How much does a Shopify website cost in Australia?

A Shopify store costs what you spend to build it plus what you spend to run it. The build is a one-off. The running costs are monthly and they are the part people forget.

At the low end you can build it yourself on a free theme and pay Shopify's monthly plan and little else. At the high end, a large brand on Shopify Plus pays a platform fee that starts at $3,700 a month as of late 2026, on top of a build. In between sit freelancers, agencies running a premium theme, and fully custom builds.

Our own packages are published, so we can be exact about those. We have no way to verify what other studios charge, so we describe how their pricing works instead of printing a number we cannot back up. Every Shopify figure on this page comes from Shopify's Australian pricing page. The sources are listed at the end.

Shopify is designed so one person can launch a store. You choose a plan, install a theme, add products, set up payments, and publish. Shopify has offered a trial of 3 days free and then $1 a month for 3 months on most plans, and says no credit card is required to start. Check the current offer on Shopify's pricing page before you sign up.

Shopify's free themes cost nothing and are updated by Shopify. Paid themes are a one-off licence rather than a subscription. Each licence covers one store.

What DIY does not include

• Your time. A 40-product store takes longer than you think once photography, descriptions, variants and policies are counted.
• Australian setup done correctly: GST and tax-inclusive pricing, shipping zones, and a returns policy that matches the Australian Consumer Law.
• Search protection. If you are moving from another platform, a missed redirect map costs rankings. See our migration checklist.
• Speed and design judgement. A theme installed with defaults looks like every other store using that theme.

DIY is the right call for a brand testing demand with a small catalogue. It stops being the right call when your time is worth more than the build fee or when a mistake in tax or redirects would cost you more than doing it properly.

A freelancer typically configures a theme, loads products and connects payments. Pricing is by quote or by the day, and it varies widely with experience and what is included. We will not print a range for freelancers because we cannot verify one.

What to check before you hire:

• Who owns the store? You should be the store owner and they should be a collaborator with limited permissions.
• What happens when they are unavailable? Ask who fixes a broken checkout on a Friday night.
• Is GST, shipping and Afterpay setup in the quote, or are they extras?
• Do they hand over a way for your team to edit pages without breaking the layout?

This is a premium Shopify theme, set up properly and styled to your brand. It suits a new brand or a first store that wants a professional result without a bespoke design budget.

Our version is Launch: $8,900 ex GST, delivered in 4 to 6 weeks. It includes a premium Online Store 2.0 theme styled to your brand, up to 150 products loaded with variants and images, Shopify Payments and Afterpay or Zip, GST and shipping zones, welcome and abandoned-cart email flows, Google Analytics 4 and Search Console, and on-page SEO for every page. With GST added, $8,900 is $9,790.

Read our Shopify store design page for what the process looks like week by week.

A custom build is a store designed from scratch in Figma and built as your own theme. It suits an established brand that has outgrown a template, has a distinctive product or buying journey, or is migrating from another platform and wants the new store to be better than the old one, not just the same.

Our Custom package is $18,500 ex GST over 8 to 10 weeks. It includes bespoke design for desktop and mobile, theme sections your team can edit without us, migration from WooCommerce, Neto, BigCommerce, Wix or Squarespace, a full 301 redirect map, and 30 days of priority fixes after launch. See custom Shopify themes and Shopify migration.

Shopify Plus is the enterprise tier. Shopify's Australian pricing page lists it from $3,700 a month as of late 2026. It adds the lowest card rates, checkout extensibility, and the tools used for B2B, multiple markets and integrations with systems such as NetSuite.

Plus builds are quoted after a scoping call because the work depends on the integrations, the number of markets and the wholesale rules. Ours start at 12 weeks. Whether you need it at all is a separate question, and we cover it in is Shopify Plus worth it in Australia. Plenty of brands doing serious revenue are better off on Advanced.

These are the recurring costs that sit behind any of the five routes above.

The Shopify plan

We go through what each plan includes in Shopify pricing in Australia.

Card fees and transaction fees

With Shopify Payments, online card rates start at 1.7% + 30 cents on Basic, 1.55% + 30 cents on Grow and 1.35% + 30 cents on Advanced. If you use a gateway other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced, and the gateway charges its own rates on top.

On a $100 sale paid by an Australian card, the Shopify Payments fee is $2.00 on Basic, $1.85 on Grow and $1.65 on Advanced. That is simple arithmetic from the published rates, and it is a good way to compare plans against your volume.

Apps

Apps are billed monthly by the app developer and each listing in the Shopify App Store shows its own price. A typical store runs a handful: email and SMS, reviews, subscriptions or bundles, a search and filter tool. The mistake is installing apps for jobs the theme already does. Part of our job on a build is deciding what the theme handles and what really needs an app. See apps and integrations.

Theme licence

If you pick a paid theme from the Shopify Theme Store, the licence is a one-off charge for one store. Free themes carry no licence cost.

Domain, email and your own people

A .com.au domain and a business inbox are small annual and monthly costs, billed by your registrar and mail provider. They are easy to forget when you add up a budget.

Ongoing support

Somebody has to update apps, check the checkout after changes, and make edits. You can do it, or you can pay for it. Our month-to-month care plans are Care at $390 a month, Growth at $1,450 and Partner at $2,900, all ex GST. Care is for a store that mostly runs itself. Growth adds a monthly improvement and SEO work. Partner is for brands that want an in-house team without hiring one.

Here is an illustrative first year for a new brand that chooses our Launch package and runs on the Grow plan billed yearly. The build is $8,900. Shopify Grow on yearly billing is $114 a month, which is $1,368 for the year. Add the Care plan at $390 a month, or $4,680 for the year. All of these are ex GST, so the sum is $14,948 before GST and before apps, domain and any card fees.

That total is just arithmetic from published prices. Your apps, product photography, copywriting and advertising are the variable costs, and they are usually larger than people expect.

• Validating an idea with under a few dozen products: build it yourself on a free theme and pay for design later.
• A small catalogue and a tight budget, with someone on your team who can maintain it: a freelancer or our Launch package.
• An established brand with real revenue, moving from WooCommerce, Neto, BigCommerce, Wix or Squarespace: a custom build, with a migration plan that protects your rankings. See WooCommerce to Shopify or Neto to Shopify.
• Wholesale, multiple regions or an ERP: scope a Plus build and ask whether you need Plus or just Advanced with the right apps.

If you would like a figure for your own catalogue, send us the details. We quote a fixed price and we say plainly if a cheaper route is the better one.