Resellers who've only sold on eBay tend to think of Shopify's cost as "the plan price" — $39 a month, done. It isn't. The plan price is the smallest line on the bill. The real cost is the plan plus a per-transaction card rate that changes depending on which plan you're on, plus a penalty you can trip into by accident if you don't use Shopify's own payment processor. Here's the actual math.
The three current plans that matter
Shopify's lineup for a real online store, monthly billing first, annual in parentheses (annual billing runs 25% cheaper, same as eBay Store tiers reward yearly commitment):
- Basic: $39/month ($29/month annual) — Shopify Payments online credit
- card rate: 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
- Grow: $105/month ($79/month annual) — Shopify Payments rate: **2.7% +
- $0.30**.
- Advanced: $399/month ($299/month annual) — Shopify Payments rate:
- 2.5% + $0.30.
(There's also a $5/month Starter plan for selling through social links and DMs without a full storefront, and a custom-priced Plus tier north of $2,300/month for large operations — neither is the comparison most resellers reading this actually need.)
Every tier drops the percentage rate as the subscription price climbs. That trade only pays off past a certain sales volume, which is the part worth running the numbers on before you upgrade.
The trap: the third-party gateway penalty
Here's the one that catches resellers who already have a PayPal Business account and assume they can just plug it in as their processor. If you accept payments through a gateway other than Shopify Payments — PayPal, Authorize.net, Adyen, whatever — Shopify adds its own extra percentage fee on top of whatever that gateway already charges you:
- Basic: +2.0% extra
- Grow: +1.0% extra
- Advanced: +0.6% extra
That's not instead of PayPal's cut — it's in addition to it. On Basic, a processor that already runs roughly 2.9% + $0.30 on its own becomes close to 4.9% + $0.60 once Shopify's penalty stacks on top. There's no scenario where that beats just using Shopify Payments at 2.9% + $0.30 outright, and the gap between "obviously worse" and "actually fine" is exactly one setting in your payment provider settings. Check which processor is active before you assume you're getting a competitive rate.
A worked example
Say you're running a Shopify Basic store doing $3,000 in sales across 100 orders in a month — a $30 average order, paid by card through Shopify Payments.
- Subscription (annual billing): $29.00
- Payment processing: 2.9% × $3,000 = $87.00, plus $0.30 × 100 orders =
- $30.00 → $117.00
- Total cost: $146.00
- Effective rate on total sales: ≈4.9%
Compare that to the same $30 order sold on eBay: 13.6% final value fee plus a $0.40 per-order fee comes to about $4.48 on that one sale — roughly 14.9% of the sale, more than triple Shopify's effective rate on the same ticket. That gap is exactly why the per-order eBay fee stack we've broken down before hurts worse on smaller items than a Shopify order does: eBay's fee is a percentage of that specific sale with no volume discount, while Shopify's subscription is a fixed cost that gets cheaper per order the more you sell.
The flip side: on a slow month with only 10 orders, that same $29 (or $39) subscription is a much bigger share of a much smaller total, and Shopify's "cheap per order" advantage mostly disappears — you're paying a real fixed cost whether orders come in or not, something eBay's percentage-only structure never charges you for a listing that doesn't sell.
When upgrading tiers actually pays for itself
Basic to Grow costs $66 more a month (monthly billing) or $50 more (annual) for a 0.2-point rate drop, 2.9% down to 2.7%. Divide the extra subscription cost by that 0.2%:
- Monthly billing: $66 ÷ 0.002 = $33,000 in monthly card sales
- before the lower rate earns back the higher subscription.
- Annual billing: $50 ÷ 0.002 = $25,000 in monthly card sales.
Grow to Advanced is a bigger jump — $294 more a month (monthly) or $220 more (annual) for another 0.2-point drop, 2.7% to 2.5%:
- Monthly billing: $294 ÷ 0.002 = $147,000 in monthly card sales.
- Annual billing: $220 ÷ 0.002 = $110,000 in monthly card sales.
For nearly every individual reseller running a Shopify store alongside an eBay account, that means Basic is very likely the right tier — you'd need a genuinely large storefront business, not a side channel, before Grow or Advanced pay for themselves on rate savings alone. The extra reporting and staff-account features on the higher tiers might still be worth it to you, but that's a different decision than the fee math.
What this means in practice
- Use Shopify Payments unless you have a specific reason not to. The
- third-party gateway penalty makes almost every alternative processor more
- expensive than Shopify's own rate, not less.
- Don't upgrade tiers for the rate alone until your monthly card sales
- are well into five figures — the break-even math above is the same for
- everyone, it doesn't bend for a smaller store with big ambitions.
- A Shopify order is usually cheaper than the same-size eBay order, on
- a percentage basis, once you're selling consistently — but that comparison
- flips on a slow month, when Shopify's fixed subscription keeps billing you
- and eBay's per-order fee doesn't.
- Annual billing is close to a free 25% discount if you're confident
- you'll keep the store open a year, the same logic as committing to an eBay
- Store subscription instead of paying month to month.
PalmFlow connects to both eBay and Shopify and pulls orders in from each automatically, so the real payout on a Shopify sale and an eBay sale sit side by side instead of living in two different dashboards you have to reconcile by hand. Free plan, 50 items, no card.