plan cost difference — typically around 50-80 orders per month at an average order value of $40-60.

Payment Processing Fees

Every Shopify plan includes a built-in payment processing rate. This is the fee charged each time a customer pays with a credit or debit card.

The fixed $0.30 fee matters more on low-price items. If you sell a $5 item, that $0.30 alone is 6% of the sale price before the percentage rate is even applied.

Transaction Fees (Third-Party Gateways)

If you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments — such as Stripe, PayPal, or Square — Shopify charges an extra transaction fee on top of the payment processing fee. This fee goes directly to Shopify, not your payment provider.

How to Calculate Your Real Profit

Here is the formula to find your net profit per sale:

• Start with your sell price
• Subtract your cost of goods (what you paid for the product)
• Subtract your shipping cost (what you pay to ship it)
• Subtract the card processing fee (sell price x card rate + $0.30)
• Subtract the transaction fee if using a third-party gateway
• Subtract a share of your monthly plan cost (plan cost / number of sales)

What remains is your true profit per sale. Most sellers are surprised to find this is 10-20% lower than they estimated before accounting for all fees.

The easiest way to run this calculation for your exact plan, gateway, and product pricing is to use the profit calculator above — it handles all the math automatically.