Costs · Margins · The business of ecommerce
What things really cost and what they return — broken down line by line, with sources.
Every email platform advertises a starting price for a list you will outgrow in months. We priced the tier that matters, 5,000 contacts, and the spread runs $75 to $100 a month for very different products.
Etsy charges nothing monthly and takes a cut of everything; Shopify charges monthly and takes almost nothing per sale. We priced one identical order on both and found the crossover point.
Take a single $50 order and follow the money: card processing, the fixed 30 cents, the amortized subscription, and the surcharge that only hits stores on outside gateways.
Four plans, two billing modes, a third-party payment surcharge that quietly quadruples between tiers: the full price sheet, read line by line from Shopify's own page.
Every published price on one page: plans, domain, theme, apps and processing, assembled into three realistic budgets, from a $40-a-month lean start to a serious launch.
We pulled the published plan prices of ten of the most-installed Shopify apps. A modest four-app stack runs about $88 a month, which is more per year than three mid-range paid themes.