The wrong answer to this question
Shopify is on this page because it takes a large share of the traffic for "best website builder", and it should not.
It is a commerce platform with a site attached. For a portfolio, a brochure site or a blog, every other platform in our comparison does the job better and for less money. It scores 8.1 under how we rate, above three of our four picks, and it sits in the also-considered list anyway, because scoring well is not the same as being what somebody asked for.
If you are selling physical products, skip the next two sections. They are for the other half of the people who land here.
What twelve months costs before a single sale
Basic is $29 a month billed yearly, or $348 for the year. Billed monthly it is $39. Grow is $948 and Advanced is $3588.
No domain is included at any tier.
That makes Basic the most expensive twelve months on this page by a distance: seven times WordPress.com at $48 and well above Wix at $204, and you have not sold anything yet.
The introductory offer is three days free, then $1 a month for three months. That is a discount, and it is worth naming as one, because three days is not a trial in any useful sense. Squarespace and Hostinger both give you fourteen.
Two kinds of Shopify fee, and only one is optional
These get confused constantly, including by pages that ought to know better.
Card processing. On Basic, 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on a standard online sale. That falls to 2.7 on Grow and 2.5 on Advanced. Everybody pays this, everywhere, in some form.
The third-party transaction fee. If you take payment through anything other than Shopify Payments, Shopify charges you a further 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Grow and 0.6 percent on Advanced. This is a fee for not using Shopify's own processor, and it is the one to understand before you commit.
Here is the number that decides the plan, and it is far higher than this category usually claims. Grow costs six hundred dollars a year more than Basic and saves 0.2 points of card rate, so it overtakes Basic at roughly twenty five thousand dollars a month in online sales. Advanced at $3588 against $348 saves 0.4 points, so it overtakes at roughly sixty seven thousand a month.
Below those figures the cheap plan is the right plan, and any page telling a five thousand a month store to upgrade has not done the arithmetic.
Worth comparing against the builders while you are here. Hostinger charges no transaction fee of its own on ecommerce. Wix charges none either. Squarespace charges two percent at its entry tier and nothing from Core.
Where it beats every builder here
At the thing it is for, comprehensively.
Inventory, orders, shipping, taxes, multiple sales channels, abandoned carts and a checkout engineered for load rather than for looks. Themes swap without touching the catalogue, which Wix cannot manage at all. Theme files download and product data exports to CSV, so unlike most of this page you are not locked in. And the app store is the deepest in the comparison by a distance, though a good many of those apps carry their own monthly fees, which is a second budget nobody mentions.
It scores highest of the seven on scalability for a reason. Every other platform here has a ceiling you can see from the entry plan. This one does not.
Who should buy it
Buy Shopify if your site exists to sell physical products, and buy Basic until your fee bill tells you to move up, which it will do clearly.
Do not buy it for a website. If you want a site that also sells a few things, Squarespace, Wix and Hostinger all do that at a fraction of the money, and the comparison only tips once selling is the point of the site rather than a feature of it.
And do not treat the $1 offer as a trial. Three days is enough to look at the dashboard and not enough to build a store.
Prices, card rates and transaction fees on this page were read from the vendor pricing page on .
