Shopify charges a credit card processing rate of roughly 2.9% + 30 cents on the Basic plan down to around 2.15-2.5% + 30 cents on Advanced and Plus, but the real hidden cost is the extra 0.2% to 2% surcharge Shopify adds on top if you skip Shopify Payments for a third-party gateway like Stripe or PayPal.
On a $100 order, that surcharge alone can add $0.20 to $2.00 beyond what your actual payment processor already charges you, on top of the base processing fee you’d pay no matter which platform you used, per the surcharge ranges documented across Shopify’s own fee pages and Craftshift’s independent breakdown.
If you haven’t picked a plan yet, our cost to start an online store breakdown covers the full platform cost picture, not just transaction fees. And if you’re still deciding on a platform at all, our how to start an eCommerce store guide and what Shopify is explainer cover the bigger-picture decisions that come before fee math matters.
Shopify’s Two Separate Fees, Explained
Shopify charges two distinct fees that often get confused as one. According to Shopify’s Help Center, the first is the credit card processing rate, charged on every sale through Shopify Payments, the platform’s built-in processor.
The second is the third-party transaction fee, an extra charge Shopify adds on top of your gateway’s own fees if you use anything other than Shopify Payments.
If you use Shopify Payments as your sole payment method, you only pay the first fee, per Shopify’s documented fee waiver.
If you use a third-party gateway like Stripe, PayPal, or Square instead, you pay both your gateway’s normal processing fee and Shopify’s separate surcharge, which is the part most new sellers don’t see coming until their first bill.
Shopify Payments Rates by Plan
These are the credit card processing rates most commonly cited across current pricing breakdowns for US-based stores on annual billing. Shopify periodically adjusts exact rates, so confirm the live number in your own Settings > Billing page before finalizing a budget.
| Plan | Monthly Price | Online Card Rate (Shopify Payments) | Third-Party Gateway Surcharge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $5/month | Checkout link only, not a full store | N/A |
| Basic | $39/month | ~2.9% + 30¢ | ~2.0% |
| Grow (formerly “Shopify”) | $105/month | ~2.6-2.7% + 30¢ | ~1.0% |
| Advanced | $399/month | ~2.4-2.5% + 30¢ | ~0.5-0.6% |
| Plus | From $2,300/month | Negotiated, commonly 2.15-2.45% + 30¢ | ~0.2%, often waived entirely |
The pattern holds across every plan: the more you pay in subscription cost, the less you pay per transaction.
The Starter row reflects pricing per Shopify’s own plan page. The Basic row matches the figures per Craftshift’s published table. The Grow row aligns with the rate per Firstpier’s pricing breakdown.
The Advanced row matches the rate per Nudgify’s fee guide. The Plus row follows the negotiated-rate range per OneCart’s independent analysis.
One honest caveat: these sources don’t all agree on the exact decimal for the Grow and Plus tiers, Firstpier cites 2.7% for Grow and 2.15% for Plus, while Nudgify and Craftshift cite figures closer to 2.6% and 2.45%.
The ranges above reflect that real disagreement rather than picking one source and presenting it as more precise than it is. Confirm your account’s exact current rate in Settings > Billing before budgeting against it.
The Hidden Cost: Why the Surcharge Catches Sellers Off Guard
The third-party transaction fee exists specifically to make Shopify Payments the financially obvious choice. According to Shopify’s official documentation on third-party fees, this surcharge applies whenever you accept payment through a provider other than Shopify Payments, and it’s calculated on top of whatever that provider already charges you.
Here’s the math that catches people off guard, following the rate structure documented by Nudgify’s 2026 fee guide. On the Basic plan, if you use Stripe directly instead of Shopify Payments, you pay Stripe’s standard rate (commonly around 2.9% + 30 cents) plus Shopify’s 2.0% surcharge on top. That’s roughly 4.9% + 30 cents combined, nearly double what Shopify Payments alone would cost on the same plan.
According to a fee breakdown published by Craftshift, a $100 order processed this way costs around $5.20 in combined fees, compared to roughly $3.20 if the same order ran through Shopify Payments alone on the Basic plan.
Real Math: What You Actually Pay Per Order
Let’s calculate the true cost per order across a few realistic scenarios, applying the rate structure documented in Shopify’s own merchant help articles and cross-checked against the worked examples published by Craftshift’s fee calculator.
Scenario 1: Basic plan, Shopify Payments, $60 order (Basic plan rate per Shopify’s official documentation) $60 × 2.9% = $1.74, plus the $0.30 fixed fee = $2.04 per order. No surcharge applies since Shopify Payments is the sole processor.
Scenario 2: Basic plan, third-party gateway, $60 order (surcharge rate per Craftshift’s published breakdown) $60 × 2.9% (gateway fee) = $1.74, plus $0.30 fixed fee, plus $60 × 2.0% (Shopify surcharge) = $1.20. Total: $3.24 per order, roughly 59% more than Scenario 1 for the identical sale.
Scenario 3: Grow plan, Shopify Payments, $60 order (Grow plan rate per Firstpier’s pricing breakdown) $60 × 2.7% = $1.62, plus $0.30 = $1.92 per order. Slightly cheaper per order than Basic, but you’re also paying $66 more a month in subscription cost to get there.
Scenario 4: Advanced plan, Shopify Payments, $200 order (Advanced plan rate per Nudgify’s fee guide) $200 × 2.5% = $5.00, plus $0.30 = $5.30 per order. At higher average order values, the percentage-based savings between plans becomes meaningful in absolute dollars.
The pattern across all four: the subscription tier matters less than which processor you use. Switching to Shopify Payments saves more on most stores than upgrading a plan tier ever will, since the surcharge applies to every single order, not just a feature you might use.
| Scenario | Order Value | Total Fee | Effective Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic + Shopify Payments | $60 | $2.04 | 3.4% |
| Basic + third-party gateway | $60 | $3.24 | 5.4% |
| Grow + Shopify Payments | $60 | $1.92 | 3.2% |
| Advanced + Shopify Payments | $200 | $5.30 | 2.65% |
Each row above follows directly from the per-plan rates per Shopify’s own documentation, with the third-party row cross-checked per Craftshift’s worked example and the Grow and Advanced rows checked per Firstpier’s and Nudgify’s published figures respectively.
According to the worked fee examples published by both Craftshift and Eightx, this gap between using Shopify Payments versus a third-party gateway on the same plan is consistently the single largest lever in a merchant’s control, larger than any plan-tier decision.
Other Hidden Fees That Add Up
Beyond the headline processing rate and third-party surcharge, a handful of secondary fees quietly affect your real cost per order:
- Currency conversion: According to Shopify’s fees and costs documentation, accepting payment in a currency different from your payout currency triggers a conversion fee, commonly cited around 1.5%, on top of your standard processing rate.
- International card surcharge: According to a fee breakdown published by OneCart, a separate surcharge of roughly 1.5% can apply when a customer’s card is issued outside your store’s home country, stacking with the currency conversion fee on true cross-border orders.
OneCart’s analysis notes that combined international and conversion surcharges can push total processing cost as high as 5.9% plus 30 cents on the Basic plan for a worst-case cross-border sale. - Shop Pay and local payment methods alongside a third-party provider: Per Shopify’s own fee documentation, if you run Shopify Payments alongside a separate third-party gateway, transactions through Shop Pay or local payment methods are charged the standard Shopify Payments rate plus a 1.25% premium.
- Chargebacks: According to fee breakdowns published by Craftshift, a disputed transaction commonly costs around $15 in fees regardless of who wins the dispute, a figure also referenced per Eightx’s margin-impact analysis, which is worth factoring in if your return or dispute rate runs above average.
- Gift card and store credit fees: Per Shopify’s own policy update, for stores created on or after May 12, 2025, Shopify now charges third-party transaction fees on the portion of an order paid with store credit or gift cards, a change many existing merchants haven’t noticed yet.
How to Minimize What You Pay
A few decisions move the needle more than any plan upgrade:
- Use Shopify Payments as your sole processor wherever it’s available in your country. Per Shopify’s own fee documentation, this single decision eliminates the third-party surcharge entirely and is the most impactful cost-saving move on this list.
- Pay annually instead of monthly to lock in roughly 25% savings on the subscription portion of your cost, a figure confirmed across both Shopify’s own billing pages and OneCart’s independent fee analysis, which compounds with whatever you’re paying per transaction.
- Raise average order value where you can, since the fixed 30-cent fee component matters proportionally more on small orders than large ones, per the per-order math shown in Scenarios 1 and 4 above. A $20 order absorbs that fee far worse than a $100 order does.
- Don’t upgrade plans purely for the processing-rate drop unless you’ve actually run the math on your own order volume and average order value, per the worked comparison in Scenario 3 above. As the Grow-plan example shows, the extra monthly subscription cost can outweigh the per-order savings unless your volume is high enough.
- If you’re in a high-risk category Shopify Payments doesn’t support, compare gateway rates carefully, since the combined gateway-plus-surcharge cost varies meaningfully between providers even after Shopify’s cut is added.
Our best shipping software for eCommerce guide covers a similar fee-comparison exercise for shipping costs, which is worth running alongside your payment processor decision since both eat into the same margin.
Why This Matters More Than It Looks
A 2% difference per order sounds small until you scale it across a year of sales. Per Shopify’s own surcharge structure, a store doing $50,000 a month in revenue through a third-party gateway on the Basic plan is paying roughly $1,000 a month in Shopify’s surcharge alone, separate from whatever the gateway itself charges.
That’s $12,000 a year that disappears with a single settings change to Shopify Payments, assuming it’s available in your country and supports your product category.
This is also why transaction fees deserve more attention in a margin model than most founders give them.
A thin-margin product category, where you’re already operating at 15% to 20% gross margin, can lose a meaningful chunk of that margin to fee structure alone if you’re on the wrong processor setup, regardless of how well the rest of the business is run.
Our guide on eCommerce vs. retail touches on a related point: online overhead structures differently than physical retail overhead, and payment processing fees are one of the clearest examples of that difference in practice.
FAQ’s
How much does Shopify charge per transaction?
It depends on your plan and processor. Per Shopify’s own published rate structure, using Shopify Payments, rates run from roughly 2.9% + 30 cents on Basic down to around 2.15-2.5% + 30 cents on Advanced and Plus. Using a third-party gateway instead adds an extra 0.2% to 2% surcharge on top of whatever that gateway already charges.
Can I avoid Shopify’s transaction fees entirely?
You can avoid the third-party surcharge specifically by using Shopify Payments as your sole processor, per Shopify’s own fee waiver policy. You can’t avoid card processing fees altogether on any platform, since that cost exists regardless of which eCommerce platform or payment processor you use.
Why does Shopify charge extra for using a different payment gateway?
Per Shopify’s own platform economics, the surcharge is designed to make Shopify Payments the more attractive financial choice, since Shopify earns directly from in-house processing but only collects a smaller fee when a competing gateway handles the transaction instead.
Does upgrading my Shopify plan reduce transaction fees?
Yes, per Shopify’s own tiered rate structure, the percentage rate drops slightly at each plan tier, but the extra monthly subscription cost often outweighs the per-order savings unless your order volume is high enough to justify it. Run the math on your specific volume before upgrading for this reason alone.
Are there transaction fees on Shopify POS (in-person) sales?
Per Shopify’s published POS rate card, in-person rates are generally lower than online rates, and the fixed per-transaction fee typically drops as well, since card-present transactions carry less fraud risk than online ones. The exact rate still varies by plan.
Does Shopify charge fees on refunds?
According to Shopify’s official billing documentation, third-party transaction fees are not returned to you when you issue a refund, meaning you can end up paying the surcharge on a sale that’s later reversed, per the original sale amount rather than any partial refund adjustment.
Is Shopify Plus worth it just to lower transaction fees?
Usually not on transaction fees alone. Plus offers negotiated processing rates and can waive third-party fees in some cases, but the monthly cost, starting around $2,300 per Shopify’s published Plus pricing, only makes sense once your sales volume is high enough that the fee savings and added features justify it, typically well into six or seven figures in annual revenue.