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By Tom Hooker, founder ·
£1,800 a month on a three-year term, or £1,950 on one year. Then the project: from £10k to upgrade a Shopify store, or £15k–£50k+ to migrate onto Plus.
Shopify Plus costs £1,800 a month on a three-year term, or £1,950 a month on a one-year term, for a standard setup in the UK. Those figures are Shopify’s, checked on 3 November 2026 on the UK pricing page and the Help Center Plus plan page. More complex or higher-volume businesses may move onto a variable platform fee. Shopify does not publish the threshold or the rate.
The licence is usually the smaller part of year one. The project to upgrade an existing Shopify store, or to migrate from Magento, WooCommerce or Cart.com, sits on top, and apps are extra and vary by store. On The Road is a Shopify Partner since 2016 with 27 five-star reviews. This page is the budget, not a quote.
Last checked: 3 November 2026.
Shopify lists Plus in pounds for the United Kingdom, the Falkland Islands and Jersey. The UK pricing comparison shows Plus as “Starts at £1,800 GBP/mo”. The Help Center table splits that into the two terms below. Both are billed monthly. There is no separate “pay yearly and save” price for Plus, unlike Basic, Grow and Advanced.
The three-year term is £1,800 a month. The one-year term is £1,950 a month. A year on the three-year term is 12 × £1,800 = £21,600. A year on the one-year term is 12 × £1,950 = £23,400. The one-year term costs £1,800 more per year (£23,400 − £21,600).
A full three-year commitment is 36 × £1,800 = £64,800 in licence fees, before any variable platform fee. Shopify’s UK pricing FAQ says: “If you choose a 1- or 3-year Plus subscription, you can cancel when your term commitment expires.” You are not buying a month-to-month plan you can drop after a quiet quarter.
| Term | Monthly licence | One year | Full term |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3-year | £1,800 | £21,600 (12 × £1,800) | £64,800 (36 × £1,800) |
| 1-year | £1,950 | £23,400 (12 × £1,950) | £23,400 |
Shopify’s Help Center says: “For standard setups and integrations. For more complex, higher-volume businesses, there might be a variable platform fee based on your revenue and business model, which differs for B2B and D2C companies.”
No threshold and no rate are published on the pages we checked. The fee differs for B2B and direct-to-consumer orders. Ask Shopify to put the trigger and the rate in the contract before you sign. A board paper that only shows £1,800 a month is incomplete if the contract can move you onto that fee.
On Shopify Payments, the online standard card rate in the UK is 1.3% + 25p on Plus and 1.5% + 25p on Advanced. The 25p is the same, so the rate gap is 0.2 percentage points. If you use a third-party payment provider instead, Shopify adds 0.2% on Plus, 0.6% on Advanced, 1% on Grow and 2% on Basic. The full table is on Shopify’s UK pricing page.
Shopify’s UK pricing page does not label these figures as including or excluding VAT, so this page does not state a VAT treatment.
| Plan | Online standard card rate | Third-party transaction fee |
|---|---|---|
| Plus | 1.3% + 25p | 0.2% |
| Advanced | 1.5% + 25p | 0.6% |
| Grow | 1.7% + 25p | 1% |
| Basic | 2% + 25p | 2% |
Shopify Plus includes up to nine expansion stores. The UK pricing table lists “Free expansion stores: Up to 9”. With the main store, that is an allowance of ten stores. The Help Center says expansion stores are for internationalisation, separate physical locations and other related purposes, and that each live expansion store needs its own theme licence.
A theme licence is not included in the £1,800. Shopify does not publish one theme price, so this page does not invent one. Budget a licence for every expansion store you put live.
Shopify charges for stores beyond that allowance. On 3 November 2026, https://www.shopify.com/uk/plus/pricing redirected to the UK pricing page, which does not publish a per-store amount. This page does not state a number. Ask Shopify before you plan an eleventh store.
Anchor Crafts is the multi-market example on our site, and it is not described as expansion stores. The Anchor Crafts case study is a five-month Shopify Plus project: order middleware, 2,000+ SKUs synced live, 90% less overselling, and multi-currency and language localisation across six markets. That is localisation on the store they launched, not a claim that the project used expansion stores. Separate stores would each need a theme licence. Say which of the two you mean, or the quote will price the wrong thing.
Shopify’s own Help Center lists the extras it does not include in the subscription: Plus Partner custom development, one-time theme purchases, and third-party apps. Two of those routes are agency projects, and they are not the same price.
Upgrading an existing Shopify store to Plus starts from £10k. It is a plan change plus the work Plus is actually for: checkout, B2B and the operational setup. It is not a replatform.
On our Shopify Plus service, an upgrade is checkout, B2B and operations. We use Shopify Functions and checkout UI extensions for pricing, validation and delivery rules. Shopify Scripts stopped executing on 30 June 2026, so anything still depending on Scripts has to be rebuilt. Wholesale, where it is a real channel, means company locations, catalogues and payment terms. ERP and middleware sit beside the store.
An upgrade is often shorter than a replatform. The quote says which one you are buying. You get a fixed price after discovery, a staging store and a launch runbook, and you place test orders before a customer does.
Migrating onto Plus from Magento, WooCommerce or Cart.com is a full migration that happens to land on Plus. Our agency project band for that work is £15k–£50k+. The bottom of the band is a straightforward catalogue. B2B, checkout extensions, ERP and high-volume imports move the quote up.
A typical UK catalogue takes 4–8 weeks. Heavy SKU volume, an ERP or custom checkout logic takes 10–14 weeks. That timeline is the same one on our Shopify migration page. Redirects are part of the migration, not a follow-up. The Magento to Shopify migration guide covers the catalogue, SEO and integration questions that decide where in the £15k–£50k+ band a Magento or Adobe Commerce move will sit.
RVinyl is the high-volume reference, and the case study body is a Plus migration, not a headless rebuild. The RVinyl case study describes a Cart.com migration of more than a million SKUs, with zero downtime, custom checkout logic using Shopify Scripts and Functions, a 98/100 page-speed score and mobile conversions that more than doubled. Scripts have since stopped executing. The client quote on that page says headless. The build description does not, and this page follows the build description.
Split the rest of the budget into what you pay once and what you pay again. The agency project is a one-off: the upgrade from £10k, or the migration at £15k–£50k+. A theme purchase is a one-off, and each live expansion store needs its own. An integration you commission — ERP, middleware, a private app — is usually part of the project quote. If someone has to host and watch it afterwards, that is a separate running cost, agreed when you know the systems, not guessed here.
Apps recur, and Shopify bills them per store. This page does not publish an app total. There is no single honest figure for every Plus merchant, and we will not invent one. The scoping question is which apps you already pay for, and which the new store still needs.
The licence repeats every month for the term. Year two is the licence, the apps you kept, and any new theme licence. It is not another build unless you commission one.
These are illustrations, not a quote and not a project total we delivered. No anonymised year-one project was supplied for this page. The licence lines are Shopify’s UK prices. The project lines are the bottom of our bands. Apps are left off.
Migration example, three-year term, year one: 12 × £1,800 = £21,600 of licence, plus £15,000 at the bottom of the migration band. £21,600 + £15,000 = £36,600 before apps.
Upgrade example, same licence: 12 × £1,800 = £21,600, plus £10,000 at the start of the upgrade band. £21,600 + £10,000 = £31,600 before apps.
Swap the term and the licence line changes. A one-year term is 12 × £1,950 = £23,400, which is £1,800 more than the £21,600 three-year year. The project line does not change with the term. A migration at the bottom of the band on a one-year term is £23,400 + £15,000 = £38,400 before apps.
| Layer | Upgrade an existing Shopify store | Migrate onto Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Licence, 3-year term, year one | £21,600 | £21,600 |
| Agency project | £10,000 (from £10k) | £15,000 (bottom of £15k–£50k+) |
| Apps | Extra, variable | Extra, variable |
| Year-one total before apps | £31,600 | £36,600 |
Fees alone rarely justify Plus. Features do. Advanced billed yearly is £259 a month. Plus on the three-year term is £1,800 a month. The gap is £1,800 − £259 = £1,541 a month.
The online card rate on Shopify Payments is 0.2 percentage points lower on Plus (1.3% + 25p against 1.5% + 25p). The 25p cancels out. £1,541 ÷ 0.002 = £770,500 of online card sales a month before the rate cut alone covers the extra licence.
With a third-party gateway the gap is 0.4 percentage points (0.2% on Plus, 0.6% on Advanced). £1,541 ÷ 0.004 = £385,250 a month. Below those levels, buy Plus for what it unlocks, not for the fee.
| Capability | Advanced | Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Checkout customisation | Limited | Full |
| API rate limits | Up to 2× on select APIs | Up to 10× on select APIs |
| B2B catalogues | Up to 3 | Unlimited |
| Expansion stores | Not included | Up to 9 |
| Headless storefronts | 1 | 25 |
| Inventory locations | 10 | 200 |
Checkout logic is the clearest reason. Shopify Functions and checkout UI extensions can enforce pricing, delivery and validation that a theme cannot. The RVinyl migration needed that: business-specific pricing, discounts and shipping rules on a catalogue of more than a million SKUs. GES is an exhibitor store for JEC World 2027, built in three months, with 12+ languages and 85% of orders placed self-service. Contamac is the operational one: 70% less manual processing, 99.5% subscription uptime and 45% faster fulfilment after automation and a subscription migration. None of those outcomes came from the 0.2 point card-rate gap.
The turnover line we use is the one on the Plus service page: Plus is commonly worth a serious look once turnover is approaching £800,000–£1 million a year, and sometimes earlier if checkout logic is the constraint. Under that, read Shopify Plus vs Shopify before you book the sales call. Advanced at £259 a month billed yearly is the honest comparison, not Basic.
Shopify’s UK pricing page shows Shopify B2B on every plan: up to three catalogues on Basic, Grow and Advanced, and unlimited catalogues on Plus. The Help Center adds what Plus still keeps: direct catalogue assignment to companies and locations, deposit requirements, partial payments, and payment requests per fulfilment. The variable platform fee is also different for B2B and direct-to-consumer orders.
One to three trade catalogues, without deposits or company-level assignment, no longer require Plus. That is already on Shopify’s pricing table.
The List is our B2B app for merchants who need trade accounts, credit and order lists without moving the whole store to Plus. It is $59.99 a month on the Shopify App Store. It is a tool for that job, not a reason to skip a checkout or catalogue requirement that only Plus covers. The product page is The List.
We would tell you not to buy Plus when the scope is a custom theme and a clean migration, and checkout, catalogues and API limits are not blocked. A competitor on Plus is not a reason. A replatform, on its own, is not a reason to take the top tier. If you will not use custom checkout logic, more than three B2B catalogues, expansion stores or the higher API limits, the £1,541 a month gap against Advanced has nothing to pay for.
Buy it when checkout must enforce rules the standard checkout cannot, when wholesale needs unlimited catalogues or deposits, when you need several stores on one contract, or when Advanced API limits are already failing. Turnover approaching £800,000–£1 million a year is when that usually starts. Checkout logic can start it sooner.
No anonymised example of a merchant we advised to stay off Plus was supplied, so this section is the test, not a made-up case. We would rather recommend Advanced, and say what would trigger Plus later, than sell a three-year term you do not need.
Discovery splits day-one work from what can wait: checkout rules, where stock is the source of truth, and who can edit prices. You then get a fixed quote, a staging store and a launch runbook, and you place test orders before a customer does. The licence is paid to Shopify. We do not mark it up. On The Road is a Shopify Partner since 2016 with 27 five-star reviews.
Bring the current platform, the SKU count, whether wholesale is real, and whether checkout rules are the reason Plus came up. The bands on this page are the starting point: from £10k to upgrade, £15k–£50k+ to migrate. Book a scoping call, or contact the studio. The service detail, including timeline, is on the Shopify Plus page, and the wider bands are on pricing.
Shopify lists Shopify Plus in the UK at £1,800 a month on a three-year term or £1,950 a month on a one-year term, for standard setups (Shopify Help Center, checked 3 November 2026). That is £21,600 or £23,400 a year in licence fees, and £64,800 across a full three-year term. Shopify says more complex, higher-volume businesses may move to a variable platform fee based on revenue and business model, and does not publish the threshold, so get it in writing before you sign. Agency build, apps and theme costs are on top of the licence.
Rarely, on fees alone. In the UK, Plus costs £1,541 a month more than Advanced billed yearly (£1,800 versus £259). Its online card rate is 1.3% + 25p against 1.5% + 25p, a saving of 0.2 percentage points. The lower rate covers the extra licence at roughly £770,500 a month in online card sales through Shopify Payments, or roughly £385,250 a month if you use a third-party gateway (0.2% versus 0.6%). Below that, buy Plus for what it unlocks, such as custom checkout logic, expansion stores or unlimited B2B catalogues, not to save on fees.
Shopify Plus includes nine expansion stores alongside the main store. They are not entirely free: Shopify’s Help Center says each live expansion store needs its own theme licence. Shopify charges for stores beyond that included allowance. The UK Plus pricing URL redirected to the main UK pricing page on 3 November 2026 and did not show a per-store price, so this page does not state one.
The one-year term is £1,950 a month, which is £23,400 over twelve months. The three-year term is £1,800 a month, which is £21,600 a year and £64,800 across 36 months. The one-year term costs £1,800 more per year. Shopify’s UK pricing FAQ says you can cancel a 1- or 3-year Plus subscription when the term commitment expires.
Shopify says that for more complex, higher-volume businesses, there might be a variable platform fee based on your revenue and business model, which differs for B2B and direct-to-consumer companies. No threshold or rate is published. Get the fee in writing before you sign.
Not by default. Shopify’s UK pricing page shows up to three B2B catalogues on Basic, Grow and Advanced, and unlimited catalogues on Plus. Plus also adds direct catalogue assignment to companies and locations, deposits, partial payments and payment requests per fulfilment. Three catalogues or fewer, without those Plus-only controls, can stay on a lower plan.
An illustrative year-one budget on the three-year licence is £21,600 of licence (12 × £1,800) plus £15,000 at the bottom of our migration band, which is £36,600 before apps. An upgrade of an existing Shopify store, using the same licence and a £10,000 project, is £21,600 + £10,000 = £31,600 before apps. These are worked examples, not a quote. Apps are extra and vary by store.
You pay Shopify for the Plus licence. On The Road does not mark it up. You pay the agency for the project: from £10k to upgrade an existing Shopify store, or £15k–£50k+ to migrate onto Plus from Magento, WooCommerce or Cart.com.
Page last reviewed: 3 November 2026.
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