If you sell in India, the honest answer to "what will Shopify cost me per order?" is three numbers stacked on top of each other: Shopify's third-party transaction fee, your payment gateway's cut, and 18% GST on that gateway cut. On a Basic plan with a standard Razorpay rate, a prepaid order costs you roughly 4.36% before you've paid for shipping, packaging or the app that sends the order confirmation. Shopify transaction fees are only the first layer, and for most Indian stores they're not the biggest one.
Here's how the stack actually works, where the money leaks, and the one calculation worth doing before you upgrade a plan to save on fees.
Shopify's third-party transaction fee: who pays it and who doesn't
Shopify charges a percentage on orders processed through any gateway that isn't Shopify Payments. At the time of writing that's 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, around 0.6% on Advanced and around 0.2% on Plus. Shopify has revised these tiers more than once, so confirm the current figures on their pricing page before you build a model on them.
The important part: Shopify Payments is not available to Indian merchants. So if you're registered in India, you are paying that fee on every card, UPI, netbanking and wallet order that goes through Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU or Instamojo. There is no version of this where you avoid it by picking a better gateway. Merchants in the US, UK, UAE, Australia and Canada can switch to Shopify Payments and the third-party fee disappears entirely, which is why fee advice written for those markets is close to useless here.
The fee is calculated on the order total, shipping and tax included, not on your margin. A ₹3,000 order with ₹99 shipping is assessed on ₹3,099.
The exception worth knowing: manual payment methods
Shopify's third-party transaction fee applies to orders captured through a payment gateway. Orders placed using a manual payment method, which is how cash on delivery is configured on almost every Indian store, do not attract it. Shopify has no way to charge a percentage on money it never saw move.
That single detail changes the arithmetic dramatically for anyone running 50–60% COD. If half your revenue is collected by a delivery partner in cash, half your revenue is outside Shopify's fee net. It also means the standard advice of "upgrade your plan to cut transaction fees" saves you less than you think, because the saving only ever applies to the prepaid half.
One caveat we've had to explain more than once: some COD apps and partial-COD flows (₹100 advance, balance on delivery) push the advance through your gateway. That advance is a gateway order. Shopify's fee applies to it.
What your gateway really charges once GST is added
Published standard pricing from the major Indian gateways sits around 2% on domestic cards, netbanking and wallets, and roughly 3% on international cards. Those are list prices. They are negotiable, and at anything above ₹1 crore a year you should be asking. We've seen domestic card rates come down meaningfully on a phone call, and almost nobody makes the call.
Then GST. The gateway fee is a service, so 18% GST applies on top of it. A 2% rate is effectively 2.36%. If you're GST registered you can claim input credit, which most founders forget when they build a unit-economics sheet and then wonder why the bank balance doesn't match the model. Cash out is 2.36%; cost after credit is 2%. Model both.
UPI is the genuine exception. MDR on UPI and RuPay debit has been regulated to nil since January 2020, so the interchange cost is zero. What you'll still see on some gateway invoices is a platform or maintenance charge dressed up as a percentage. If your UPI share is 40% of prepaid orders and you're being billed 2% on it, that's a line item worth arguing about.
A worked example you can check
Take a store doing ₹40,00,000 a month, with 55% of orders COD. Prepaid revenue is ₹18,00,000.
- Shopify third-party fee on Basic, 2% of ₹18,00,000 = ₹36,000
- Gateway at 2% + 18% GST, so 2.36% of ₹18,00,000 = ₹42,480
- Total on prepaid = ₹78,480
That's 4.36% of prepaid revenue, and 1.96% of total GMV. Now the upgrade question. Moving from Basic to Grow takes the Shopify fee from 2% to 1%, saving 1% of ₹18,00,000 = ₹18,000 a month. The plan price gap between Basic and Grow is a fraction of that, so the upgrade pays for itself several times over. Easy call.
Basic to Advanced is where founders get it wrong. Advanced takes the fee to roughly 0.6%, saving another 0.4% of prepaid revenue: ₹7,200 a month. Compare that against the Grow-to-Advanced plan price gap in rupees. At ₹18 lakh of prepaid revenue it usually doesn't clear, and you should upgrade to Advanced for the reporting, the shipping rates and the checkout extensibility headroom, not for the fee saving.
The formula is one line. Monthly plan price difference divided by the fee difference expressed as a decimal gives you the prepaid revenue at which the upgrade breaks even. A ₹5,500 monthly gap against a 1 percentage point fee drop breaks even at ₹5,50,000 of prepaid revenue a month. Below that, stay where you are. We go through this with every client considering Shopify Plus, and the fee tier is almost never the reason Plus makes sense. Checkout customisation, B2B, multiple storefronts and Launchpad are.
COD is the fee nobody puts in the spreadsheet
Your COD orders dodge Shopify's transaction fee, so founders file them as cheap. They are the most expensive orders on the store.
Courier rate cards typically charge a COD remittance fee of ₹25–₹50 per shipment or 1.5–2% of the collected value, whichever is higher. On a ₹1,200 order at 2%, that's ₹24, which is already comparable to the full prepaid fee stack. Then there's the money that never arrives: in the apparel and footwear stores we work on, return-to-origin on COD runs well into double digits, and every RTO costs you forward freight, return freight and a re-quality-check. One failed COD order can wipe out the fee saving on twenty successful ones.
Which is why the sensible lever isn't plan tiers. It's shifting order mix. A 5% prepaid discount, UPI as the default and most prominent option at checkout, and COD disabled above a value threshold will do more for your payment economics than any Shopify plan change. We've seen a prepaid nudge move mix by 8–12 percentage points inside a month on stores where COD was the path of least resistance.
Cross-border: the fee layer that catches exporters
Selling to the US, UAE or UK from an Indian entity adds two costs. International card rates are higher, commonly around 3% before GST. And if you're presenting prices in USD or AED while settling in INR, somebody is taking a currency conversion spread. Shopify Markets charges a conversion fee where it handles the conversion; your gateway takes its own spread where it does. Read which one applies to your setup, because paying both is possible and we've found it on live stores.
Duties and import taxes are a separate conversation, but they belong in the same sheet. An unexpected customs bill at the doorstep is a refund request, and a refund has its own fee consequences.
Refunds and chargebacks: money that doesn't come back
Refund a customer and you return the order value. The processing fee is a different matter, and it depends on your gateway contract. Several Indian gateways retain the transaction fee on a refunded order, and some charge a separate refund processing fee on top. Find the clause in your agreement rather than assuming. If you run a category with a 25% return rate, the difference between "fee refunded" and "fee retained" is a real number in your P&L.
Chargebacks are worse. A disputed card transaction carries a fixed representment fee regardless of whether you win, and the documentation burden falls on you. Most Indian D2C brands see very few, because UPI and COD dominate. Stores selling internationally on cards see more.
Apps that bill as a percentage of revenue
This is the fee layer nobody counts as a transaction fee, and on some stores it's larger than Shopify's. Subscription apps, upsell apps, loyalty and referral tools, reviews platforms with revenue-share pricing, affiliate tracking — plenty of them price on a percentage of attributed or total GMV. Stack three of those and you've quietly added 1–2% to every order.
Audit the app bill once a quarter. Sort by cost, not by install date. We regularly find two apps doing overlapping jobs, and one of them billing on a percentage while the fixed-price alternative would cost a tenth as much. If a percentage-billed app is doing something your theme could do natively, replacing it is one of the highest-return jobs on a Shopify store, and usually cheaper than founders expect. Our notes on what Shopify development actually costs in India break down where that kind of work lands.
The order to fix things in
Fees are a stack, so attack them in order of size, not in order of how easy they are to find.
- Pull three months of payout statements from your gateway and reconcile them against Shopify's order export. Not the dashboard summary. The statements. Rate mismatches between what you negotiated and what you're billed are more common than they should be.
- Split your revenue into prepaid and COD. Calculate the fee load on each separately. They behave nothing alike.
- Run the plan break-even formula on prepaid revenue only.
- Negotiate your gateway rate, and specifically ask what you're paying on UPI.
- Work on order mix. Prepaid share is the lever with the biggest number attached to it.
- Audit percentage-billed apps last, but do audit them.
If you want a second pair of eyes on the numbers, our free store audit covers checkout and payment configuration alongside speed and SEO. Bring a gateway statement and a month of order data. That's enough to tell you within an hour whether your fee load is normal for your category or whether something's quietly wrong.