The plan prices look similar once you convert them. The card fees do not. An Australian store on Shopify Payments pays domestic card rates that start around 1.75% + 30c and fall with plan tier; the equivalent US store starts at 2.9% + 30c. On A$150,000 a month that gap is worth more than the entire subscription, several times over. So if you're choosing where to anchor a store, or wondering why your Australian numbers look better than your US counterpart's on identical revenue, interchange is the answer, not the plan.
Everything else that differs — GST versus state sales tax, which payment methods exist, currency conversion fees, what Shopify bundles for free in one country and not the other — matters, but it matters second.
Plan prices are set per currency, not converted
Shopify publishes a separate price list for AUD and USD. Those lists get re-set occasionally; the exchange rate moves daily. Which means the honest answer to "is Shopify cheaper in Australia?" is: open both pricing pages, convert at today's rate, and see. The gap drifts. We've seen it favour each side at different points over the last few years.
What you cannot do is arbitrage it. Billing follows your store's address and currency settings, not where you happen to sign up from. Opening a "US" store to get USD pricing while operating out of Melbourne creates a tax and payouts mess that costs far more than the difference on a Basic plan.
One line item people miss: the annual commitment discount is roughly a quarter off the monthly rate, and it applies in both markets. If you're paying month to month on Advanced because it feels safer, you're leaving real money behind. Advanced at US$399/month is US$4,788 a year; the annual plan takes a chunk off that for a commitment you were going to make anyway.
GST, ABN, and the ten percent you might not owe
Australian merchants get 10% GST added to the Shopify subscription by default. If you're GST-registered, put your ABN into the billing settings and confirm your registration status. Under the rules for imported digital services, a GST-registered business supplying its ABN generally isn't charged the GST in the first place. Ten minutes of admin against 10% of every invoice for the life of the store. Worth doing before your accountant asks why you've been paying it and claiming it back.
The US side is messier in a different way. Whether your Shopify subscription is taxable depends on the state — several tax software-as-a-service, most don't, and the charge follows your business address. Nothing you can do about it, but it explains why two US merchants on the same plan see different invoice totals.
Where the real money is: card processing
Australian interchange is capped. American interchange is not, in any comparable way. That single regulatory difference flows straight into what Shopify Payments can charge you.
Work it through on a store doing A$150,000 a month at an A$95 average order value. That's about 1,580 orders.
- Australian domestic cards on a mid-tier plan at 1.6% + A$0.30: A$2,400 in percentage fees, plus A$474 in per-transaction fees. Total A$2,874.
- The same volume on US online rates of 2.7% + 30c: A$4,050 plus A$474. Total A$4,524.
A$1,650 a month. Just under A$20,000 a year on identical revenue. Check the current rate cards before you bank on those exact percentages, because both change, but the shape of the gap has held for years.
Two caveats that bite. International cards cost Australian merchants meaningfully more than domestic ones, so an Australian store with a big expat or NZ customer base doesn't get the headline rate on all of it. And if you use a third-party gateway instead of Shopify Payments, you pay Shopify an additional percentage per order — around 2% on Basic, falling to a fraction of a percent on Advanced. That surcharge exists in both markets and it is the reason most stores that can use Shopify Payments should.
Buy now, pay later quietly reverses the advantage
Afterpay and Zip are close to default in Australian retail. Shoppers expect them, and on higher-ticket categories the conversion lift is real. The merchant fee is not.
Take the same A$150,000 store and assume a quarter of revenue goes through a BNPL provider at roughly 4.2% + A$0.30. That A$37,500 slice costs about A$1,574 in fees, against A$600 if it had gone through on a debit card. Roughly A$975 a month of the A$1,650 you saved on interchange, handed straight back.
That's not an argument against offering it. It's an argument for knowing your blended rate rather than your card rate, and for not comparing your Australian economics to a US store's without checking payment mix. US merchants have access to Shop Pay Installments through Shopify's own integration, which changes their cost structure in ways that don't map onto the Australian setup at all.
One GST rate versus fifty sets of rules
An Australian merchant registers for GST once past the A$75,000 turnover threshold, charges 10%, and files with the ATO. Prices are displayed inclusive. Done.
A US merchant has economic nexus to track in every state they sell into, thresholds that differ by state, product taxability that differs by state, and tax displayed exclusive of price at checkout. Shopify Tax handles the calculation reasonably well, and takes a cut above a free order threshold on some plans. The compliance filing is still yours.
This is the difference founders underestimate when they expand from Sydney into the US. The platform cost of selling into America is small. The accounting cost is not. Budget for a sales tax filing service from day one rather than discovering forty registrations later.
Going the other way, an overseas business selling into Australia crosses the same A$75,000 threshold and owes GST on low-value imported goods. Plenty of US brands ship to Australia for two years before anyone tells them this.
Cross-border selling costs Australian stores more per sale
Shopify Payments charges a currency conversion fee when you accept a currency other than your payout currency. For US-based stores that fee sits at 1.5%. Outside the US it's 2%. So an Australian store selling in USD to American customers pays 2% on that revenue that an American store selling in USD does not.
On US$40,000 a month of American sales, that's US$800. It's rarely enough on its own to justify a second store and a second entity, because a separate US store means separate inventory sync, separate content, separate SEO and a real chance of splitting your review volume. But it's enough to factor into the decision once your US revenue passes a few hundred thousand a year. We usually recommend running one store with Shopify Markets until the operational reasons — a US warehouse, US-specific SKUs, a domestic returns address — force a split. The 2% alone doesn't.
Price rounding in Markets is worth ten minutes too. Leaving it on defaults produces US$41.37 price points on your American storefront. Set rounding rules and per-market adjustments so the numbers look deliberate.
What US stores get that Australian ones don't
Shopify's shipping label discounts and negotiated carrier rates are deepest in the US. Australian merchants have Australia Post and Sendle integrations, which are useful, but the discount structure isn't equivalent. Shopify Balance, Shopify Capital availability and some finance products also skew US-first. POS Pro is priced per location in both markets and the local-currency figure is worth checking if you run more than a couple of stores, because it scales linearly and surprises people.
None of this should decide where you incorporate. It should decide what you don't assume works the same way when you read an American growth playbook.
Shopify Plus: quoted in USD, and often premature
Plus starts around US$2,300 a month on a multi-year commitment, with a variable platform fee that replaces the flat rate once monthly GMV passes a high threshold. That's dollars, not Australian dollars, for most contracts. At a 0.65 exchange rate the flat fee is roughly A$3,500 a month, or A$42,000 a year, before you've built anything.
For an Australian store doing under about A$1 million a year, Plus rarely pays for itself. The checkout extensibility and B2B features are genuinely good, and the lower Shopify Payments tier helps, but the arithmetic on A$80,000 monthly revenue doesn't work: the processing saving is a few hundred dollars against a A$3,500 subscription step-up. We tell people this regularly and occasionally lose the project over it. The honest trigger for Plus is usually checkout customisation you cannot do otherwise, wholesale running alongside D2C, or a flash-sale traffic profile that needs the headroom. Not revenue for its own sake.
If you're weighing it, our Shopify work in Australia and our US engagements both start with the same question: what specifically can't you do on Advanced?
If you sell in both markets, pick a home and be deliberate
Most brands should run one Shopify store with Markets, payouts in their home currency, and market-specific pricing, domains and content. The 2% conversion fee and the higher international card rate are the price of that simplicity, and for most catalogues it's cheaper than duplicating operations. Split into separate stores when physical fulfilment splits, not when the fee table annoys you.
When the split does happen, the migration of customers, subscriptions and SEO equity is the hard part, not the theme. That's where projects go wrong.
Pull your last three months of payout reports and calculate your actual blended processing rate: total fees divided by total revenue. If it's more than half a percent above your plan's headline domestic rate, your payment mix or your gateway setup is costing you money, and that's fixable in a fortnight. Want a second pair of eyes on the numbers? Send us the store.