Shopify Store Setup: Plans, Themes, Apps, and Launch

Shopify store setup is mostly reversible. Themes swap, apps uninstall, plans upgrade from a settings page. One decision doesn’t behave that way: the gateway you route card volume through, because Shopify adds a platform fee of up to 2% of every order on top of your processor’s own rate whenever that processor isn’t Shopify Payments.

Most people opening a first store land in one of two camps. The first spends 3 weeks on the theme, then picks a payment gateway in 4 minutes on launch day. The second reads every pricing comparison on the internet, upgrades to a plan built for six-figure months, and still hasn’t written a product description.

The order you do this in decides how much of it you redo.

Which Shopify Plan to Start On

Start on Basic. At $29 a month on annual billing it carries unlimited products, unlimited orders, 24/7 chat support, and Shopify Payments with no platform fee stacked on card processing. Higher tiers don’t change what you can sell, only what each transaction costs and how deep the reporting goes.

Those headline figures are annual-billing prices. Month to month, the same three tiers cost $39, $105, and $399.

Pay yearly.

Plan	Annual Billing	Monthly Billing	Online Card Rate (From)	Third-Party Gateway Fee
Basic	$29/mo	$39/mo	2.9% + 30 cents	2%
Grow	$79/mo	$105/mo	2.7% + 30 cents	1%
Advanced	$299/mo	$399/mo	2.5% + 30 cents	0.6%
Plus	from $2,300/mo	Custom	2.25% + 30 cents	0.2%

The mid tier is called Grow now. Shopify retired “Shopify” as a plan name, so a guide telling you to upgrade to “the Shopify plan” was written before the rename and its fee numbers are probably stale too.

Read the card column as a floor. Shopify publishes those as “card rates from”: premium cards run 3.5% + 30 cents and international cards add 1%, so any cross-border demand blends you above the table. The Shopify pricing page carries the current comparison.

Break-even = (monthly plan difference) / (card rate difference)

Basic to Grow: $50 / 0.002 = $25,000 a month in card-processed revenue

Grow to Advanced: $220 / 0.002 = $110,000 a month in card-processed revenue

The saving between consecutive tiers is 0.2 percentage points every time, so the plan price does all the work in that division and both jumps sit much further out than the dashboard implies. If you’re still choosing a platform, our breakdown of the best ecommerce platforms for startups runs the same arithmetic across the alternatives.

One plan isn’t on the menu: Starter at $5 a month. Shopify’s help docs state it isn’t available to new stores, and merchants who leave it can’t come back.

It’s closed.

How to Set Up a Shopify Store

Work in this order: product data, domain, theme, payments, shipping, taxes, legal pages, then remove password protection. Design depends on product data, so a theme picked before you know your variant count and image ratios is a theme you’ll rebuild.

1. Add one real product first. Five or more images, the actual variants, and a description you’d defend to a customer. Our guide to writing a product description that sells covers the structure that survives being read on a phone.
2. Buy the domain outside Shopify. Shopify’s own blog puts a .com at about $16 a year. Cloudflare Registrar sells at cost, currently around $10.46 with the ICANN fee, so the real saving is $5 to $6 a year rather than the $10-plus figure that circulates. Namecheap’s renewal sits roughly level with Shopify’s, and the Verisign wholesale fee rises to $10.97 on 1 November 2026.
3. Turn on Shopify Payments. It covers roughly 40 countries and regions, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Denmark. Where it isn’t offered, Stripe is the better second choice.
4. Set shipping zones with weight-based or price-based rates. A flat rate is fine for version 1, as long as it’s one you can absorb.
5. Configure tax. US: Shopify Tax. EU and UK: register for VAT where thresholds apply. India: GST against your GSTIN.
6. Rewrite the generated legal pages. Shopify drops your store name into refund, privacy, terms, and shipping templates. That’s a placeholder, not a policy.
7. Remove password protection and go live.

Product data and policy pages eat the calendar.

Design is the part that feels like progress and isn’t.

Which Shopify Theme to Pick

Start on a free Shopify-built theme and pay only when a named conversion feature is missing. Shopify shipped Horizon on 21 May 2025, a set of 10 free themes built on theme blocks, and it’s what a store opened today gets steered toward.

Horizon. Free, Shopify-built, and the theme-blocks foundation Shopify’s own editor tooling is now developed against. Ten variants ship in the collection, so picking one is a styling choice rather than a platform one.

Dawn. Still free and maintained, and still the theme almost every tutorial and app doc assumes. That makes it lower friction than Horizon if you follow third-party instructions instead of writing Liquid. Sense, Refresh, and Taste are the same deal with more visual character.

Debut. Retired, pulled from the theme store in November 2022 with the rest of the vintage themes. There’s no Online Store 2.0 version, so stores still on it can’t use sections or app blocks at all.

Impulse. $500 one-time from Archetype Themes, lifetime license. Sticky add-to-cart, promo bars, and product tabs are built in rather than bolted on with apps.

Prestige. $400 one-time from Maestrooo, lifetime license. Large product galleries and slower pacing, which suits higher price points.

A paid theme is one-time $400 to $500, which lands at roughly $33 to $42 a month across year 1 and nothing after. Compare it against a subscription that never stops, not against the free themes.

The Apps Worth Installing

Five apps is enough for a launch. Every install loads code on the storefront whether a shopper touches that feature or not, so the survivors are the ones tied to a revenue event: a review, an email, a restock.

• Judge.me for reviews. The Awesome plan is $15 a month, and Google rich snippets ship on the free tier, so the product schema markup benefit doesn’t require paying at all. Tiers sit on the Judge.me pricing page.
• Loox if photo reviews matter more than price. Free to 500 orders, then Convert at $49.99 a month covering 300 orders with $50 per additional 300, and Unlimited at $299.99. That first paid tier is over 3 times Judge.me.
• Klaviyo for email and SMS. Free to 250 contacts with a 500-emails-a-month send cap, then paid tiers per the Klaviyo pricing page. We compared Mailchimp and Klaviyo for ecommerce on flows rather than feature counts.
• Shopify Flow for automation. Published by Shopify, free, and enough to tag high-value customers, flag risky orders, and fire inventory alerts.
• Amp Back in Stock | Preorder for restock demand. Free at 10 notifications a month, $19 on Starter capped at 500. The developer name matters, because several apps share the “back in stock” label at $5 to $15 with different caps.

Read the caps, not the headline prices. Every app there bills against a usage number, so the $19 restock app costs more in exactly the month its alert works.

Skip checkout-injecting upsell apps, AI description generators, and standalone popup builders. Klaviyo’s forms cover the last one, and each extra script competes with your product images for the same mobile connection. Set a 30-day reminder when you install anything: no traceable order or documented hour saved by then, uninstall it.

Shopify Payments vs a Third-Party Gateway

Use Shopify Payments wherever it’s offered. It’s the only setup with a 0% Shopify platform fee, and that fee lands on gross order value rather than profit, which is why it bites hardest on thin margins.

Route cards through any other processor and Shopify adds its own cut on top of the processor’s: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. On $50,000 of monthly card revenue that’s $300 to $1,000 a month for not using the native gateway.

Pure overhead.

PayPal is the documented exception, and it’s the one worth knowing. Shopify excludes PayPal and manual payment methods from third-party transaction fees while Shopify Payments is active, so keeping PayPal switched on alongside costs nothing at the platform layer. Whether you want a second processor at all is a separate question, and our case for not relying on a single payment processor covers the failure it exists to prevent.

One regional trap: PayPal Express Checkout isn’t available to merchants in the United States or France. US stores get PayPal Wallet through Shopify Payments instead, which Shopify’s pricing table lists at 3.49% + 49 cents. A US guide telling you to enable PayPal Express is describing a screen you’ll never see.

What to offer at checkout:

• Shopify Payments, or Stripe in markets where it isn’t available
• Shop Pay, the native accelerated checkout
• PayPal Wallet through Shopify Payments in the US, PayPal Express elsewhere
• Apple Pay and Google Pay, which cost nothing to enable

Shop Pay is the strongest of those on the numbers available, with a caveat about who produced them. Shopify cites a study it commissioned from a large management consultancy finding Shop Pay lifts conversion by up to 50% against guest checkout and beats other accelerated checkouts by at least 10%.

Directional, not proven.

Pre-Launch Checklist

Run this the day before you go live. It catches the failures that are invisible from the admin and obvious to the first customer.

• Place a real order with a real card, then refund it from the admin
• Confirm shipping rates against a real street address in every country you ship to
• Run PageSpeed Insights on a product page, not only the homepage
• Verify GA4 and the Meta Pixel fire on add-to-cart and purchase, not just pageview
• Confirm order, shipping, and fulfillment emails land in an inbox you don’t own
• Check that homepage, a collection page, and a product page render correctly on a phone
• Match legal pages to the policies you’ll actually honor
• Reconcile inventory counts with physical stock and tax rates with your primary market
• Redeem every discount code you plan to announce, once, in a test order

The expensive failures there are all fulfillment failures. A wrong shipping rate doesn’t cost you a sale, it costs the sale plus the shipping plus the refund plus the review. Once orders flow, the work moves to ecommerce checkout optimization, where the recoverable revenue already exists.

What a Shopify Store Costs Each Month

The $29 plan isn’t the bill. For a store doing $20,000 a month across 400 orders on Basic, the platform-side total looks like this.

Line item	Monthly
Shopify Basic, annual billing	$29
Klaviyo, 2,500 contacts	$60
Judge.me Awesome	$15
Amp Back in Stock Starter	$19
Paid theme amortized over year 1 (Impulse, $500 one-time)	$42
Domain	$1
Card processing, 2.9% + 30 cents on $20,000 across 400 orders	$700
Total	$866

Card processing is 81% of that total and the Shopify plan is about 3%. An hour spent shaving the plan line is an hour not spent on average order value, which is the only lever that moves the $700.

The theme line vanishes in year 2. Klaviyo and Back in Stock rise as your list and restock volume grow, which is the correct direction for both.

Year 2 is cheaper.

When WooCommerce Is the Better Call

Shopify’s pricing page claims its checkout “converts 15% better on average than other platforms.” That’s a vendor claim about a vendor product with no independent benchmark behind the figure, but the structural point survives the discount: you don’t maintain that checkout, patch it, or rebuild it after an update.

WooCommerce earns the extra work in three situations: complex product configurators or bookings, memberships and digital goods mixed with physical stock, and stores where an existing WordPress content operation already supplies the traffic. Our roundup of the best WordPress ecommerce plugins by product type narrows that stack faster than a platform debate will. Either way, Shopify SEO and its WordPress equivalent still get done by hand.

The Limits

Shopify sells you a checkout you don’t maintain.

The price is a checkout you also can’t rewrite, plus costs that scale on axes you don’t control.

• The checkout isn’t editable below Plus. You can’t add a field, reorder steps, or run custom validation on Basic, Grow, or Advanced. Checkout Extensibility gives apps defined slots and nothing more, so a product needing an engraving line, a tax ID, or a delivery window either fits an existing app or waits for a plan starting at $2,300 a month.
• The theme layer is Liquid, not a page builder. Anything past your theme’s section settings is a code edit or a paid app, and both are recurring costs wearing a one-time decision’s clothes.
• The third-party gateway fee is charged on gross and isn’t negotiable below Plus. If your market has no Shopify Payments and local banking fixes your processor, that 2% on Basic is permanent.
• Migrating out is a rebuild, not an export. Products, customers, and orders leave cleanly by CSV. Theme customizations, checkout configuration, and app-dependent automations don’t export at all, and those are the parts that took the time.

Rebuild, not migrate.

What Quietly Ruins a New Store

None of these throw an error. They just make the first 90 days cost more than they had to.

Picking the theme first. It’s the only part of the build that’s visible, so it feels like progress. Then the real product data arrives with 6 variants and 9 images per SKU, the template won’t hold it, and the theme work gets redone with a launch date already announced.

Installing apps for problems you haven’t had yet. Each one loads on the storefront whether a shopper uses that feature or not, and uninstalling rarely clears every leftover script, so the load cost outlives the subscription.

Shipping Shopify’s generated legal pages as written. The refund window in that boilerplate isn’t the one you intend to honor, and the gap surfaces during your first chargeback, where it counts as evidence.

Testing checkout only on the happy path. The failures live in the combinations: a discount code plus a shipping zone plus a variant that sold out between add-to-cart and payment.

Announcing the launch before a transactional email has been sent once. Confirmation failures don’t produce an error in the admin, they produce silence, and you hear about it from a customer asking whether the order went through.

FAQs on Shopify Store Setup

The questions that come up once the plan is chosen and the theme is live.

Final Remarks

A store isn’t hard to build. It’s hard to finish, because the last stretch is product photography, refund language, and shipping-zone arithmetic, and none of that looks like progress in a screenshot you can show someone.

The platform argument people spend weeks on matters least of all. Shopify, WooCommerce, and everything adjacent sell the same thing at this stage: somewhere for money to land safely. What decides the outcome is whether the descriptions were written by someone who has held the product, and whether the confirmation email arrives.

Build the boring parts first. The theme will still be there when you get to it.

Continue reading: Product Description That Sells · Ecommerce Checkout Optimization · Product Schema Markup