Costs · Margins · The business of ecommerce
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.
“How much does Shopify take per sale” has a short answer that is technically true and useless: nothing. Shopify charges no commission on your sales. The useful answer is what one order actually costs once card processing, the fixed per-transaction fee and your amortized subscription are counted, and that number moves a lot depending on order size, plan and payment setup. Here is the math, line by line.
Every Shopify order carries up to three costs.
1. Card processing. With Shopify Payments, a US online order on the Basic plan is charged 2.9% + 30 cents. Grow drops that to 2.7% + 30 cents, Advanced to 2.5% + 30 cents. This money mostly passes through to card networks; every processor charges something similar.
2. The third-party surcharge, if it applies. Skip Shopify Payments and process through PayPal alone, a regional gateway or a high-risk processor, and Shopify adds its own fee on top of whatever that gateway charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. Use Shopify Payments and this line is zero.
3. The subscription, spread across your orders. Basic is $29/month on annual billing ($39 monthly). At 100 orders a month that is 29 cents per order; at 20 orders it is $1.45 per order. This is the only line that gets cheaper with volume.
| Line | Basic, Shopify Payments | Basic, outside gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Card processing (2.9% + $0.30) | $1.75 | paid to your gateway* |
| Shopify surcharge (2% on Basic) | $0 | $1.00 |
| Subscription share (at 100 orders/mo) | $0.29 | $0.29 |
| Total to Shopify + processing | $2.04 (4.1%) | $1.29 + gateway fees |
*An outside gateway typically charges its own 2.9%-range processing on top, so the right-hand column usually totals more, not less.
The takeaway for most stores is blunt: if Shopify Payments is available in your country, the 2% surcharge is a fee you can simply choose not to pay.
The table above is one order at one price. Your store is not. Put in your plan, your average order and your monthly volume, and tick the box if you use Shopify Payments. The calculator returns what Shopify itself takes: the subscription plus, if you are on an outside gateway, its surcharge.
The 30-cent fixed fee is the quiet variable. Here is the same Basic setup (Shopify Payments, subscription amortized at 100 orders/month) across order values:
This is why “what does Shopify take per sale” has no single number. A store selling $12 phone grips and a store selling $180 lamps pay the same published rates and end up with completely different cost structures. If your average order is small, bundling two items into one checkout does more for your margin than any plan change.
Plans cut the percentage but raise the flat fee, so the crossover is pure arithmetic. Grow costs $50/month more than Basic on annual billing and saves 0.2 points of processing, so it breaks even at $25,000 of monthly card sales. If you are on an outside gateway the story changes completely: the surcharge drops a full point between Basic and Grow, and break-even falls to $5,000 a month. Stores below those lines should keep the cheap plan and ignore the upgrade prompts. The per-sale fees are not where Shopify gets expensive; the subscription and app stack are.
Click a column heading to reorder the plans. The subscription figures are on annual billing, and the surcharge column is the extra Shopify adds only if you process through an outside gateway.
| Plan | Subscription / year | Subscription / month | Outside-gateway surcharge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $348 | $29 | 2% |
| Grow | $948 | $79 | 1% |
| Advanced | $3,588 | $299 | 0.6% |
On annual billing, subscription per year is simply the monthly figure times twelve. With Shopify Payments the surcharge column is zero.
Plan prices, the third-party gateway surcharge, and the US card rate were read from Shopify's official pricing page on 15 July 2026, in US dollars for the US market. Subscription figures use annual billing: $29, $79 and $299 per month for Basic, Grow and Advanced, which work out to $348, $948 and $3,588 per year.
The calculator returns only what Shopify itself takes: your subscription, plus its outside-gateway surcharge when Shopify Payments is switched off. It deliberately does not quote a Shopify Payments card rate, because that rate changes by country and card type. For your own market, check Shopify's card rates page. Rates and plan prices change; treat this as accurate to the check date above, not forever.
Not as a commission. If you use Shopify Payments, your only per-sale cost is card processing, which for US online orders is 2.9% + 30 cents on Basic, 2.7% + 30 cents on Grow and 2.5% + 30 cents on Advanced. If you process through an outside gateway instead, Shopify adds its own fee on top of what that gateway charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced.
Because of the fixed 30 cents per transaction. It is 3% of a $10 order but only 0.15% of a $200 order, so the effective rate falls as order value rises. Stores with a low average order value feel processing costs roughly twice as hard as stores selling $100+ items.
Shopify charges a flat subscription plus processing, with no listing fee and no commission. Marketplaces flip that structure: Etsy, for example, charges no subscription but takes a 6.5% transaction fee plus payment processing plus a listing fee on every sale. Low volume favors the marketplace structure, higher volume favors the flat subscription.