The subscription is the smallest line on your Shopify bill. For an Australian store turning over A$60,000 a month, the plan costs less than the card fees, a lot less than the shipping, and about the same as the apps nobody has audited since launch. So if you're pricing up Shopify in Australia for 2026, start with processing rates and parcel costs and work backwards. The plan tier is a rounding error until you're past roughly A$50k a month, and even then the decision is arithmetic, not ambition.
The four plans, and why the list price is the least interesting number
Shopify bills Australian merchants in AUD, and the local list price isn't a straight currency conversion of the US price. There are three self-serve tiers (Basic, Grow, Advanced) plus Shopify Plus, which is contracted and starts in the low thousands of AUD per month. Annual billing knocks roughly a quarter off the monthly rate on the self-serve plans.
I'm not going to print exact figures here, because Shopify has repriced twice in the last two years and a blog post is a bad pricing page. Check the AU pricing page the day you sign up. What matters more, and what nobody reads carefully, is that each plan step also lowers your Shopify Payments rate and your third-party gateway surcharge. That's where the real money moves.
Card processing: the number that actually scales with you
Shopify Payments in Australia charges a percentage of the order plus a fixed cent amount per transaction, and the percentage drops as you move up plans. Domestic Visa and Mastercard sit somewhere around the 1.4%–1.75% band depending on tier, with a fixed fee of about 30c. Amex and international cards cost more. Confirm your own rate in the admin, because promotional rates and older grandfathered accounts exist.
Here's the calculation to run before you upgrade anything. Say you're doing A$60,000 a month at an A$85 average order value. That's 706 orders.
- At 1.75% + 30c: A$1,050 in percentage fees, plus A$211.80 in fixed fees, so A$1,261.80.
- At 1.6% + 30c: A$960 plus A$211.80, so A$1,171.80.
The saving is A$90 a month. If the upgrade costs more than A$90 extra per month, the upgrade loses money. Simple as that. Note also that the fixed 30c is 0.35% of an A$85 order but only 0.1% of a A$300 order, which is why low-AOV stores selling A$25 items feel payment fees far more sharply than furniture brands do.
Using a gateway other than Shopify Payments will cost you
If you process through a third-party gateway, Shopify adds a transaction fee on top of whatever that gateway charges. It scales down with plan tier: around 2% on Basic, falling to a fraction of a percent on Advanced and lower again on Plus. On A$60,000 a month at 2%, that's A$1,200 on top of your gateway's own fees. It's the single most expensive mistake we see on Australian stores that were set up by someone who preferred a familiar processor.
There are legitimate reasons to run a third-party gateway: an existing merchant agreement with genuinely better rates, high-risk category restrictions, a supplements or vape brand that Shopify Payments won't underwrite. Outside those cases, use Shopify Payments. The surcharge alone usually pays for a plan upgrade twice over.
BNPL is a marketing cost pretending to be a payment method
Afterpay and Zip are close to table stakes in Australian fashion, beauty and anything with an A$80+ basket. Merchant fees for BNPL land in the mid-single digits as a percentage plus a fixed fee, which is three to four times a card transaction. Nobody publishes one flat rate; you negotiate, and volume moves it.
The honest way to assess it is incrementality. If 30% of your orders come through Afterpay and you're paying, say, 5% on those, on A$60,000 revenue that's A$18,000 of BNPL volume costing A$900 versus roughly A$315 on cards. You're spending an extra A$585 a month. Worth it if BNPL genuinely lifts AOV and brings customers who wouldn't otherwise buy. Not worth it if your existing customers simply switched payment method at checkout because the button was there. Run the AOV split in Shopify's reports before you assume.
GST, ABN and the imported-goods rule that catches offshore founders
GST is 10%. You must register once your turnover hits A$75,000 in a twelve-month period, and most growing D2C brands should register early anyway so they can claim input tax credits on the Shopify subscription, apps, agency fees and ad spend. Shopify applies GST to your Australian billing; if you're registered, that comes back to you at BAS time.
The part that trips up overseas brands selling into Australia: low-value imported goods. If you're an offshore seller shipping physical goods under A$1,000 to Australian consumers and your Australian sales exceed the A$75,000 threshold, you're expected to register for GST and collect it at the point of sale. Shopify can handle the tax collection once it's configured. The registration is your job, and your accountant's. Get it wrong and the first sign is usually a customs headache for a customer, which is a terrible way to find out.
Also worth setting correctly on day one: display prices GST-inclusive. Australian consumer law expects the single total price to be prominent, and a checkout that adds 10% at the last step is a cart-abandonment machine.
Shipping will cost you more than everything else combined
Australia is a continent with five population clusters and a lot of nothing in between. Domestic parcel rates reflect that. A 500g parcel going Sydney metro to Sydney metro is a different animal from the same parcel going to Broome, and remote-area surcharges from the major carriers are real money.
The modelling to do before you set a free-shipping threshold: pull your last 500 orders, split them by state, and get a blended cost per parcel from your carrier mix. If your blended cost is A$11.40 and your gross margin is 62%, a free-shipping threshold of A$80 leaves you A$49.60 in gross profit and A$38.20 after shipping. That's fine. At a A$50 threshold you'd be at A$31 before you've paid for the ad that brought the order in. Most Australian stores set their threshold by copying a competitor. Set it from your own margin.
Compare Australia Post's eParcel contract rates against Sendle and the aggregator options once you're doing over a few hundred parcels a month. The contract rates are negotiable, and nobody negotiates them unprompted.
The app stack nobody audits
Six apps at A$29 to A$79 each is A$300 a month, A$3,600 a year, and on most stores we audit at least two of them are doing something the theme could do natively or something the business stopped needing eighteen months ago. Reviews app, upsell app, subscriptions, reviews-again-because-someone-installed-a-second-one, a currency switcher on a store that only sells in AUD.
The cost isn't only the invoice. Each app injects script into the storefront, and by the time you're running eight of them the mobile LCP has drifted past 3 seconds and your paid traffic is bouncing before the hero image paints. We run a quarterly stack review on retainer clients for exactly this reason: uninstall, measure, keep the ones that moved a number. If you want the monitoring side handled automatically, our SwiftStore app scans PageSpeed, fixes what it can and tracks the score over time, which at least tells you when a new install has cost you half a second.
What a store actually costs to build
A premium theme is A$400 to A$600, one time. A competent setup on that theme, with proper collection structure, a configured checkout, shipping zones, tax, and a handful of sections built to your brand, is a few thousand dollars of work. A fully custom build with bespoke product configurators, an ERP integration, or a B2B portal runs into the tens of thousands and takes months.
Australian agency day rates sit well above what the same work costs delivered from an offshore team, which is why a lot of AU brands run a local brand and marketing lead with an offshore build team. We work with Australian brands from Bengaluru and the rate gap is the honest reason most of them called; the breakdown is on our Shopify development cost page, and the AU-specific engagement model is on our Australia page. The trade-off is timezone. AEST is 4.5 to 5.5 hours ahead of IST, which gives you a solid overlap window in your morning and means nothing gets answered at 9pm your time. Decide whether that matters to you before you sign anything.
When Shopify Plus is worth it, and when it isn't
Plus makes sense in Australia at roughly the point where your Advanced plan fee plus your payment savings plus the things you're paying developers to work around exceed the Plus contract. Concretely: multiple storefronts for AU and NZ, checkout customisation you can't do with checkout extensibility, B2B alongside D2C, or launch volumes that need the higher API limits.
If you're under about A$400k a month and your main reason is that Plus sounds more serious, it isn't worth it. We've told brands to stay on Advanced for another year and spend the difference on their email programme, and been right. Shopify's own sales team will not tell you that.
Run your own numbers first
Pull three figures out of your admin: last month's revenue, last month's order count, and your current processing rate. That gives you fee-per-order and tells you within five minutes whether a plan change pays for itself. Then pull your app invoices and ask, per app, which number it moved.
If the answer for two or three of them is "no idea", that's the place to start. We do a free store audit that covers the payment setup, the app stack and the speed cost of both, and you get the findings whether or not you work with us.