How Much Does a Shopify Store Cost in 2026?

You're not just paying for the subscription. You know that already, you just don't know how much more.

Shopify is one of the most popular platforms for new Dutch online stores in 2026. That's no accident: the platform is mature, reliable and scalable. But Shopify's pricing page tells you one thing, and the real cost of a professional store is something else entirely.

This is the breakdown I give when someone asks me what a Shopify store costs. Not the marketing version. The version where I don't want to call you in three years asking "why isn't this thing converting?"

Shopify subscription costs: what you see on the pricing page

Shopify has three main plans in 2026 (pricing):

• Basic: $39 per month on month-to-month billing, or $29 per month on annual billing. Suitable for starters with a limited product range.
• Grow (renamed from "Shopify" in 2026): $105 per month, or $79 on annual billing. Good for growing stores with multiple staff members.
• Advanced: $399 per month, or $299 on annual billing. Relevant if you're seriously exporting or need advanced reporting.

The numbers you see most often ($29/$79/$299) are the annual-billing prices: an annual contract saves you 25% compared to month-to-month. But that saving is quickly wiped out by what's listed below.

What the pricing page doesn't mention: Shopify charges transaction fees if you don't use Shopify Payments. Basic: 2%, Grow: 1%, Advanced: 0.5% per transaction. If you process 50,000 euros per month through an external PSP on the Basic plan, you're paying 1,000 euros extra per month to Shopify. That's 12,000 euros per year on top of your subscription.

Shopify Payments is available in the Netherlands. But it's not usable for everyone, certain product categories are excluded, and some businesses have an existing payment relationship with another provider. Check this before choosing a plan.

Domain and email are separate. A domain costs 10-20 euros per year. Shopify Email has a free tier, but if you're doing serious email marketing, you'll use Klaviyo or a comparable tool, that's a separate line item.

Subscription cost summary:

• Basic: ~$29-39/mo (depending on billing cycle)
• Grow: ~$79-105/mo
• Advanced: ~$299-399/mo
• PSP transaction fees: 0-2% depending on plan and provider

Apps: the cost item most store owners underestimate

This is where most cost estimates go wrong.

A Shopify store without apps doesn't exist. The platform is deliberately built lean, the core features are solid, but the moment you need something specific, you grab an app. And apps cost money. Monthly.

The average business running a serious Shopify store has 6-8 active apps. Costs per app range from $5 to $150+ per month. Add them up and you're quickly at $200-400 per month.

What are those apps? The most common categories:

Reviews and social proof: Yotpo, Judge.me, Okendo. Price: $15-150/mo. Nearly indispensable, the vast majority of shoppers read reviews before buying.

Email marketing and retention: Klaviyo, Omnisend, Drip. Price: depends on list size, but quickly $50-200/mo. This is your primary retention channel. Cutting here is rarely smart.

SEO and site speed: Booster apps, metafield editors, schema markup tools. Price: $10-50/mo. Most are unnecessary if your store is properly built.

Upsell and cross-sell: ReConvert, Frequently Bought Together, CartHook. Price: $15-100/mo. Direct impact on average order value.

Loyalty and retention: Smile.io, LoyaltyLion, Yotpo Loyalty. Price: $49-199/mo. Relevant once you want to drive repeat purchases.

Internationalisation: Weglot, LangShop, Translate & Adapt. Price: $15-100/mo. Necessary if you serve multiple language markets.

Inventory management, bundles, subscriptions: each with their own price tag.

The trap: you install apps step by step, approve each individual charge, and twelve months later you stop looking at the total. I've seen stores with 600+ euros per month in apps where half weren't actively used anymore, but the invoices kept running.

Rule: audit your apps every quarter. Remove what you no longer need. Every app you remove saves immediately.

App cost summary:

• Starters (3-4 essential apps): $50-150/mo
• Growing stores (6-8 apps): $200-400/mo
• Mature stores (10+ apps): $400-700/mo

Design and development costs: the one-time investment that determines your future revenue

This is the part where I want to be clear, even if it's uncomfortable to hear.

Buying a Shopify theme for 300 euros and putting it live is not a store. It's a product catalogue. The difference is conversion.

The average Shopify store converts at 1.4%, the top 10% at 4.7% (global Shopify benchmarks). That gap isn't the result of a better product or a bigger ad budget. It's largely design, brand strategy and mobile optimisation, see also why many webshops don't convert.

Run the numbers: at 50,000 visitors per month, the difference between 1.4% and 3% conversion is 800 extra transactions per month. At an average order value of 75 euros, that's 60,000 euros in additional monthly revenue. From the same traffic volume.

That makes "what does a good store cost?" the wrong question. The right question is: what is bad design costing you?

What are the options and what do they cost?

Free or paid theme ($0-350, self-customisation): Suitable if you have no budget and are willing to invest time. The result is generic. Rarely converts above average.

Theme customisation by a freelancer (500-2,000 euros): Cheaper than custom work, but also more limited. You're adjusting what's already there, you're not building a brand.

Custom design by an agency (5,000-25,000 euros): Depending on scope, complexity and agency. This is the segment Oase operates in: complete stores built on brand strategy, conversion psychology and mobile optimisation.

Enterprise/custom development (25,000 euros+): Relevant for large catalogues, complex integrations, or headless commerce.

What determines the price at an agency? Not just billable hours, but the approach. A good agency doesn't start with Figma, it starts with positioning. Who is the customer? What's the buying behaviour? What does the competition do? Only then does design have direction. The difference between a logo and a brand is also covered in branding versus logo.

At Oase we deliver this in 28 days: brand strategy, UX, design, Shopify setup, app configuration, and mobile optimisation as standard. That's not an upsell, that's the baseline. A store without that foundation is an opportunity left on the table.

One-time design and build cost summary:

• Self-customised theme: 0-350 euros
• Theme customisation by freelancer: 500-2,000 euros
• Custom agency store: 5,000-25,000 euros
• Enterprise custom: 25,000 euros+

How much does Shopify maintenance cost per year?

A store is not a brochure. It's a system you need to actively maintain.

What falls under maintenance?

Shopify platform updates: Shopify regularly updates its platform. Most updates are transparent, but some require action from you or your developer. A good example is what's happening right now.

Shopify Scripts deprecation (urgent in 2026): Shopify Scripts, a popular system for discounts and promotions at checkout level, will be marked deprecated on April 15, 2026 and stops entirely on June 30, 2026. Stores using Scripts for discount stacking, free products at certain order values, or advanced B2B pricing need to migrate to Shopify Functions before June 30.

That migration requires development work. Shopify Functions are more powerful and flexible, but the logic needs to be rewritten. Depending on the complexity of your Scripts: 500-3,000 euros in development costs.

If you have a Shopify store and don't know whether you use Scripts, check now. In your Shopify admin, go to Apps, then Script Editor. If you see active scripts there, you need to act before June 30.

App updates and conflicts: Apps are continuously updated. Sometimes an update breaks something on your site. Monitoring this costs time or money (through a maintenance contract).

Content updates: Updating product pages, swapping banners for seasons or campaigns, building landing pages for promotions. You do this yourself or outsource it.

Performance monitoring: Load times, mobile rendering, broken links, checkout errors. Every extra second of load time costs an average of 7% conversion. A slow store is an expensive store.

What does maintenance cost per year?

• Doing it yourself (with knowledge): 0 euros in cash, but hours of investment
• Freelancer on call: 500-2,000 euros per year for standard updates
• Agency maintenance (monthly contract): 200-600 euros per month
• Emergency costs for crises (store down, checkout error): unpredictable, but 200-500 euros per incident is realistic

Annual maintenance cost summary:

• Minimum (DIY): 0 euros
• Realistic average: 1,500-4,000 euros/year
• With active agency contract: 2,400-7,200 euros/year

Migration: what it costs to switch from WooCommerce or another platform

WooCommerce is losing market share to Shopify and other hosted platforms. Many store owners are considering the switch to Shopify. That switch has costs you need to estimate upfront.

What gets migrated?

• Product data (titles, descriptions, variants, prices, SKUs)
• Customer data (including account history, addresses)
• Order history (for analytics and tax purposes)
• Content (blog posts, pages)
• SEO (URL structure, redirects, metadata)
• Integrations (accounting software, ERP, fulfilment)

The technical migration of product data is manageable. The challenge is in the details:

SEO redirects: Every URL that changes is potential loss of organic traffic. A WooCommerce shop running on /product/product-name needs to either maintain the same URL structure on Shopify, or set up proper 301 redirects. This isn't optional, it's the difference between keeping your SEO and starting over.

Checkout flow adjustments: WooCommerce has a different checkout structure than Shopify. Custom checkout logic (discount stacking, field validation, B2B flows) needs to be rebuilt.

App parity: Not every WooCommerce plugin has a Shopify equivalent. Inventory which functionalities you currently have and how they'll be solved on Shopify before you start.

Migration costs:

• Simple migration (products + customers, standard setup): 1,000-3,000 euros
• Mid-range migration (with SEO redirects, custom logic): 3,000-8,000 euros
• Complex migration (ERP integrations, large catalogues, multi-currency): 8,000-20,000 euros+

If you're considering the switch: plan the migration outside your peak season. A migration right before the holiday season is an unnecessary gamble.

The total tally: what a Shopify store costs per year

Now for the full picture. These are the realistic annual figures for a professional Shopify store that's seriously used as a sales channel.

Recurring annual costs:

One-time setup costs:

These aren't theoretical figures. These are the actual costs I see across the stores I work with.

What I notice: the businesses that complain the most about Shopify costs are the ones that started too cheaply. They paid 350 euros for a theme, added $200/mo in apps months later, and eventually hired an agency anyway to fix it.

The businesses that are most satisfied? They invested upfront in design and strategy, then kept their recurring costs low because their store was properly built from the start.

Why the cheapest option is the most expensive

There's a reason the average Shopify store sits at 1.4% conversion while the top 10% hits 4.7%.

That gap doesn't exist because successful stores spend more on ads. It exists because they invested more in the store itself, in design, brand identity, and mobile conversion optimisation.

The maths is simple. Say: 10,000 visitors per month, average order value 60 euros.

• At 1.4% conversion: 140 transactions x 60 euros = 8,400 euros/mo
• At 3.0% conversion: 300 transactions x 60 euros = 18,000 euros/mo
• At 4.7% conversion: 470 transactions x 60 euros = 28,200 euros/mo

The difference between an average store and a top performer is 19,800 euros per month from the same traffic volume. That's 237,600 euros per year.

Set that against a 15,000 euro investment for a professional store with brand strategy. That ROI closes in year one.

This is why at Oase we refuse to build stores without brand strategy. Not because we're difficult, but because a generic Shopify setup doesn't convert, and I don't want to deliver that to you.

What the Shopify Scripts deprecation means for your store in 2026

This deserves its own section, because it's urgent and many store owners aren't aware of it yet.

Shopify Scripts are small Ruby scripts you can write for checkout-level logic: stacking discounts, adding free products at a minimum order value, calculating customer-group-specific pricing. They became popular because they were flexible for B2B scenarios and complex promotional structures.

As of April 15, 2026, Scripts are officially deprecated. As of June 30, 2026, they stop working. That's less than three months from now.

The replacement is Shopify Functions, a more modern system that's more capable and faster, but requires a different technical implementation. Functions are written in Rust or AssemblyScript (or via a Shopify UI extension), and can be used for the same use cases as Scripts, plus more.

What you need to do:

1. Check whether you use Scripts (Shopify admin, then Apps, then Script Editor)
2. Inventory what logic they contain
3. Plan the migration to Functions before June 30
4. Test thoroughly, checkout logic that breaks has direct revenue impact

If you're having a Shopify store built right now and your developer doesn't mention Scripts: ask about it. Any store delivered in 2026 still running on Scripts has a ticking clock.

At Oase we build new stores on Functions by default. We also handle migration of existing Scripts, but the sooner you start, the lower the risk.

The next step for your store

If you want a Shopify store built to convert rather than just exist: that's exactly what we do at Oase. We build complete Shopify stores in 28 days, including brand strategy, mobile optimisation and app configuration.

If you already have a store and want to know why conversion is lagging: webshop design at Oase always starts with an analysis of what's currently wrong before we touch anything.

The honest cost of a Shopify store in 2026

The question "how much does a Shopify store cost?" doesn't have an honest answer of $29 per month. The answer is:

• Recurring costs: 1,200-15,000 euros+ per year, depending on apps and plan
• One-time build costs: 350-25,000 euros+, depending on quality and approach
• Hidden costs: transaction fees, migration, Scripts update, maintenance

But the real answer is this: a store is not a cost item. It's a conversion machine. And the difference between an average and a good conversion machine is larger than the one-time investment to reach that quality.

The cheapest Shopify store is rarely the cheapest choice. The numbers prove it.