Shopify Plans Compared: Basic to Plus — Which to Choose

Most stores pick the wrong plan because they compare prices instead of features

What Are Shopify Plans?

Five tiers. One platform.

Shopify plans are subscription tiers that determine which features, staff accounts, analytics, and checkout capabilities your store can access. In 2026, Shopify offers Starter ($5/month), Basic ($39/month), Shopify ($105/month), Advanced ($399/month), and Plus (from $2,300/month). Each plan unlocks progressively lower transaction fees, more staff seats, and advanced selling tools — according to Shopify's official pricing page.

A Shopify plan is not just a price point. It is a feature gate. The plan you choose determines whether you can run professional reports, calculate shipping at checkout, sell in multiple currencies, or customise your checkout flow.

Most store owners compare plans by monthly cost alone. That is like choosing a car by the sticker price without checking if it has air conditioning. The features you unlock — or the ones you miss — shape how your store operates day to day.

We have migrated and audited over 80 Shopify stores across Malaysia and Singapore. The pattern is consistent: stores pick the cheapest plan, then spend months working around limitations that the next tier would have solved on day one.

Here is what actually matters in each plan.

Which Shopify Plan Features Matter Most?

Staff accounts and reports separate the tiers.

The features that differ most between Shopify plans are staff accounts (2 to unlimited), analytics depth (basic to custom reports), shipping rate calculations (flat vs carrier-calculated), and checkout customisation (none to full Checkout Extensibility on Plus). Shopify's plan comparison page confirms that professional reporting alone — available from the Shopify plan upward — is the number-one reason merchants upgrade from Basic.

Not every feature difference matters equally. Some are cosmetic. Others change how you run your business.

Here is the full side-by-side breakdown of every feature that actually impacts operations:

Complete Feature Comparison Table

Feature	Starter	Basic	Shopify	Advanced	Plus
Monthly price	$5	$39	$105	$399	$2,300+
Annual price (per month)	$5	$29	$79	$299	$2,300
Online store	No (link page only)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Staff accounts	1	2	5	15	Unlimited
Inventory locations	2	10	10	10	200
Online credit card rate	5% + 30¢	2.9% + 30¢	2.7% + 30¢	2.5% + 30¢	2.15% + 30¢
3rd-party transaction fee	5%	2%	1%	0.6%	0% (Shopify Payments)
Basic analytics	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Professional reports	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Custom report builder	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Calculated shipping rates	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Duties & import taxes	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Checkout customisation	No	No	No	No	Yes (Checkout Extensibility)
Shopify Flow automation	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Discount code limit	N/A	25,000	25,000	25,000	Unlimited
Markets (international)	1	3	3	3	50
POS Lite	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Abandoned cart recovery	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Gift cards	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Source: Shopify.com/pricing, verified July 2026. Prices in USD.

Three features stand out as genuine upgrade triggers. Professional reports let you see where revenue comes from. Calculated shipping rates let you show exact carrier prices at checkout. Checkout customisation lets you control the most important page on your site.

Everything else is incremental.

Is Shopify Starter a Real Ecommerce Plan?

No. Starter is a social selling tool.

Shopify Starter at $5/month does not include an online store. It provides a Linkpop page, shareable product links, and checkout — designed for creators selling through Instagram, TikTok, or WhatsApp. Shopify reports that Starter merchants process an average of $800/month in sales, making it suitable only for testing product-market fit before investing in a full store.

Starter gives you a checkout. That is it. No storefront. No collections. No custom pages. No blog. No SEO.

You get a link-in-bio page that can process payments. Think of it as Shopify's version of Gumroad — functional, but not a store.

Starter makes sense if you are:

• Testing whether a product sells before building a store
• Selling 1-3 products exclusively through social media DMs
• A content creator adding a merch link to your bio

Starter does not make sense if you:

• Want customers to browse products on your own domain
• Need any kind of brand experience
• Plan to rank in search engines

The 5% credit card rate is punishing at scale. Sell RM10,000/month and you lose RM500 to card fees — more than the cost of upgrading to Basic. If you are selling enough to care about fees, you have outgrown Starter.

What Can You Do on Shopify Basic That You Cannot Do on Starter?

Basic is where real ecommerce begins.

Shopify Basic ($39/month) gives you a full online store with collections, custom pages, discount codes, abandoned cart recovery, and 2 staff accounts. It supports up to 10 inventory locations and includes Shopify POS Lite for in-person selling. According to Shopify, approximately 80% of new merchants start on Basic — and most operate on it for 12-18 months before upgrading.

The jump from Starter to Basic is the biggest functional leap in Shopify's lineup. You go from "link page with checkout" to "fully operational ecommerce store."

On Basic, you get:

• Full online storefront with themes, collections, and custom pages
• Abandoned cart recovery — automated emails to shoppers who left without buying
• Discount codes — up to 25,000 active codes
• Gift cards — sell and redeem digital gift cards
• Shopify POS Lite — sell in person at markets, pop-ups, or retail
• Up to 10 inventory locations — track stock across warehouses or stores
• Free SSL certificate — HTTPS on your custom domain
• Manual order creation — take phone or wholesale orders

What Basic does not give you: professional reports, Shopify Flow automation, calculated shipping rates at checkout, or more than 2 staff accounts.

For a store doing under RM35,000/month (~$7,500 USD), Basic covers everything you need. The limitations only pinch when your team grows or your operations become complex enough to require better data.

The Two Staff Account Limit

This is the first wall most growing stores hit. Two staff accounts means the store owner plus one employee. The moment you hire a third person who needs backend access — a customer service rep, a warehouse picker, a marketing assistant — you either share logins (security risk) or upgrade.

We see this with Shopify stores in Malaysia regularly. The store launches with the founder running everything. Six months later, there are three people touching the backend. Shared logins lead to mistakes, no audit trail, and the inevitable "who deleted that product?" conversation.

When Does the Shopify Plan Make More Sense Than Basic?

When your team grows past two people or you need real reports.

The Shopify plan ($105/month) becomes the better choice when you need more than 2 staff accounts, require professional-level analytics, or want Shopify Flow automation for repetitive tasks. WebMedic's data across 40+ Malaysian stores shows that merchants typically upgrade at $7,500-$10,000/month in revenue — driven more by operational needs than fee savings alone.

The fee savings between Basic and Shopify are modest: 0.2% on credit card rates and 1% on third-party gateway fees. On $7,500/month in revenue, that saves roughly $90/month — just enough to offset the $66 higher subscription.

But fees are not why most stores upgrade. They upgrade because they need:

Professional Reports

Basic gives you a dashboard with total sales, sessions, and returning customer rate. The Shopify plan gives you reports that show sales by product, by traffic source, by customer cohort, and by geography over custom date ranges.

The difference matters when you are trying to answer questions like:

• Which products actually drive profit (not just revenue)?
• Which marketing channel brings buyers, not just browsers?
• Are customers from Google Ads coming back for a second purchase?

Without professional reports, you are guessing.

Shopify Flow

Shopify Flow is a visual automation builder. It automates repetitive tasks:

• Tag customers based on order value or purchase frequency
• Send Slack notifications when inventory drops below a threshold
• Auto-publish products when they are approved
• Flag high-risk orders for manual review

Flow saves 5-10 hours per week for stores processing 100+ orders per month. That operational time saving alone justifies the plan upgrade for most growing brands.

Five Staff Accounts

Five seats cover the typical growing team: founder, operations manager, customer service, marketing, and a warehouse or fulfilment role. No more shared logins.

Does this sound like your store? Find out where you're leaking revenue — take the free Revenue Score. 3 minutes. Free. No pitch.

What Does Shopify Advanced Unlock That the Shopify Plan Does Not?

Carrier-calculated shipping and custom reports.

Shopify Advanced ($399/month) adds third-party carrier-calculated shipping rates at checkout, duty and import tax collection for international orders, a custom report builder, and 15 staff accounts. The plan is designed for stores shipping internationally or managing complex multi-location fulfilment. Shopify's documentation confirms that calculated shipping rates reduce cart abandonment by 18% for stores with variable shipping costs.

The $294/month jump from Shopify to Advanced is steep. On transaction fees alone, the break-even sits around $50,000/month in revenue. Most stores below that threshold do not need Advanced.

But two features justify the upgrade regardless of fee savings:

Carrier-Calculated Shipping at Checkout

On Basic and Shopify plans, you set flat shipping rates or price-based rates manually. On Advanced, Shopify pulls real-time rates from DHL, UPS, FedEx, and other carriers directly into checkout.

This matters for stores that:

• Ship heavy or oversized items where flat rates bleed margin
• Offer international shipping where rates vary dramatically by destination
• Sell B2B where customers expect accurate freight quotes

Without calculated rates, you either overcharge (losing conversions) or undercharge (losing margin). Neither is sustainable at scale.

Duties and Import Tax Collection

If you sell cross-border — Malaysia to Singapore, or Southeast Asia to Australia — Advanced lets you collect duties and taxes at checkout. The customer sees the landed cost upfront. No surprise customs charges on delivery.

This feature alone can improve international conversion rates by 15-25%, according to Shopify's cross-border commerce data. Customers abandon orders when they cannot calculate the total cost.

Custom Report Builder

The Shopify plan gives you pre-built professional reports. Advanced lets you build custom ones. Filter by any dimension, create calculated fields, and save reports for your team.

If you are making decisions based on data — which you should be — custom reports let you answer questions that Shopify's standard reports cannot. "What is the average order value from email traffic on mobile devices during our last promotion?" That query requires a custom report.

Who Actually Needs Shopify Plus?

Brands doing $500K+/month with checkout-level requirements.

Shopify Plus ($2,300+/month) serves brands processing $500,000 or more per month that need checkout customisation via Checkout Extensibility, up to 200 inventory locations, 50 international markets, and a dedicated merchant success manager. Shopify reports that Plus merchants collectively process over $10 billion annually. For stores below the $500K threshold, the standard Advanced plan with third-party apps replicates 90% of Plus functionality at a fraction of the cost.

Plus is not an upgrade from Advanced. It is a different product category.

The headline feature is Checkout Extensibility — Shopify's framework for customising the checkout page. On all other plans, checkout is locked. You cannot add upsells, change the layout, add custom fields, or implement loyalty point redemption at checkout.

On Plus, you can.

Plus Makes Sense For:

• High-volume brands processing 10,000+ orders/month that need checkout upsells, custom payment logic, or subscription flows baked into checkout
• Multi-brand operations running multiple storefronts from a single backend (Plus includes up to 10 expansion stores)
• B2B + DTC hybrids that need wholesale pricing, net payment terms, and company account management alongside their consumer store
• Global brands selling in 50+ countries with localised storefronts, currencies, and languages

Plus Does Not Make Sense For:

Stores doing under $500K/month. We have audited Malaysian brands that jumped to Plus at $100K/month in revenue. In every case, they paid $2,300/month for features they could have replicated with $200/month in apps on the Advanced plan.

The switching cost is not just the subscription. Plus implementations typically run $15,000-$50,000 for custom checkout work, theme migration, and app reconfiguration.

How Do You Choose the Right Shopify Plan for Your Store?

Match the plan to your operations, not your ambitions.

Choose your Shopify plan based on current team size, operational complexity, and monthly revenue: under $7,500/month with 1-2 people choose Basic, $7,500-$30,000/month with 3-5 people choose Shopify, $30,000-$500,000/month with international shipping choose Advanced, and above $500,000/month evaluate Plus. Re-evaluate quarterly using WebMedic's Shopify Total Cost Calculator to verify you are on the most cost-effective tier.

Here is the decision framework we use with every client:

Plan Selection Matrix

Signal	Recommended Plan	Key Trigger
Testing a product idea via social media	Starter ($5)	No storefront needed
New store, 1-2 people, under $7,500/month	Basic ($39)	Full store at lowest cost
Growing team (3-5 people), need reports	Shopify ($105)	Staff accounts + analytics
International shipping, 6-15 people	Advanced ($399)	Calculated shipping + duties
$500K+/month, checkout customisation	Plus ($2,300+)	Checkout Extensibility

The Quarterly Review

Your correct plan changes as your business grows. A store growing 15% month-over-month crosses the Basic-to-Shopify threshold in a single quarter.

Set a 90-day calendar reminder. Open the Shopify Total Cost Calculator and plug in your current numbers. If the next plan up saves you money after accounting for the subscription increase, upgrade. If it does not, stay put.

The most common mistake is upgrading too early based on projected revenue. The second most common mistake is staying on Basic for two years while paying $200/month in unnecessary transaction fees.

Neither position is ideal. Let the math — and your operational needs — drive the decision.

What Costs Beyond the Plan Should You Budget For?

Apps, themes, and development add $100-$500/month for most stores.

Beyond the Shopify subscription, typical stores spend $150-300/month on apps, $0-350 one-time on a premium theme, and $500-5,000+ on initial setup. WebMedic's analysis of 40+ Malaysian Shopify stores shows that app costs frequently exceed the subscription itself — with the average store running 8-12 paid apps. The total cost of running a Shopify store on the Basic plan at RM50,000/month in revenue averages RM2,800-RM4,200/month including all variable costs.

The Shopify subscription is the sticker price. Here is the actual ownership cost:

Total Cost of Ownership Breakdown

Cost Category	Monthly Range	Notes
Shopify subscription	$29-$399	Depends on plan and billing cycle
Credit card processing	2.15-5% of revenue	Varies by plan and gateway
Third-party transaction fee	0-2% of revenue	$0 with Shopify Payments
App subscriptions	$50-$500	Average: $150-$300 across 8-12 apps
Theme	$0-$350 one-time	Paid themes offer better flexibility
Domain	$14/year	Through Shopify or any registrar
Email platform (Klaviyo)	$20-$150/month	Based on subscriber count
Development/maintenance	$0-$2,000/month	Higher during launch, lower ongoing

For Malaysian stores on the Basic plan processing RM50,000/month (~$11,000 USD), the total monthly cost typically breaks down to:

• Subscription: $39
• Credit card fees (gateway): ~$330
• Shopify transaction fee: ~$220
• Apps: ~$200
• Total: ~$789/month

That is roughly 7% of revenue going to platform and payment costs. Industry benchmarks from Shopify's own merchant data show 5-10% as typical.

The key insight: your plan choice affects only one line item. The other costs remain largely the same regardless of which tier you select. Focus your plan decision on features and staff needs, not just the subscription delta.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which Shopify plan is best for a new store in 2026?

Shopify Basic at $39/month (or $29/month billed annually) is the best plan for new stores in 2026. It includes a full online storefront, abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, gift cards, and 2 staff accounts. Approximately 80% of new Shopify merchants start on Basic and operate on it for 12-18 months before revenue growth or team expansion triggers an upgrade.

How many staff accounts do you get on each Shopify plan?

Shopify Starter includes 1 staff account, Basic includes 2, the Shopify plan includes 5, Advanced includes 15, and Plus offers unlimited staff accounts. Staff account limits are one of the primary reasons merchants upgrade — once your team exceeds the limit, the only options are sharing logins (a security risk with no audit trail) or moving to the next plan.

Does Shopify Basic include abandoned cart recovery?

Yes, Shopify Basic includes abandoned cart recovery at no extra cost. The feature automatically sends up to 3 email reminders to shoppers who added items to their cart but did not complete checkout. According to Shopify, abandoned cart emails recover 5-15% of lost sales on average, making it one of the most valuable features included in the $39/month Basic plan.

What is the difference between the Shopify plan and Shopify Advanced?

Shopify Advanced ($399/month) adds carrier-calculated shipping rates at checkout, duty and import tax collection, a custom report builder, and 15 staff accounts compared to the Shopify plan's 5. The credit card rate drops from 2.7% to 2.5%, and the third-party transaction fee falls from 1% to 0.6%. Advanced is designed for stores shipping internationally or managing complex multi-location operations.

Is Shopify Plus worth the price for mid-size ecommerce brands?

Shopify Plus at $2,300/month is worth it for brands processing $500,000 or more per month that need checkout customisation, B2B functionality, or 50+ international markets. For mid-size brands below that revenue threshold, the Advanced plan ($399/month) with third-party apps achieves approximately 90% of Plus functionality. WebMedic has seen Malaysian brands overspend by upgrading to Plus before their revenue justified the investment.

Keep Reading

• Shopify Pricing Plans: Side-by-Side With Calculator
• Shopify Malaysia: What You Need to Know Before You Launch
• Shopify vs WooCommerce: Which Platform Fits Your Business?