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.
Most people typing “shopify fees uk” expect one number, a flat monthly cost that settles the question. That is not what the UK pricing page shows. It shows four separate tiers, each with its own monthly figure and its own card rate, plus a trial offer that temporarily replaces all of them, plus a theme cost that sits entirely outside the platform fee and that most searches never separate out. The full picture needs both halves: what Shopify charges to run the store, and what a theme costs to build it on.
Shopify’s UK pricing page, loaded 2026-09-05, lists Basic at £19/mo for solo entrepreneurs, Grow at £49/mo for small teams, Advanced at £259/mo for global reach, and Plus starting from £1,800/mo for complex businesses. Each tier’s card rate is listed separately: Basic starts from 2% plus 25p GBP, and the higher tiers carry their own rate lines down to 25p GBP as the published copy shows. A new signup can start selling with a 3-day free trial and then pay £1/month for 3 months before the listed price takes over, which matters for the first few months of a budget far more than for the ongoing one. None of these four figures include hosting a theme, staff account limits beyond what each tier states, or the credit programs mentioned on the page.
| Plan | Monthly price | Card rate line (as published) |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | £19/mo | from 2% + 25p GBP |
| Grow | £49/mo | from 2% + 25p GBP (Grow line references Everything in Basic) |
| Advanced | £259/mo | 7% + 25p GBP (advanced tier line) |
| Plus | from £1,800/mo | Everything in Advanced |
Across the aggregate ranking of 329 themes, the median price is $300 with a range running from $100 to $500. That median sits roughly in the middle of the range, so a theme priced at $300 is not an outlier in either direction. Quality signals sit alongside price: the average rating across 308 rated themes is 4.53 out of 5, and the median number of reviews behind that rating is 23. None of this is billed by Shopify itself; it is a separate purchase or subscription depending on the theme vendor, and it stacks on top of whichever plan tier a merchant picks.
Method: the Core Web Vitals figures here come from CrUX, the Chrome User Experience Report, for July 2026, which measures actual visits to live stores rather than a single lab run against a demo page. On mobile, the median share of a store’s visits that pass all Core Web Vitals is 85.5%, calculated across 247 themes with enough recorded data. The best-performing theme on the market reaches 98.6% and the worst reaches 46.1%, a spread wide enough that theme choice alone appears to move real-world load experience by more than fifty percentage points. On desktop the median climbs slightly to 86.2% across 199 themes, with a best of 99.2% and a worst of 30.3%. A merchant weighing a $300 theme against a $500 one should treat this spread as more decision-relevant than the price gap itself, since a theme priced near the median can still land anywhere in that performance range.
A weak keyword match is not the same as a feature. In Dawn, at commit 258f00f from 2026-08-10, the word “table” turns up in 38 of the theme’s 351 files, but every one of those hits lives in README.md, assets/base.css, assets/component-card.css, or assets/component-cart-drawer.css. None of those files define a merchant-facing settings section; they are documentation and stylesheets, not a configurable fee table. In Horizon, at commit 8b42ace from 2026-08-31, “table” appears in 27 of 484 files, confined to assets/base.css, assets/component-cart-items.js, assets/morph.js, and assets/popover-polyfill.js. Again, no dedicated settings section exists. So a merchant looking for a theme editor toggle that displays a fee breakdown or pricing table on the storefront will not find one built into either theme as measured; that functionality, if wanted, has to come from an app or custom code, not from a setting already sitting in the file.
A merchant reading only the plan page will underprice the store, because the theme is a separate line the pricing page never mentions. Check the plan tier against actual transaction volume and staff needs first, then weigh a theme’s price against its measured Core Web Vitals pass rate rather than against its listing price alone.
The UK pricing page lists four tiers: Basic at £19/mo for solo entrepreneurs, Grow at £49/mo for small teams, Advanced at £259/mo for global reach, and Plus starting from £1,800/mo for complex businesses. Each tier also carries a card rate, starting from 2% plus 25p GBP on Basic and moving to 25p GBP on higher tiers per the published rate lines. New signups can start with a 3-day free trial then pay £1/month for 3 months before the listed monthly price applies. None of these numbers include a theme purchase, which is billed separately.
Across 329 themes in the aggregate market ranking the median price is $300 with a range of $100 to $500, so a theme at the median sits in the middle of what the market charges, not at an extreme. The average rating across 308 rated themes is 4.53 out of 5 with a median of 23 reviews, which gives a rough sense of how tested a given theme is before it reaches a storefront doing real traffic. Whether it is worth the cost depends on what the store needs from performance and layout, not on the price alone.
Real visitor data from CrUX for July 2026 shows a median of 85.5% of mobile visits passing all Core Web Vitals across 247 themes with enough data, with the best theme on the market at 98.6% and the worst at 46.1%. On desktop the median is 86.2% across 199 themes, with a best of 99.2% and a worst of 30.3%. This is field data from actual store visitors, not a lab test run once against a demo page, so it reflects what shoppers experience on real connections and real devices.
No. In Dawn, checked at commit 258f00f from 2026-08-10, the word 'table' appears in 38 of 351 files but only inside README.md, assets/base.css, assets/component-card.css, and assets/component-cart-drawer.css, none of which define a merchant-facing settings section for fees or pricing tables. In Horizon, checked at commit 8b42ace from 2026-08-31, 'table' appears in 27 of 484 files, living in assets/base.css, assets/component-cart-items.js, assets/morph.js, and assets/popover-polyfill.js, again with no dedicated settings section. Anyone hunting through theme editor settings for a built-in fee table in either theme will not find one; it does not exist in the code as measured.
The measured categories in this market are Art, Auto, Bags, Beauty, Clothing, Electronics, Food and drink, Home, Jewelry & Access., Kids, Pets, Sports, and Toys, and none of them is priced or reported separately in the facts gathered here. The $300 median and $100 to $500 range apply across the 329-theme aggregate, not per category. A merchant should treat the category list as a way to scope which themes to compare, not as a source of a different price figure.