Shopify changes their pricing on 1 Jun 2016. The plans’ name are changed accordingly: Basic Shopify, Shopify and Advanced Shopify. It still has 14 days trial, and of course, the most economic and clever way is to contact a Shopify Expert to work with you for a longer trial period for the store development.
From previous experience, most of my client would just need the Basic Shopify plan, as they only put items in store without need for detail report or gift card support. If clients need specific feature that only available in particular Shopify plan, before suggesting them to select the plan with that specific feature, I would show them the different of the potential cost among different plans.
I have the sheet below which I wrote for a client who original have the Unlimited Shopify Plan (Advanced Plan) and consider how would it be different for his store if he downgrade his plan.
In the sheet, I have 3 tables:
- $299 Plan and $79 Plan the change in total running cost
- $29 Plan and $79 Plan the change in total running cost
- $179Plan and $79 Plan the change in total running cost
In each table, I show the plan cost, the gross transaction, the corresponding transaction fee (using third party payment like PayPal / PayDollar) and the total store running cost. You can see if your store has around HKD$350000 or USD $44872 gross transaction. Use $299 plan would be more economic.
So if you are running very simple Shopify store with $29/mo, if your monthly transaction is more then HKD$30000 or USD$3846, using $79 would be more economic.
For my client, he is currently using the old Unlimited $179 Plan, Shopify does not change this monthly price unless he changes the plan; When I help review, his plan will only be economic to him if his business cans produce $157000 gross sale per month. Yet, his business is still require some time to reach this sale level, and he needs not the advanced report feature, I recommend him to downgrade the plan so as to save the cost.
For my client, he is delighted to see this information and suggested arrangement for him; For me, my monthly commission is actually reduced by almost half. However, I believe this is definitely good for my client so as to help them running their business in lower cost. The lower the cost for their business, the higher the chance of success of their Shopify business.