If your store's turnover is under A$75,000 you don't have to register for GST, and you shouldn't be charging it. Once you cross that line — measured over a rolling twelve months, not a financial year — you have 21 days to register, and from your registration date every taxable sale to an Australian customer includes 10% GST whether you collected it or not. That last part is what catches people. The ATO doesn't care that your checkout was still set to tax-free on the day you tipped over.
Most of the work of getting Shopify GST settings right in Australia takes about forty minutes. The mistakes that cause a BAS mismatch take longer to unwind, because by then you've shipped three months of orders with the wrong tax treatment and your bookkeeper is reconciling from Shopify payouts instead of gross sales. Here's the whole sequence, from below the threshold to registered and filing cleanly.
Do I need to charge GST on Shopify in Australia?
Only if you're registered. And you must register once your GST turnover hits A$75,000 (A$150,000 for non-profits). GST turnover means gross business income, not profit — before Shopify fees, before Afterpay merchant fees, before COGS.
The test is forward and backward looking at the same time. You've met it if your turnover for the current month plus the previous eleven is A$75,000 or more, or if you reasonably expect the current month plus the next eleven to hit it. That second half is the one that bites new stores with a strong launch. If you did A$14,000 in your first month and the trajectory is obvious, you're expected to register then, not in month six.
Worked example. Say your previous eleven months came to A$58,000, ticking along at four or five thousand a month. Then Click Frenzy lands and November does A$21,000. Rolling total: A$79,000. You've crossed. Register within 21 days, and pick a start date you can actually operate from — because every sale from that date onward has GST baked into it.
The awkward version of this is a store that crosses on 12 November and doesn't notice until the accountant looks in February. Those November and December sales are still taxable supplies. You can't go back and invoice the customers for another 10%. You pay it out of the price you already charged, which means you're handing over one eleventh of a quarter's revenue that you never priced for.
Should you register voluntarily before you get there?
Usually not, if you sell to consumers. Voluntary registration lets you claim input tax credits on stock, Meta ads, apps, freight and your Shopify bill. But you also have to charge 10% on the way out, and a D2C customer doesn't care that your price rose because of tax law. So you either raise prices and lose some conversion, or absorb it and lose a ninth of your margin on every unit.
The case for registering early is real in two situations: you're mid-way through a big inventory or build spend and the credits are worth more than the collected GST, or a meaningful share of your revenue is B2B — stockists, corporate gifting, wholesale — where the buyer claims the credit back and the GST is invisible to them.
For a store doing A$3,000 a month to retail customers, staying unregistered is the right call. Say so to your accountant if they suggest otherwise, and make them show you the numbers.
Shopify GST settings in Australia: what to actually change
Go to Settings → Taxes and duties. Australia appears as a country-level region with a single 10% rate; there's no state-by-state layer to manage, which makes it one of the simpler tax regimes Shopify handles. Add your ABN and GST registration in the Australia region so the store knows it's collecting.
Three settings decide whether your numbers make sense afterwards:
- Include tax in prices. Turn it on. Australian Consumer Law requires a single total price to be displayed, and that price has to include GST. A product listed at A$99 must cost A$99 at checkout, not A$108.90.
- Charge tax on shipping. On. Shipping is a taxable supply here. If you charge A$9.95 for Australia Post parcel post, A$0.90 of that is GST (9.95 ÷ 11 = 0.9045). Leaving this off is one of the most common reasons a Shopify tax report and a BAS don't agree.
- Product-level tax exemption. On each variant there's a "Charge tax on this product" checkbox. Uncheck it for GST-free lines. Basic food is the big one — plain milk, bread, most fresh produce — but the boundaries are sharp and not intuitive. Prepared food, confectionery, savoury snacks and most beverages other than milk are taxable. Plenty of health and supplement products people assume are food are not GST-free.
Get the exemptions wrong in either direction and it shows up as a variance between G1 and 1A that nobody can explain three months later.
GST-inclusive pricing display: the repricing you have to do first
This is where stores quietly cut their own margin. Before registration, a A$99 product earned you A$99. Flip "include tax in prices" on and that same A$99 now breaks down as A$90 revenue plus A$9 GST. You didn't change the price tag. You just gave away nine dollars a unit.
The formula for GST inside a tax-inclusive price is price ÷ 11. To hold your net, the new shelf price is old price × 1.1 — A$99 becomes A$108.90.
Almost nobody raises every price by exactly 10%, because A$108.90 looks like a rounding error made flesh. What we usually do is run a bulk price edit, apply the uplift, then round to a sensible ending across the catalogue — A$109, or A$105 on the lines where you'd rather eat A$3.90 than lose the price point. The important thing is that it's a deliberate decision per price band, made once, rather than a discovery in the next BAS.
Making your order confirmation a valid tax invoice
Shopify's default order confirmation email is a receipt. It is not a tax invoice, and B2B customers will ask you for one. A buyer needs a valid tax invoice to claim an input tax credit on any purchase over A$82.50 including GST, and you're obliged to provide one within 28 days of being asked.
What has to be on it:
- The words Tax invoice
- Your business name and your ABN
- The date it was issued
- A description of what was sold, with quantities
- The GST amount, or a statement that the total includes GST
- Which items on the invoice are taxable, if some are GST-free
- For sales of A$1,000 or more: the buyer's name or ABN
You fix this in two places. Add your ABN to Settings → Store details so it's available to templates, then edit the Order confirmation and Order invoice notification templates in Settings → Notifications to include the heading, the ABN line, and a tax summary block. Shopify's own Order Printer app handles the printable PDF version. It's an hour of Liquid work at most, and it stops you fielding the same email every fortnight.
Low value imported goods: selling into Australia from overseas
If you're not an Australian business but you ship to Australian customers, the same A$75,000 threshold applies to your Australian sales, and the rule is about consignment value rather than order value.
- Consignments valued at A$1,000 or less — you charge 10% GST at checkout and remit it to the ATO under a simplified registration.
- Consignments above A$1,000 — you don't charge at checkout. GST is assessed at the border along with any duty, and the importer of record pays it there.
Shopify handles the split once you add an Australian tax registration to the store: it applies GST to qualifying low-value orders and leaves the higher-value ones alone. Where it goes wrong is the customs paperwork. If your registration number isn't on the commercial documentation accompanying the parcel, the border has no way to know GST was already collected, and the customer gets charged a second time on delivery. That's a refund, a support ticket and a review you didn't want.
The other trap: consignment, not cart. A A$1,400 order split across two parcels of A$700 each is two low-value consignments, and both are taxable at checkout. Warehouses split parcels for weight and dimension reasons without telling anyone. If your fulfilment partner does this routinely, your tax treatment and your shipping behaviour need to be reconciled before you find out from a customer.
Four things that cause a BAS mismatch
Most Australian stores are on Simpler BAS, which applies under A$10 million turnover and reduces the GST section to three labels: G1 total sales, 1A GST on sales, 1B GST on purchases. Fewer boxes, same ways to get it wrong.
Reporting from payouts instead of gross sales. The single most common one. A A$110 order paid through a buy-now-pay-later provider might settle at A$103.10 after a A$6.90 merchant fee. G1 is A$110 and 1A is A$10. If you report the deposit, you've declared A$103.10 and A$9.37 of GST, understating your liability by 63 cents on that order — and the A$0.63 of GST inside the merchant fee belongs at 1B as a credit, not netted off the sale. Multiply across a quarter of Afterpay and Zip volume and the gap is real money.
Refunds in the wrong period. A refund reduces your sales in the period the refund is processed, not the period of the original order. Shopify's tax report handles this correctly. Spreadsheets built from order exports usually don't.
Gift cards. Selling a gift card isn't a taxable supply. GST applies when it's redeemed against products. Shopify treats it this way, but your sales dashboard total and your G1 figure will differ by the value of unredeemed cards, and if you sell a lot of them at Christmas that difference is large enough to look like an error.
Export sales left out of G1 entirely. Goods exported within 60 days are GST-free, so nothing goes in 1A. But the sale still belongs in G1 as total sales. Stores selling to New Zealand or the US often drop those orders out of the return completely, which makes the reported turnover look wrong against everything else the ATO can see.
Pull the numbers from Shopify's Finance summary and the Taxes report for the exact BAS period, in AUD, and reconcile them to your accounting platform before you file. If you sell in multiple currencies, check that your accounting connector is converting at the right rate and not double-counting orders it also imported from the payment gateway.
Does Shopify charge GST on subscription fees?
For Australian merchants, GST generally applies to Shopify's subscription and app charges, because overseas suppliers of digital services have had to collect it here since 2017. There's an exemption where the customer is a GST-registered business that supplies a valid ABN, so once you're registered it's worth adding your ABN in the billing section of your admin and checking the next invoice.
Whichever way it lands, look at the actual invoice rather than assuming. If GST is charged, it's an input tax credit at 1B. Same logic applies to Meta and Google Ads billing — both will stop charging GST to an Australian advertiser once a verified ABN is on the account, and if they are charging it, that's a credit you're probably not claiming. Same for Australia Post and Sendle invoices, which carry GST you can recover once registered.
Timing your registration around the Australian calendar
The retail year here has two spikes that matter to the threshold test: Click Frenzy and the run into a summer Christmas in November and December, and EOFY promotions in June. A store that sits comfortably at A$4,000 a month for ten months can add A$25,000 in a single quarter and cross without anyone watching.
If you can see it coming, register and reprice before the peak, not during it. Changing prices across a catalogue in the middle of Click Frenzy while ads are running against old feed prices is how you end up with mismatched Google Merchant Center listings and disapproved products at the worst possible moment. We'd rather do the tax work in a quiet week in September than a busy one in November.
One more thing worth saying out loud, since sustainability and provenance claims are a big part of how Australian D2C brands differentiate: the ACCC has been active on greenwashing, and a claim on a product page is a representation you have to be able to substantiate. Tax compliance and marketing compliance land in the same inbox, and the same audit tends to surface both.
Where to start
Open Settings → Taxes and duties and check three things right now: is Australia set to include tax in displayed prices, is shipping taxable, and does any product have the tax checkbox unticked that shouldn't. Then pull last quarter's Shopify Taxes report and compare G1 against what you filed. If those two numbers don't match within a few dollars, the cause is almost always in the four items above.
We build and maintain Shopify stores for Australian brands out of our Bengaluru studio, and the tax setup is usually the least interesting hour of a build and the one that saves the most trouble later. If you want a second set of eyes on your settings, templates and reports before the next quarter closes, our Australia team does a free store audit that covers this alongside speed and conversion. If it's a bigger piece of work — repricing a catalogue, rebuilding invoice templates, sorting a migration — bring in a developer for a few days rather than doing it in the admin at 11pm.
We build stores. Your accountant signs the BAS. Use both.