How much does a Shopify store cost in Australia?
There are three bills, and most guides only count two. Shopify charges $56 a month on Basic. A build runs from $1,500 for a fitted theme to $35,000 for a headless storefront. Then there is the app stack, which is the one that surprises people.
- Shopify
- $56 a month
- Theme build
- $1,500–16,000
- Headless
- $15,000–35,000
- Apps
- $0–500 a month
- Card rate
- 1.75% + 30c
- Price
- see our own price list
Shopify prices are AUD list. Ours exclude GST.
Australia · 2026$56 a month to Shopify, and $1,500 to $35,000 to build it.
Shopify's Basic plan in Australia is $56 a month, or $42 if you pay yearly, and it takes 1.75% plus 30 cents from a domestic card sale. That part is fixed, published, and the same for everyone. What varies is the storefront on top of it: $1,500 to $3,500 for a freelancer to set up a bought theme, $9,000 to $16,000 for a custom theme built from a clean base, and $15,000 to $35,000 for a headless storefront where Shopify keeps the checkout and everything a customer sees is yours.
The third bill is apps, and it is the one nobody puts in the budget. Reviews, subscriptions, bundles, upsells, a page builder: $10 to $200 a month each, most of them adding a script to every product page. Work out what the store will run on before you decide what it costs to build.
What Shopify itself charges.
Australian list prices, September 2026. This is the part of the bill that has nothing to do with who builds your store.
| Per month | What you get | On a $100 sale |
|---|---|---|
| Per month $56 Basic · $42 billed yearly | What you get One storefront, the full online store, up to 10 inventory locations. Where nearly every new Australian store starts, and where most stay longer than they expect to. | On a $100 sale 1.75% + 30c, so $2.05. |
| Per month $149 Grow · $114 billed yearly | What you get Staff accounts, better reporting, lower card rates. The upgrade you make when the card-rate saving covers the difference, not before. | On a $100 sale 1.6% + 30c, so $1.90. |
| Per month $575 Advanced · $431 billed yearly | What you get Custom reporting, deeper international shipping, more staff accounts. Rarely earns its place under seven figures of revenue. | On a $100 sale 1.4% + 30c, so $1.70. |
| Per month from $3,700 Plus | What you get Enterprise. Checkout customisation, more storefronts, higher API limits, an account team. | On a $100 sale Negotiated. Third-party gateway fee drops to 0.2%. |
Australian list prices from shopify.com/au/pricing, read on 10 September 2026. Card rates are for a domestic card through Shopify Payments; international and American Express cards cost more, and using a third-party gateway instead adds 0.2% to 2% on top depending on the plan.
The app bill is the one nobody budgets for.
Reviews, subscriptions, bundles, upsells, a page builder, a currency switcher, a loyalty scheme. Apps run from about $10 to $200 a month each, so a store on the $56 plan running eight of them is usually paying more for its apps than for Shopify.
It compounds twice, in money and in speed, because most of them add a script to every product page. POP Local's category pages, the pages people actually shop from, were the slowest thing on the site before we rebuilt them. Every app is a decision you are making about your product page load time, whether or not anyone framed it that way.
What the storefront costs.
What an Australian buyer pays in 2026 to get a store built, on top of Shopify's own subscription. Our own numbers are further down.
| Budget | What that buys | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Budget $0–500 Do it yourself | What that buys A free or paid theme you set up yourself. Shopify's own themes are genuinely good, and a tidy store on Dawn beats a bad custom one every time. | Who it suits A first product, a small range, or finding out whether people will buy at all. |
| Budget $1,500–3,500 A theme, set up for you | What that buys A freelancer installs a paid theme, loads your products, connects payments and shipping and hands it over. Two to three weeks. | Who it suits A launch with a date on it and a catalogue small enough to load by hand. |
| Budget $3,500–9,000 A theme, customised | What that buys A bought theme reworked to your brand. Custom sections, a homepage that is yours rather than the theme's, collection and product pages that match the rest of your world. | Who it suits Brands that need to look distinct without leaving Shopify admin. |
| Budget $9,000–16,000 A custom theme Ours · theme | What that buys Built from a clean base instead of a marketplace theme. Sections and blocks your team rearranges without calling anyone, and only the apps that earn their place. | Who it suits Teams who want everything in one admin and a launch in weeks. |
| Budget $15,000–35,000 A headless storefront Ours · headless | What that buys A custom storefront on a modern framework, with Shopify keeping cart, checkout, payments and inventory. Sub-second pages, and no theme limits on layout, search or filtering. | Who it suits Brand-led stores, large catalogues, content-heavy sites, or a store that lives inside a bigger site. |
Figures exclude GST and exclude Shopify's own subscription and card fees, which you pay to Shopify.
What actually moves the number.
- 01
How many products, and how messy they are.
Forty products with clean data is an afternoon. Ten thousand with variants, options, and images coming from three different places is a project of its own. POP Local has 10,000 across 343 makers.
- 02
Whether the design fits inside what a theme does.
This is the line between a $9,000 build and a $20,000 one. Themes do a great deal well; they do not do arbitrary layout, custom search, or filtering that behaves the way you drew it.
- 03
What the store has to talk to.
Accounting, shipping, email, reviews, a point of sale, a warehouse spreadsheet. Each integration is real work, and each one can wait a week on the other side's API.
- 04
Whether you are moving, and from where.
Products, customers, orders and every old URL redirected. WooCommerce and Squarespace exports are rarely as clean as they look.
- 05
Multi-region and multi-currency.
One store in Australia is one build. Australia and New Zealand with different catalogues, pricing and shipping is meaningfully more, even through Shopify Markets.
- 06
How many people will run it afterwards.
A store one person updates is not the store six people update, with roles, drafts and someone approving before it goes live.
One real store, line by line.
Made Quiet makes premium Australian sports caps. There was a name, a range, a clear idea of the brand, and no store, with a first drop already booked for February.
A week of design, then six working days from first commit to a live store. It sold in its first week, a third of visitors who arrive go on to buy, and seven months in the total is closing on six figures. Here is what it cost, and what it costs to run.
- Client
- New brand, first store
- Scope
- Headless storefront, Sanity content, Klaviyo, reviews
- Built in
- 7 days design, 6 days build. January 2026
- Live at
- madequiet.co
- Design 7 days. Home, collection, product and cart, on their real products
- $3,000
- Development 6 working days. SvelteKit on Cloudflare Workers, Shopify Storefront API, own cart
- $9,000
- Total ex GST
- $12,000
Costs to run
- Shopify Basic plan. Products, cart, checkout and payments
- A$56
- Storefront hosting Cloudflare Workers, their own account
- $0
- Sanity, Klaviyo, Judge.me content, email capture, reviews and star ratings
- $0
No care plan. Changes are quoted and billed by the hour when they want them.
Published with Made Quiet's permission. Excludes GST. Built January 2026.
Ex GSTThis one lands below our own headless floor of $15,000, which is worth explaining rather than hiding. It was January 2026, one small range with no catalogue to migrate, one set of templates, two integrations, and a client whose brand and copy were ready before we started. A store with four hundred products, a WooCommerce migration and an accounting system to stay in sync with is a different build at a different price, and that is what the floor is for. We would quote this one higher today.
What we charge.
- Headless storefront Shopify checkout, storefront built by us
- from $15,000 typically $18–35k
- Custom Shopify theme built from a clean base, not a marketplace theme
- from $9,000 typically $9–16k
- Care plan monitoring, updates, small changes, monthly performance snapshot
- from $250/month
Why we do not build $3,000 stores
Because a store at that price is a theme with your logo on it, and what you save up front gets spent later on apps that paper over what the theme cannot do. We would rather build the thing once. If a fitted theme genuinely is what you need, we will say so on the call and point you at someone who does them well.
Fixed quote after a scoping call. Shopify's subscription and card fees are yours and go to Shopify; they are not part of what we charge.
Ask away.
Eight things people ask before they spend the money. Still one missing? Ask us.
How much does it cost to pay someone to build a Shopify store?
In Australia in 2026, $1,500 to $3,500 for a freelancer to set up a bought theme, $3,500 to $9,000 for that theme customised properly, $9,000 to $16,000 for a custom theme built from a clean base, and $15,000 to $35,000 for a headless storefront. All of it sits on top of Shopify's own subscription, which you pay separately.
How much does Shopify take from a $100 sale?
On the Basic plan in Australia, $2.05, which is 1.75% plus 30 cents through Shopify Payments on a domestic card. Grow takes $1.90 and Advanced takes $1.70. International and American Express cards cost more, and using a third-party gateway instead of Shopify Payments adds another 0.2% to 2% depending on your plan.
How much does a Shopify store cost per month?
$56 a month for Basic in Australia, or $42 if you pay yearly. Apps are where the number really moves, at roughly $10 to $200 a month each, and email marketing adds $20 to $100. A headless storefront hosted on Cloudflare adds close to nothing. Budget $100 to $400 a month all in for a small store that is running properly.
Is Shopify worth it in Australia?
For almost every store below enterprise, yes. What you are buying is checkout, payments, fraud, tax and shipping being somebody else's problem, at a scale you could not build for yourself. The parts worth arguing about are the storefront and the app stack, and those are exactly the parts you can own.
Do we have to use Shopify?
No. We have built on BigCommerce, and custom setups on Stripe and Square. Shopify is the default because it is the one we would pick for ourselves: the part customers trust is handled by a platform that does it at scale, and we do not rebuild that.
Does a headless store cost more to run?
It costs more to build and less to run. The storefront is pre-rendered and served from a CDN, so hosting is close to nothing and pages load in under a second. A theme launches in weeks and keeps everything in one admin. We will tell you which one you want on the first call, and it is not always ours.
What does it cost to move from WooCommerce, Squarespace or Wix?
The migration is usually $1,000 to $4,000 on top of the build. Products, customers, orders and every old URL redirected, so you keep the rankings you have earned. Karis Life and Kea Health both came across from WooCommerce stores that could not take the load.
Why is our current store slow?
Usually apps. Each one adds scripts to every page, and product and collection pages carry the most of them. We audit what is installed, keep what earns its place, rebuild the rest into the storefront, and then measure it rather than claiming it.