Shopify vs Shopify Plus in 2026: Advanced or Plus? Price & Fees

Most growing brands should stay on Shopify Advanced, and move to Shopify Plus only when they need a feature Advanced doesn't have. Advanced costs $399 a month. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a 3-year contract, so the upgrade adds at least about $1,900 a month before any fee savings.

Fee savings alone rarely close that gap below several million dollars a year in online sales. In the Plus projects on our portfolio, the reason to upgrade was always a capability: customer-specific B2B pricing, a customized checkout, separate stores per market, or the room to build custom logic.

Prices and features below were checked on Shopify's pricing page and Help Center on November 8, 2026. They change, and they differ by country, so check the official Shopify pricing page before you sign anything. For the cheaper plans and all the costs around them, see our Shopify pricing guide.

If you don’t have a Shopify store, you can start with a free trial, often followed by discounted first months. The exact offer changes frequently and depends on your region. Use our trial link to register and get to know the Shopify platform. When it comes to Shopify Plus development – schedule a call with us or the Shopify Plus salesperson.

Shopify Advanced vs Shopify Plus at a glance

The admin looks the same on both plans; the differences are in price, commitment, limits and a set of Plus-only features. Here is the side-by-side as of November 2026:

When a smaller store should stay on Shopify instead of Plus

If you're on Basic or Grow, your next step is Advanced, not Plus. Basic costs $39 a month and Grow $105, so Plus at $2,300 is more than 20 times the price of Grow, and almost every reason smaller brands used to give for Plus now works on the regular plans.

Two changes in 2026 moved the line:

• Shopify Markets works on every plan. You can create as many country or region markets as you need, each with its own currency, language, prices, product availability and domain, in one store. Showing local currencies and local payment methods requires Shopify Payments.
• Core B2B works on every plan. Since April 2, 2026, Basic, Grow and Advanced have companies, up to 3 B2B catalogs, net terms and volume pricing. The contextual B2B storefront and checkout need Advanced or Plus.

What Basic and Grow still lack are mostly Advanced features, not Plus ones. Grow allows 5 staff accounts and Basic none beyond the owner, and multi-currency payouts with Shopify Payments start on Advanced. Third-party gateway fees are 2% on Basic and 1% on Grow, so a Grow store paying a third-party gateway often gains more from Advanced (0.6%) than Plus would add on top.

For international selling, the old choice between one global store and separate regional stores still exists, but the default has flipped:

• One store with Markets keeps one catalog, one admin and one team. It's the right start for most brands testing two or three new countries, on any plan.
• Separate regional stores fit when markets need different catalogs, operations, payment providers or teams. On regular plans each extra store is a separate subscription and a separate database; on Plus, up to 9 expansion stores for one brand are included.

So a smaller brand going abroad should launch new markets in one store on Grow or Advanced first, and look at Plus only once it has a Plus-only need from the list below.

How much more does Shopify Plus cost than Advanced?

Shopify Plus costs at least about $1,900 a month more than Advanced billed monthly, and you commit to it for one or three years.

• Advanced is $399 a month in the US, with a lower monthly rate if you pay yearly.
• Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a 3-year term.
• In Europe, Plus starts at EUR 2,100 a month on a 3-year term or EUR 2,250 a month on a 1-year term.
• Over a 3-year term, the minimum Plus subscription is $82,800, against $14,364 for 36 months of Advanced billed monthly.

Larger, more complex businesses don't pay the flat starting price. Shopify moves them to a variable platform fee based on revenue and business model, agreed with its sales team. Shopify doesn't publish the percentage or the revenue level where it starts, so treat any figure you see in third-party articles as an estimate and get a written quote.

You can't walk away from Plus mid-contract. Shopify's pricing FAQ says that on a 1- or 3-year Plus subscription you can cancel when the term commitment expires.

Transaction and payment fees on Advanced and Plus

Plus has lower fees on every payment route, and that's the only part of the price gap that shrinks as you grow.

• Third-party gateway fee. If you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds 0.6% per order on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus.
• Shopify Payments. With Shopify Payments the third-party fee doesn't apply, and card rates are lower on Plus. For stores based in Poland, standard online cards cost 1.65% + PLN 1.20 on Advanced and from 1.45% + PLN 1.20 on Plus. The Plus rate is a "from" rate; your contract may differ.
• BLIK in Poland. Through Shopify Payments, BLIK costs 1.3% + PLN 1.20 on Advanced and 0.9% + PLN 1.20 on Plus.

Shopify Payments has been available to Poland-based merchants since 2025. Many Polish brands still run Przelewy24 or PayU for part of their traffic; on those orders the third-party fee applies.

When does Shopify Plus pay for itself? A fee-only example

On fees alone, Plus pays for itself only at high monthly sales volumes. This is an illustration built from the published prices above, not a quote.

Assumptions:

• Advanced billed monthly at $399; Plus at the $2,300 starting price. The monthly gap is $1,901.
• No variable platform fee, no change in apps or other costs.

If all your online sales go through a third-party gateway, Plus saves 0.4% of sales (0.6% minus 0.2%). The gap closes at $1,901 ÷ 0.004 = about $475,000 a month, or roughly $5.7 million a year.

If all your sales are card payments through Shopify Payments at the Polish published rates, Plus saves 0.2 percentage points. The gap closes at $1,901 ÷ 0.002 = about $950,000 a month, or roughly $11.4 million a year.

Real numbers will move both ways. Paying Advanced yearly makes the gap bigger. A negotiated Plus card rate, cheaper BLIK, or apps you can drop because Plus does the job natively make it smaller. A variable platform fee makes Plus more expensive. Our Shopify plan calculator runs this math for your own revenue and payment mix.

The practical conclusion: unless you're well above these volumes, decide on features. The rest of this guide covers the ones that actually move the decision.

Which features are still Plus-only in 2026?

The list of Plus-only features got shorter in 2026: B2B arrived on lower plans in April, and Shopify Scripts were switched off in June. These are the gaps that still matter.

Checkout customization

Only Shopify Plus lets apps customize the information, shipping and payment steps of checkout and gives access to the Checkout Branding API. On Advanced you get the checkout editor and apps on the Thank you and Order status pages – enough for branding and for content on the confirmation pages.

The old checkout.liquid file no longer works on any plan, so every checkout change now goes through Checkout Extensibility. When we moved The Odder Side to Shopify Plus, its checkout got extensions for pickup points such as DHL and local pickup, plus promotions from discount codes to automatic gifts above a cart value. For Eveline Cosmetics we built a gift-with-purchase with three spending thresholds directly in checkout. Changes like these sit in the steps Advanced can't touch.

Custom logic with Shopify Functions

Only stores on Plus can run custom apps that contain Shopify Functions, which is how you build your own discount, shipping, payment or validation logic. Public apps from the Shopify App Store that use Functions work on every plan.

This matters more since June 30, 2026, when Shopify Scripts stopped running. Scripts were Plus-only too, and Functions replaced them. If an App Store app covers your discount or shipping rule, Advanced is enough. If your rule is specific to your business, such as free shipping that depends on the company, catalog, tags and order value, as we set up for Naturopathica, you're in custom territory, and that points to Plus. Custom apps are part of our Shopify app development work.

What Advanced can do for B2B since April 2026

Since April 2, 2026, Advanced has native B2B: companies and locations, up to 3 active B2B catalogs, net payment terms, volume pricing, quantity rules, vaulted cards and draft orders sent as invoices. Advanced and Plus also both get a contextual B2B storefront and checkout through Shopify Markets; Basic and Grow don't.

Plus is still needed for:

• more than 3 active catalogs
• catalogs assigned directly to a company or company location, which is how you give each customer its own price list
• deposits on companies and draft orders
• partial payments and payment requests per fulfillment

Naturopathica is the kind of B2B setup that needs Plus. We moved more than 2,000 companies and 8,000 locations to its Shopify Plus B2B store, with pricing per company and location, pack-size order rules and payment terms based on customer eligibility. If your wholesale prices are negotiated customer by customer, plan for Plus. If you sell to trade customers from one to three price lists, Advanced now does it.

More on the setup: How to set up Shopify for B2B and wholesale, and the questions our clients ask most before a B2B project in the podcast episode Shopify Plus B2B: common client questions before implementation (in Polish, with an English transcript).

Expansion stores vs Shopify Markets

Plus includes the main store and up to 9 expansion stores for one brand. Each further store costs EUR 250 a month or a revenue share, and a separate brand needs its own Plus contract.

Expansion stores are less of a reason to upgrade than they used to be, because Shopify Markets on every plan handles currencies, languages, prices per market, product availability and local domains in one store. Our own projects show both directions:

• The Odder Side launched on Shopify Plus with four separate stores (European, Polish, American and British) and a custom app to keep them in sync. It later consolidated to three, folding the UK into the European store.
• Eveline Cosmetics went the other way: we merged four Shopify instances serving five stores into one Shopify Plus store on Markets. Subscription and integration costs dropped by up to four times.

Separate stores still make sense when markets need different operations, catalogs or teams. Selsey, which sells in about eight European markets, is building its new market stores with us on Shopify Plus; its CEO talks about the German launch in our episode Mirosław Mikołajczak, Selsey: From Groupon to 2M parcels and 8 European markets (in Polish, with an English transcript). If all you need is local currency, language and prices, Markets on Advanced does it in one store.

Managed Markets, where Global-e acts as merchant of record, isn't a reason for European brands to upgrade: it's offered only to merchants in the continental US and some stores in Canada and the UK.

Staff accounts, locations and POS

Advanced allows 15 staff accounts and 10 inventory locations; Plus has unlimited staff accounts and 200 locations.

Multi-location operations don't need Plus by themselves. The GANT store we launched runs four locations (three stores and a central warehouse), splits orders across them based on Comarch ERP routing and processes standard returns on Shopify Flow. That location count fits within Advanced's limits. What usually pushes retail brands up is a larger team in the admin, more than 10 locations, or POS Pro in many stores: on Plus, 20 POS Pro locations are included, while on Advanced you pay for each one.

Launchpad, Flow and discounts

Launchpad is a Plus-only app for scheduling sales, product drops and restocks: it changes prices, publishes products and switches themes at the start and end of an event. Shopify Flow, which automates tasks such as tagging customers or alerting your team about low stock, is free on Advanced and Plus.

Every plan can combine product, order and shipping discounts. Stacking several product discounts on the same line item is Plus-only.

API limits and headless

Plus gets up to 10x the standard API rate limits on select APIs, against up to 2x on Advanced. That matters for stores that sync large catalogs or order volumes with an ERP, PIM or marketplace hub.

Plus also allows up to 25 headless storefronts, against one on Advanced. If you plan several headless storefronts, Plus is the realistic option.

Choosing between Shopify Advanced and Plus in one table

Use this table to check whether a specific need requires Plus. If none of the "Plus" rows apply to you, Advanced is the better buy.

What moving from Advanced to Plus involves

Upgrading from Advanced to Plus happens through Shopify's sales team and keeps your existing store, so it isn't a migration. The work comes after the contract: building the checkout extensions, Functions, B2B catalogs or expansion stores you upgraded for.

Plan that work before you sign. A Plus contract pays off only once the features you bought it for are live. If you're moving to Plus from another platform, our Shopify migration services cover the replatforming and the Plus setup in one project.

More on Shopify Plus

This guide covers the choice between the regular Shopify plans and Plus. For related questions:

• For what working on Plus looks like day to day, see 8 things you need to know about Shopify Plus.
• For all plans and fees from Basic up, see our Shopify pricing guide.

Talk to us about Shopify Plus

Not sure whether your store has outgrown Advanced? We're a Shopify Premier Partner and build, migrate and run stores on Shopify and Shopify Plus, from B2B portals to multi-market stores. Contact us and we'll go through your setup and tell you honestly whether Plus pays off for you now.