You're ready to launch your store — or maybe you're fed up with your current platform eating into your margins — and you sit down to compare pricing pages. Thirty minutes later you have twelve browser tabs open, a headache, and no clearer idea of what you'll actually pay each month.
Sound familiar? Platform pricing pages are designed to show the lowest possible number in the biggest possible font. The real cost lives in the footnotes: transaction fees, payment gateway surcharges, app subscriptions, and staff-account limits. This e-commerce platform pricing breakdown cuts through that noise so you can make a decision based on real numbers, not marketing math.
Let's walk through the major cost categories, compare the biggest platforms side by side, and figure out which tier actually makes sense for where your store is right now.
Why Platform Pricing Is Trickier Than It Looks
Every platform has a base subscription fee. That's the number they advertise. But for most stores doing more than a few thousand dollars a month, the base fee is almost never the biggest line item.
Here's a quick example. Suppose you run a candle store doing $8,000 a month in revenue. On a mid-tier Shopify plan (currently $79/month), you pay 1% on every transaction if you use a third-party payment processor instead of Shopify Payments. That's $80/month in transaction fees alone — more than the plan itself. Add two or three apps (an email pop-up, a review widget, a bundle builder) at an average of $20–$30 each, and your real monthly cost is closer to $220–$250, not $79.
None of that is hidden in a malicious way. It's just easy to miss when you're focused on the headline number.
The Four Cost Buckets You Need to Track
Before we get into platform specifics, bookmark these four buckets. Every dollar you spend on your store falls into one of them.
1. Subscription fee — the flat monthly (or annual) charge just to keep the lights on.
2. Transaction fee — a percentage the platform takes from each sale, separate from payment processing. Not every platform charges this, but the ones that do can take 0.5–2% of your gross revenue.
3. Payment processing fee — what your payment gateway (Stripe, PayPal, the platform's own processor) charges per transaction. Industry standard is roughly 2.9% + $0.30 for card payments in the US, though volume discounts kick in above $80K/month on some processors.
4. App and plugin costs — the ecosystem tax. Platforms with thinner native feature sets push you toward paid apps faster. Budget $50–$150/month for a basic app stack once you're past the startup phase.
Keep those buckets in mind as we go through the platforms.
Shopify Pricing: Flexible but Layered
Shopify is the default choice for a lot of new sellers, and the pricing reflects how much market share they have — it's confident.
- Basic: $39/month (annual) — 2% transaction fee with third-party gateways, 2.9% + $0.30 card processing via Shopify Payments, 2 staff accounts.
- Shopify: $105/month (annual) — 1% transaction fee, 2.6% + $0.30 processing, 5 staff accounts.
- Advanced: $399/month (annual) — 0.5% transaction fee, 2.4% + $0.30 processing, 15 staff accounts.
The transaction fee is the trap. If you're moving $20,000/month through a third-party processor on the Basic plan, you're paying $400/month in transaction fees on top of your $39 subscription. Jumping to the Shopify plan ($105) drops that to $200 in transaction fees — a net saving of $134/month just from the upgrade.
Do that math for your own revenue before you assume the cheapest plan is the cheapest option.
Shopify's app store is enormous (8,000+ apps), which is great for flexibility but means you'll feel the pull of paid apps early. A realistic mid-stage stack — email marketing, reviews, upsells, and a loyalty program — can run $100–$200/month in apps alone.
WooCommerce Pricing: Low Floor, Variable Ceiling
WooCommerce is free to install on WordPress, which makes it genuinely attractive if you already have a hosting setup. But "free" needs a few asterisks.
- Hosting: $15–$50/month for managed WordPress hosting (Kinsta, WP Engine, Cloudways) that can handle store traffic without sweating.
- Domain + SSL: ~$15–$20/year combined if not included in your host plan.
- WooCommerce extensions: The core plugin is free, but features like subscriptions ($279/year), bookings ($249/year), or advanced shipping rules ($99/year) are paid add-ons from the official store.
- Payment processing: No platform transaction fee — you pay only your gateway's rate (2.9% + $0.30 with Stripe, for example).
For a lean store with simple needs, WooCommerce can run $25–$40/month all-in. For a store with subscriptions, complex shipping, and a loyalty program, you could easily be at $150–$250/month once extensions and hosting stack up.
The hidden cost here is time. WooCommerce requires more active maintenance — plugin updates, security patches, occasional conflicts between extensions. If your time is worth $50/hour, factor in 2–4 hours a month of upkeep. If you're considering this route, this guide on WooCommerce setup for beginners can help you get started.
BigCommerce Pricing: Transparent but Revenue-Gated
BigCommerce takes a different approach: no transaction fees at all, but it gates you into higher plans based on annual sales volume.
- Standard: $39/month (annual) — up to $50K annual sales, no transaction fee.
- Plus: $105/month (annual) — up to $180K annual sales.
- Pro: $399/month (annual) — up to $400K annual sales, then $150/month per additional $200K.
If you hit the sales ceiling on your plan, BigCommerce automatically bumps you to the next tier. That's predictable, which some operators love, but it can feel like a tax on success if you're scaling fast.
The no-transaction-fee structure is genuinely valuable. A store doing $15,000/month saves $150–$300/month compared to Shopify Basic or mid-tier plans with third-party gateways. BigCommerce also includes more native features out of the box (faceted search, multi-currency, abandoned cart recovery on Plus+), which trims your app bill.
Realistic all-in cost for a $10K/month store: $105–$180/month.
Squarespace Commerce Pricing: Simple Stores, Simple Pricing
If your store is more of a side project — a ceramics shop, a print-on-demand brand, a local service with a few products — Squarespace Commerce is worth a look.
- Basic Commerce: $36/month (annual) — 0% transaction fee, basic e-commerce features.
- Advanced Commerce: $65/month (annual) — abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, advanced shipping.
Squarespace's payment processing runs through Stripe or PayPal at standard rates. The platform's app ecosystem is much smaller than Shopify's, so you'll hit feature walls faster as you grow, but for stores under $5K/month the simplicity is a real asset.
Expect to pay $36–$80/month all-in for a simple store. Don't expect to scale past six figures here without feeling constrained.
How to Pick the Right Plan for Your Stage
Here's a quick framework based on where you are right now:
Under $2K/month revenue: Squarespace Basic Commerce or WooCommerce on budget hosting. Keep costs under $40/month. You need to validate the business, not optimize the stack.
$2K–$10K/month: Shopify Basic or BigCommerce Standard. Run the transaction-fee math for your specific gateway situation. If you're on Shopify and using a third-party processor, check whether upgrading to the Shopify plan pays for itself — it often does above $5K/month.
$10K–$50K/month: BigCommerce Plus or Shopify (mid-tier). At this volume, transaction fees and processing rate differences are worth negotiating. Some processors offer custom rates above $10K/month — ask.
Above $50K/month: You're probably already looking at enterprise tiers or headless setups. The platform fee becomes a smaller percentage of revenue, but the opportunity cost of a clunky checkout or a slow site is real money. Prioritize performance and conversion rate over subscription cost.
Ask yourself this: what's the cost of a 1% improvement in conversion rate at your current traffic? That number usually dwarfs any monthly platform fee difference.
Three Things You Can Do Today
You don't need to overhaul everything at once. Here are three concrete moves that take under an hour each:
1. Run your real monthly cost. Add up your current subscription, any transaction fees (check your platform's billing dashboard — it's usually itemized), payment processing fees, and active app subscriptions. Most store owners are surprised to find the total is 30–50% higher than they thought.
2. Check the transaction-fee math. If you're on Shopify Basic and using a third-party payment processor, open a spreadsheet and calculate whether upgrading to the Shopify plan saves you money at your current revenue. The break-even point is usually around $5,000–$8,000/month in sales.
3. Audit your app stack. Log into your platform's app section and list every paid app. Cancel anything you haven't actively used in the last 30 days. A lot of stores are paying for apps installed during a late-night optimization session that never got turned off. Even trimming $30–$60/month is real money over a year.
You've Got This
Platform pricing feels overwhelming until you break it into those four buckets — subscription, transaction fees, processing fees, and apps. Once you see them separately, the comparison becomes a spreadsheet problem, not a mystery.
The right platform isn't the cheapest one on paper. It's the one where your all-in monthly cost is predictable, your feature needs are met without a pile of add-ons, and you're not spending Saturday afternoons on maintenance you didn't sign up for.
Your next step: spend 20 minutes pulling your actual numbers from last month's billing. Write them down. Then come back and compare them against the tiers above. You might find you're already on the right plan — or you might find an easy switch that saves you $100/month starting now.
Either way, you'll know. And knowing is the whole point.