Costs · Margins · The business of ecommerce
Merchants search for a single fixed monthly number but Shopify's UK pricing page shows tiered plans from £19 to £1,800 a month plus per-transaction card rates, and the theme a store runs on is a separate cost with its own median of $300 that this article prices out alongside the plans.
Merchants search for a single all-in Shopify fee for the Australian market but the pricing page names four plan tiers with different monthly rates and a promotional entry rate, and no theme, however well built, changes what those tiers cost.
Merchants search 'shopify app costs per month' expecting a subscription calculator, but the real savings sit inside theme code that already ships settings apps charge monthly to duplicate, and comparing Dawn's featured-product section against Horizon's shows exactly which jobs a theme can and cannot do alone.
We pulled the price tag off 20 well-known Theme Store listings, first-party and third-party, and the sample says: free or roughly $300-500, with surprisingly little in between.
Forget the spreadsheet templates with 40 tabs. Unit economics is one question: after one order pays its own bills, what is left? Here is the math on a single $60 order, every line explained.
Most 'average margin by niche' articles quote each other in a circle. We went to the three sources that actually publish numbers: NYU Stern's sector dataset, SEC annual reports, and Shopify's own rule of thumb.
Seven steps from nothing to first order, priced at each stage from official rate sheets. The build itself now costs $14 to $400; everything expensive comes after launch.