“Is Shopify the best platform” has no answer. “Does what Shopify sells match how my business makes money” has a very clear one.
Shopify’s real product isn’t a website. It’s operational simplicity, rented monthly: hosting, security, updates and a checkout that someone else is responsible for. You pay for that in three places, a plan fee, a rate on every card payment, and a surcharge if you use anyone else’s payment gateway. Whether that trade is worth it comes down to one thing: whether your growth comes from selling operations or from content and search.
The short version
Shopify, and the trade you’re making
- You’re renting, not buying. The fee buys hosting, security, updates and a checkout you never have to think about again.
- The plan price is the smallest number. Card rates, app subscriptions and a gateway surcharge decide what you actually pay.
- Ignore any guide still quoting Lite. The plans are Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus, and prices differ by country.
- Shopify wins on operations. WordPress wins when content and search do the selling. That’s the whole decision.
- We’re a Shopify Partner and a WordPress shop. Which is exactly why we’ll talk you out of the wrong one.
What you’re actually renting
Shopify started in 2006 when its founders got fed up trying to sell snowboards on the e-commerce software of the day and built their own. That origin still shapes the product. Shopify is opinionated in a way open-source platforms aren’t, and the opinion is that a merchant’s time belongs on selling, not on servers.
So the fee covers hosting, SSL, PCI compliance, security patching, uptime and a checkout Shopify tunes constantly. Nobody rings you about a plugin conflict at 11pm. That’s a real product, and for a lot of stores it’s worth every cent. Just be clear that it’s a subscription to someone else’s infrastructure, not an asset you own, which is a different arrangement from building a site you keep.
What Shopify costs in Australia right now
These are the Australian prices from Shopify’s own pricing page, checked this month, on yearly billing. Pay month to month instead and the three self-serve plans run about a third higher.
| Paid yearly | Basic | Grow | Advanced | Plus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price per month | $42 | $114 | $431 | from $3,700 |
| Card rate from | 1.75% + 30c | 1.6% + 30c | 1.4% + 30c | 1.2% + 30c |
| Extra fee if you don’t use Shopify Payments | 2% | 1% | 0.6% | 0.2% |
| Shopify’s own description | Solo entrepreneurs | Small teams | Global reach | Complex businesses |
Two things worth noticing. The jump from Grow to Advanced is roughly four times the money for a card rate that improves by 0.2 of a percentage point, so Advanced only pays for itself at serious volume or when you specifically need live carrier shipping rates. And Plus starts near $3,700 a month, which puts the enterprise tier further out of reach than most comparison articles imply.
The line item nobody quotes
Look again at that third row. If you process payments through anyone other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a percentage of every sale on top of whatever your provider already charges. Two percent on the Basic plan is not a rounding error. On $30,000 of monthly revenue it’s $600, which is more than fourteen times the plan fee.
The obvious answer is to use Shopify Payments and the surcharge disappears. The catch is that it’s a lock-in mechanism dressed up as a discount, and it’s worth going in with your eyes open rather than discovering it in month three. Add up all of it before you decide:
Where Shopify genuinely earns its money
The checkout is the strongest argument. Shopify has spent years optimising a page that most businesses would never get around to testing, and it arrives already handling wallets, address autocomplete and abandoned-cart recovery. If you’re going to obsess over one thing in an online store, obsess over what happens after someone clicks add to cart, and Shopify hands you a very good version of that on day one.
Product data is the second argument, and it matters more than it sounds. Because Shopify keeps products in a proper structured catalogue, feeding them into Google Shopping is close to trivial, where a badly structured WooCommerce catalogue can turn feed management into a monthly chore. Inventory, multi-channel selling and physical retail through Shopify POS all sit in the same box.
The app ecosystem is the third. Whatever you need, subscriptions, bundling, loyalty, wholesale pricing, someone has built it and it will install in minutes rather than sprints.
Where it gets in your way
Deep customisation runs into Liquid, Shopify’s templating language. Straightforward changes stay easy, but anything genuinely custom needs a developer who knows the platform, and “we can’t do that on Shopify” is a sentence stores hear more often than they expect.
Content is the bigger limitation. Shopify’s blogging tools are basic next to WordPress, and if your plan is to win customers by ranking for the questions they ask before they buy, you’re choosing the weaker tool for the job that matters most. That’s not a small caveat for anyone building an e-commerce SEO strategy as their main growth channel.
Then there’s app creep. Each app solves a problem for $10 or $20 a month and nobody cancels anything, so a year later the app bill quietly rivals the plan. And the checkout itself, the very thing Shopify does best, is the one page you can’t fully customise until you’re on Plus.
We’re a Shopify Partner, and we still build most sites on WordPress. That’s not a contradiction, it’s the whole point. The stores I’m happiest to put on Shopify are the ones where the hard part is fulfilment, stock and payments. The businesses I steer towards WordPress are the ones whose customers find them by reading something first.
So is it the best platform for you?
Shopify is the right call when the complexity in your business sits in selling: lots of orders, real inventory, in-person as well as online, and a team who need to run it without a developer on speed dial. It’s the wrong call when your site is mostly content with a shop attached, when you need unusual functionality, or when owning the whole thing matters more than never patching a server.
WooCommerce is the honest alternative there, and the head-to-head deserves more room than a paragraph, so we gave it a full article: Shopify vs WordPress. The other two names you’ll be handed are worth a sentence each. Magento is now split between Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce, both very much alive but both developer-heavy enough that the licence is rarely the real cost. BigCommerce renamed its plans in mid-2026 and added a fee for using outside payment providers, which tells you its old “no transaction fees” pitch has quietly moved on.
One more thing that has nothing to do with the platform: whichever you pick, the store still has to be worth landing on. Plenty of businesses spend months choosing and then publish a template with the demo photos still in it, which is a design problem no platform solves for you. If budget is the sticking point, what a website actually costs is a more useful thing to read than another platform comparison.
Before you commit
Pick the platform that fits how you sell.
We build on Shopify and WordPress, so the recommendation follows your business model rather than our preferences. Tell us how the money comes in and we’ll tell you which one we’d use.
The bottom line: Shopify is excellent at the parts of e-commerce that involve taking money and moving stock, and merely adequate at the parts that involve being found. Work out which of those is your growth engine, and the platform question answers itself.
Shopify FAQs
How much does Shopify cost in Australia?
On yearly billing, Basic is $42 a month, Grow is $114, Advanced is $431 and Plus starts around $3,700. Paying month to month costs roughly a third more on the three self-serve plans. Card processing is charged separately, starting at 1.75% plus 30c on Basic and falling as you move up.
Does Shopify charge transaction fees?
Only if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments. That surcharge is 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, and it sits on top of what your provider already charges. Use Shopify Payments and it doesn’t apply.
Is Shopify better than WooCommerce?
For selling operations, usually yes. For content, blogging and search, usually no. Shopify gives you a hosted system with a very strong checkout, WooCommerce gives you ownership and far better publishing tools at the cost of maintaining it yourself.
Is Shopify good for SEO?
It’s competent rather than exceptional. You get editable titles, meta descriptions, URL handles and an automatic sitemap, which covers the basics well. The limits show up in URL structure and in blogging tools that are noticeably thinner than WordPress, so content-led stores feel the ceiling first.
Is Shopify worth it for a small business?
It’s worth it when your time is better spent selling than maintaining a website, and when you’d rather pay a predictable subscription than manage hosting and updates. It’s poor value when you’re paying for a plan and a stack of apps to run a handful of orders a month.