How Much Does It Cost To Build A Website On Shopify

You have heard of Shopify and considering building a website on this platform, but not sure about how much this is going to cost. Shopify offers tons of features and affordable templates, and it helps you build a fully functional website without having to know a single line of codes. That convenience comes at a price though (different levels of prices, in fact), so in this article, I will address how much it costs to build a website on Shopify. Now let’s jump right into the details.

Why you should use Shopify to build an eCommerce website

When it comes to building a website for eCommerce, there are so many options to choose from; sometimes it’s so overwhelming that you’re tempted to buy from the first website provider you encounter.

You should set up your website on Shopify as this is the easiest, cheapest, and most convenient way for a business to build a store and start selling their products and services online right away. Here are five reasons why you need to purchase Shopify websites for your company:

Big brands are using Shopify.

If it’s good enough for big brands, it’s definitely good enough for your eCommerce website. Names such as Third eye blind, Lollapalooza, and American Blues musician Jimmie Vaughan sell their merchandise on his websites hosted by Shopify. Shopify is also used by giant brands such as Tesla, Nestle, GE, Red Bull, and Kylie Cosmetics.

You don’t have to pay for server costs.

Many companies are discouraged by server costs, but luckily Shopify’s platform is managed by Shopify itself. It comes with a variety of options and a monthly subscription, so you can select the plan that suits your needs. Shopify offers a free trial of 14 days and a special deal allowing you to use Shopify for just 1 dollar for the first month. You can try to build an online store and select a plan later. Prices are from $39 to $399 a month. You won’t have to worry about renting a server.

Discounts are offered on annual plans.

Not everybody is a fan of monthly payment plans, which is why Shopify also offers discounts on annual and biennial plans. If you choose annual contracts, you will receive a 10% discount and, if you choose biennial contacts, you will receive a 20 % discount.

Shopify has a huge app market.

Shopify is popular with SaaS service companies as they have a huge app marketplace where you can just find an app for any function you need. You’ll most almost always find whatever innovative new service you need at Shopify before anywhere else, and some of them offer great free plans.

Conversely, SaaS companies are also not interested in e-commerce competing platforms, such as WooCommerce or Open Carts, because people who use them do not pay monthly subscription fees. So a lot of very useful services are not built into these solutions. App integrations will save you time, money, minimize errors, give your apps better insights, make them cheaper and uncomplicated, and easier to customize.

Security & Reliability

Shopify is a global hosted service, which means that they have tech people monitor their network 24/7 for any cyber risks and can help you solve any problems that arise. Also, their apps have a certain standard and are not likely to give you trojans or viruses. You can also opt for SSL or PCI compliance to accept credit cards and store sensitive information without having to find out about the technical details of how it works. Though this is also provided by other platforms, they cannot give you this level of security and reliability at the same price. Other companies are going to charge you more.

Read more:

• How to Optimize Conversion Rate for Shopify Stores?
• Shopify Fitness Store Examples
• How to Start Candles Business on Shopify
• How to Improve Your Shopify Store?
• How to Setup SEO on Shopify?

Does Shopify design your website?

Shopify does not provide custom web design services; you can either buy a theme from their theme store or from a third-party theme builder such as Themeforest or pay for a qualified web designer to create a custom theme for your Shopify store. So, How much does it cost to build a website design on Shopify?

Although there are lots of decent themes available in Shopify’s theme store, the majority of big Shopify stores choose custom-designed themes created with their brand aesthetics and branding goals in mind.

Shopify store cost components

There can be more costs that you need to think of apart from Shopify’s pricing plans. So, although the Basic Shopify plan costs $39/month to begin, you might have to spend on some other things to make your website complete. Maybe you’re asking what other factors are applied to the cost of an online eCommerce store? The three most important things are time, resources, and maintenance.

Time is of the utmost importance. Whether a store can be launched in one week or two months of trial-and-error would make a big difference in cost. With (possible) time limits in place, the higher the cost, the closer one gets to finish. Also, do you have an in-house team with the expertise you need, or do you recruit from outside?

A list of factors impacting the cost of a Shopify store or some other cost of an e-commerce shop includes:

• Domain name registration;
• SSL certificate (for strong encryption);
• Reliable hosting;
• Transactional fees (PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, etc.)
• Development and documentation;
• UX and visual design selection and setting;
• Testing;
• Copywriting and imagery;
• Product shipping options;
• Continued web store maintenance.

So let’s calculate the minimum cost to start a Shopify store. How much does it cost to build a website on Shopify?

Shopify base fee

Shopify Starter is just $5 per month, providing an easy-to-use online store builder and 24/7 customer service support. There’s no restriction on ‘bandwidth;’ if you’re new to this concept, I’ll explain it to you. Basically, it means that regardless of whether 1 or 1,000 merchants visit your online store every day, Shopify sets no limit on the amount of traffic you can process.

If you’re only starting with Shopify, you’re going to have to go through the typical “learning curve.” There’s nothing to worry about Shopify’s 24/7 support team, which is available via chat, phone, email, and community forum. So, it doesn’t matter in which time zone you are, just contact them as much as you like, and you’ll get a Shopify expert answering any questions you may have.

Shopify pricing also includes high security and speed for your online store. Did you know that all images in Shopify stores are hosted on the Content Delivery Network (CDN)? I can hear you asking what that means to you. This means that, whether your customer is in New York, Paris or Tokyo, they can access your Shopify store at almost the same page speed. Off-site picture storage ensures that your store is loading fast in every country that is truly important if your company has international customers.

Shopify provides three options of subscription for you to choose:

1. Shopify Basic - $39 (Suitable for new businesses)
2. Shopify - $105
3. Shopify Advanced - $399

Shopify transaction fee

Shopify Payments accepts common credit and debit cards, including VISA, Master Card, American Express, JCB, and others. Shopify charges a certain fee for each purchase, depending on what Shopify plan you are on. This might seem like lots of money at first, why do you have to use Shopify Payments and pay a fee like that, right? Here’s the explanation.

The Shopify Payments process requires a security test to be carried out by the owner of the credit card, just to ensure that the transaction is valid. What does it mean to you as a business owner? You will be safe and can proceed with the order with the confidence that you earn a customer, not a scammer.

What if you don’t want to take advantage of Shopify Payments? Shopify has tons of third-party payment gateways that you can use depending on the country in which you registered your Shopify store.

So, here’s how much Shopify will charge you as transaction fees:

• Shopify Basic: 2.9% of your transaction + 30 cents.
• Shopify: 2.6% of your transaction + 30 cents.
• Shopify Advanced: 2.4% of your transaction + 30 cents.

Keep in mind that you won’t have to pay for any of this if you use Shopify Payment as your payment gateway. These fees are applied when you use third-party payment processors only.

Shopify theme cost

Shop theme pricing ranges from fully free to $140 per theme, typically 12 months of customer service. Your preference depends, of course, on your budget and your needs. Shopify has built fantastic free themes and constantly offers direct email support. If you’re just getting started, find one of the free Shop themes from the Shopify theme marketplace. Here you can find themes that are tailored for the most popular niches, such as fashion, cosmetics, restaurants, and more.

Verdict: So, to build a fully functioning website on Shopify, it can cost you at least $348/year ($39/month x 12 months), provided that you choose a free theme. From my experience, the features that you can get from a free theme is very limited, so it’s a good idea to pay for a premium theme to give your customers great shopping experience. So, that’s another $140, which makes it almost $500 to build a Shopify store for your first year.

Shopify apps (Optional)

This is sometimes overlooked when it comes to the cost of building a website on Shopify. Let’s say you’ve chosen the Shopify Basic Plan (39/month) and have selected the free ‘Brooklyn’ theme from the Shopify theme marketplace.

Once you’ve already built your store, you want to automate some repetitive tasks on your store, but Shopify doesn’t provide that feature in your pricing plan, how are you going to do that? You will need to pay for apps. That will cost you more even though your budget is already tight. I understand that, and after this article, if you’re still interested in building a store on Shopify, you will like our collection of must-have Shopify apps.

About AVADA’s free collection of Shopify apps

Having developed apps for eCommerce stores for many years, we, AVADA, have a deep understanding of what store owners need to build up a great store. With that knowledge, we have built a collection of apps that are must-have for every new Shopify store, no matter what industry you are in.

On top of that, despite knowing all the life-easing benefits that apps can bring, new store owners often have a budget limit, so they’d rather do things manually instead of paying for apps that get things done quickly for them. We understand that too, and we also believe that if new stores can have access to must-have eCommerce apps, they will be able to grow their store faster and have more budget for advanced apps later on.

This is why we are providing a collection of must-have apps that every new store should install, and all of these apps are FREE. These apps will make the development of your Shopify store so much easier, and you will be able to operate it more efficiently. All of these apps are now available on the Shopify app marketplace, so once you build your store on Shopify, you can go and grab them at once. Now, let’s review what our apps can do for you.

AVADA SEO Suite

SEO Suite app enables you to build elements of your on-page SEO effortlessly. It will help you optimize website photos and structures in a way that is most compatible with the Google Search algorithms.

Key benefits of AVADA SEO Suite

• Free
• Improve website loading speed
• Faster Google index of websites images, content
• Increase click rate with standardized meta tags
• Auto-complete Google structured data for your website
• No duplicate content
• Control all web issues by SEO checklist
• One-click auto-run, no technical skills required

Download it now.

AVADA Social Proof

81% of global customers say trust in a brand as their top buying consideration. Trust issues are one of the biggest concerns that you need to solve when it comes to eCommerce. There are many ways to create trust with website visitors. Showing dynamic customer interactions on your website is one of the easiest methods. This is why we build Social Proof.

Proofo - Social Proof will show visitors’ interactions with your website in the form of pop-ups. These pop-ups are not the in-your-face type, but small ones that show up at the bottom left corner of your website. This design will prevent the feature from bothering your site visitors.

There are many forms of pop-ups that Proofo can display, and you can check them out now.

Go check out and download it now.

AVADA Free Shipping Bar

Offering free shipping will help increase your sales and attract new customers. Free shipping is one of the strongest incentives that can urge customers to make purchases.

With AVADA Free Shipping Bar, you can have a banner on the homepage of your website so that your prospects can notice your offer immediately. There are also many well-designed modifications that AVADA Free Shipping Bar can do to satisfy your needs.

You can learn all about it here and download it (for free, of course) too.

AVADA Discount Code Generator

Apart from free shipping, providing discounts is another way to boost your revenue. With the default features provided by Shopify, setting up discounts is a little bit difficult. In Shopify, you can only have one single code for a discount. This can be a problem when you want to have multiple codes for the same discount. AVADA Discount Code Generator allows you to generate a load of different codes for your predefined discount rule.

You can download it here.

Bonus: Checklist Before Launching Shopify Store

Developing a new Shopify Store will take a ton of time and work. As there are lots of tasks to complete, it will be tough not to miss something important. This is why we have written an ultimate checklist that you can use as a reference before launching your fitness store. Check it out here.

Related posts:

• Checklist Before Launching Shopify Store
• What is the Best Size for Ecommerce Product Images?
• How to Promote & Advertise Shopify Store
• How to Build the Perfect Shopify Homepage

Final Words

If you want to do business on Shopify, think about investing in your store. Building a store on Shopify is relatively cheap and easy in comparison to other platforms. I hope this article has provided you with valuable information about how much it costs to build a website on Shopify. Please feel free to leave comments below for further discussion. :-)