Shopify lets you track your business’s performance in a variety of ways, including by measuring your tracked sales and achieved goals. Source: shopify.com
Shopify Hidden Costs
Shopify’s pricing is pretty transparent but, as ever, there are some extra costs and little technicalities that are worth being aware of.
Shopify Payments rates
The most important thing to be aware of with Shopify is its in-house payment processing — Shopify Payments.
If you choose to use Shopify Payments as your chosen payments processor, you’ll pay 2.9% + 30¢ for online credit card transactions and 2.7% for in-person transactions on the Basic Shopify plan — these fees drop slightly as you start using more expensive plans.
However, if you choose to use a different payment processor — Square or Stripe, for example — you will have to pay 2% of the cost of every transaction to Shopifyplusthe credit card and in-person processing rates of your chosen provider. This drops to 1% with the Shopify plan and 0.5% with the Advanced plan.
If you’re not careful, these costs could start mounting up and eating into your profit margins. If you’re committed to Shopify, it’s worth choosing Shopify Payments but, if you’re not sure, we’d recommend looking into some other ecommerce platforms.
Premium themes cost extra
Shopify isn’t known for creating beautiful websites — check out Squarespace for those — but it does let you build clean, easily navigable ecommerce-specific websites.
However, it only offers ten free website themes. This means that, while you’ll be able to create a decent online store, there’s a chance it will end up looking like thousands of other Shopify-based stores.
But Shopify does offer more than 60 premium themes for your delectation. These paid themes cost between $140 and $180 — no small investment.
Paid Shopify apps
Shopify runs an app store that will let you add integrations and features to your site that might not be offered in the base Shopify platform.
Email marketing integrations, dropshipping apps, and landing page builders are all available to be added to your site but you might also have to pay extra. For example, the PageFly Landing Page Builder app lets you build responsive, SEO-friendly landing pages for your site.
However, while it offers a free plan, PageFly also has three pricing plans that start from $19 per month. You’ll be able to build a single page with the free version but extra pages will cost more.
Custom domain names
By default, all Shopify stores come with .myshopify.com at the end of their URL. This, obviously, doesn’t look very professional.
If you want, Shopify will let you buy a custom domain from $11. It will last you for one year and that domain name is yours to keep forever, even if you leave Shopify. If you already have a domain name purchased from another company, you can import it into a Shopify store easily.
Learn what else you get in the provider’s web building packages in our Shopify review.
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