What Does Shopify Charge Per Sale?

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Understanding the Shopify Fee Structure
3. Deep Dive: What Does Shopify Charge Per Sale?
4. Physical vs. Digital: A Profit Margin Comparison
5. Avoiding the "Success Fee" Trap
6. How Tevello Optimizes Your Shopify Store
7. Practical Scenarios for Revenue Diversification
8. The Tevello Unlimited Plan: Clear and Transparent
9. Maximizing Your Shopify ROI
10. Implementation Guide: Setting Up for Success
11. Realistic Business Expectations
12. FAQ
13. Conclusion

Introduction

Did you know that the global e-learning market is projected to reach a staggering $460 billion by 2026? While many e-commerce entrepreneurs spend their nights worrying about rising shipping costs, fluctuating inventory prices, and the logistical nightmare of broken supply chains, a new breed of Shopify merchant is quietly building high-margin empires using digital products. For a traditional merchant, every sale involves a complex dance of COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), but in the digital realm, the primary variable remains the platform fee. This leads us to the most critical question for any budding or established business owner: what does shopify charge per sale?

The purpose of this guide is to pull back the curtain on Shopify’s pricing model, providing you with a transparent, line-by-line breakdown of how much it costs to run your store. We will explore the nuances between subscription fees, payment processing costs, and the often-misunderstood third-party transaction fees. Furthermore, we will demonstrate how you can optimize these costs by diversifying into digital products and memberships—transforming your store from a simple shop into a recurring revenue engine.

At Tevello, our mission is to turn any Shopify store into a digital learning powerhouse. We believe that understanding your overhead is the first step toward true financial freedom. By the end of this article, you will not only understand exactly what Shopify takes from each transaction, but you will also learn how to leverage our "Native Shopify Integration" to keep more of your hard-earned money while building a brand that you own entirely.

Understanding the Shopify Fee Structure

When you ask, "what does shopify charge per sale?" the answer isn't a single flat percentage. Instead, it’s a combination of different costs that vary based on your business size, your chosen plan, and the payment gateway you utilize. To manage a profitable business, you must distinguish between your fixed monthly costs and your variable transactional costs.

Subscription Fees vs. Transactional Costs

Shopify operates primarily on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. This means you pay a recurring monthly fee to access the platform's infrastructure, hosting, and security. However, the subscription fee is only the baseline. The real impact on your margins comes from the transactional layer.

For many merchants, the goal is to find the "sweet spot" where the monthly subscription fee is offset by lower transaction rates. As your volume grows, paying a higher monthly fee for the "Advanced" plan can actually save you thousands of dollars in the long run because Shopify reduces the percentage they take from each individual sale.

Payment Processing Fees: The Hidden Variable

Every time a customer swipes a card or enters their digits online, a payment processor has to verify the funds and move the money. This is a service that carries an inherent cost. If you use Shopify Payments (the built-in processor), you are charged a set rate based on your plan. If you choose to use a third-party gateway like PayPal or Authorize.net, you are often hit with a "double whammy": the gateway’s own fee plus an additional transaction fee from Shopify for not using their internal system.

Deep Dive: What Does Shopify Charge Per Sale?

To give you a clear picture, let’s break down the three most common Shopify plans and the specific fees associated with each.

The Basic Plan Breakdown

The Basic plan is the starting point for most entrepreneurs. It currently costs $39 per month (when billed monthly). On this plan, the online credit card rate is 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction.

If you decide to use an external payment gateway rather than Shopify Payments, Shopify will charge an additional 2% transaction fee on every sale. This is why we almost always recommend using the native Shopify Payments system whenever possible; it simplifies your bookkeeping and immediately protects your margins.

Scaling with the Shopify and Advanced Plans

As your store finds its footing and your monthly revenue begins to climb, moving to the "Shopify" plan ($105/month) or the "Advanced" plan ($399/month) becomes a strategic necessity.

• The Shopify Plan: Reduces the online credit card rate to 2.6% + 30¢. The additional third-party transaction fee drops to 1%.
• The Advanced Plan: Offers the lowest standard rates at 2.4% + 30¢ per transaction, with only a 0.5% fee for third-party gateways.

For a merchant doing $20,000 in monthly sales, the difference between the 2.9% rate on the Basic plan and the 2.4% rate on the Advanced plan is $100 per month—not even accounting for the higher subscription cost. However, once you hit higher volumes, these fractional percentage points represent significant capital that could be reinvested into marketing or product development.

Physical vs. Digital: A Profit Margin Comparison

One of the most effective ways to offset the fees Shopify charges is to change the nature of what you are selling. When you sell a physical product, your "per sale" cost includes Shopify’s fee plus shipping, packaging, storage, and the original cost of the item.

The Inventory Burden of Physical Goods

Imagine you are selling premium coffee beans. For every $30 bag sold, you might spend $10 on the beans, $5 on shipping, and $2 on packaging. After Shopify takes its ~3% cut, your actual take-home profit is significantly diminished. If a shipment is lost or a customer requests a refund, you are often out the cost of the physical inventory and the shipping fees.

The Power of Digital Upsells

Now, consider a different scenario. For a merchant selling coffee beans, creating a "Barista Basics" video course is a high-margin upsell that requires no shipping boxes and no physical storage. Once the content is created, the cost of selling it to the 1,001st student is virtually the same as selling it to the first.

By integrating digital products, you are diversifying your revenue streams and increasing your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). You are no longer just asking "what does shopify charge per sale?" on a low-margin physical item; you are leveraging that same transaction to sell a high-margin digital asset. At Tevello, we specialize in making this transition seamless, ensuring your digital products that live directly alongside physical stock create a unified brand experience.

Avoiding the "Success Fee" Trap

As you research how to expand your store into courses or memberships, you will likely encounter third-party platforms that offer to host your content. Be wary: many of these platforms charge what we call "success fees." These are additional transaction fees—sometimes as high as 5% to 10%—that the platform takes on top of what your payment processor already charges.

Why 0% Transaction Fees Matter

At Tevello, we fundamentally disagree with the idea that a software provider should take a percentage of your hard work. This is why we offer 0% transaction fees. When you use our platform, you keep 100% of what you earn (after Shopify’s standard processing fees).

We offer a simple, all-in-one price for unlimited courses that allows you to scale your business without the fear of your software costs ballooning alongside your success. Whether you have 10 students or 10,000, your software cost remains predictable.

Ownership of Data and Brand Experience

Beyond the financial cost, there is the cost of the customer experience. Many course platforms force your customers to leave your website and log in to a third-party URL (e.g., yourbrand.thirdpartyplatform.com). This creates friction, weakens your brand, and often leads to higher customer support inquiries.

Our philosophy is different. We believe merchants should own their customer data and brand experience. This is why we created a solution for keeping customers at home on the brand website. By staying on your own Shopify URL, you maintain a "Native Shopify Integration," ensuring a seamless checkout experience using the payment gateways your customers already trust.

How Tevello Optimizes Your Shopify Store

We didn't just build a course creator; we built an ecosystem designed to maximize the value of your existing Shopify store. If unifying your stack is a priority, start by a simple, all-in-one price for unlimited courses.

Unlimited Growth Without Per-User Fees

Many community and course apps charge you more as you grow. They might offer a cheap entry tier, but the moment you hit 100 members, the price triples. We offer a flat-rate plan that supports unlimited members, allowing you to focus on community engagement rather than worrying about the next price jump. This is essential for avoiding per-user fees as the community scales.

Drip Content and Community Engagement

Building a digital product isn't just about uploading a video; it's about creating a journey. With Tevello, you can schedule "drip content," which releases lessons over time to keep students engaged and prevent "content bingeing" followed by immediate refund requests.

Furthermore, we’ve integrated community features like member directories and social feeds. This allows your customers to interact with each other, creating a "sticky" environment that encourages recurring revenue. Instead of a one-time sale, you are building a subscription model that provides stability and long-term brand loyalty.

Practical Scenarios for Revenue Diversification

Let's look at how real brands use these tools to mitigate the impact of Shopify fees and increase their overall profitability.

The "Bundle" Strategy

We’ve seen incredible success with merchants who bundle physical and digital goods. For example, look at how one brand sold $112K+ by bundling courses with their physical craft kits. By adding a $20 digital "How-To" course to a $30 physical kit, they doubled their revenue per sale while only marginally increasing their Shopify transaction fee. This is one of the most effective strategies for selling over 4,000 digital courses natively.

The Migration Solution

Many established brands come to us because they are tired of managing a fragmented system. They might have their shop on Shopify, their courses on Teachable, and their community on Discord. This fragmentation leads to lost passwords, frustrated customers, and high overhead.

One of our favorite examples involves migrating over 14,000 members and reducing support tickets by bringing everything under one roof. By unifying a fragmented system into a single Shopify store, the merchant was able to provide a single login for their customers, which significantly reduced the administrative burden on their team.

The Tevello Unlimited Plan: Clear and Transparent

We believe in predictable pricing without hidden transaction fees. Our Unlimited Plan is designed to give you everything you need to turn your Shopify store into a digital powerhouse without any of the "gotchas" common in the industry.

The Unlimited Plan: $29.99 per month.

This plan is built for the serious merchant who wants to scale. It includes:

• Unlimited courses and students: Never worry about hitting a cap.
• Unlimited video hosting and bandwidth: We handle the heavy lifting of video delivery so you don't have to pay for external hosting like Vimeo or Wistia.
• Community features: Build a thriving hub with member profiles and social feeds.
• Drip content and quizzes: Create structured learning paths and verify student progress.
• 0% Transaction Fees: You keep 100% of your earnings from your digital products.

We even offer a 14-day free trial so you can install Tevello from the Shopify App Store today and build your entire curriculum before you ever receive a bill.

Maximizing Your Shopify ROI

When you evaluate "what does shopify charge per sale," you should also be evaluating what you are getting in return. Shopify provides the most robust, secure, and conversion-optimized checkout on the planet. By adding Tevello to the mix, you are taking that world-class checkout and applying it to high-margin digital products.

Improving Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

It is a well-known fact in e-commerce that it is much cheaper to sell to an existing customer than to acquire a new one. By offering courses and memberships, you give your existing physical-product customers a reason to keep coming back to your site. This recurring engagement increases the LTV of every customer who enters your ecosystem.

Professionalism and Authority

Selling a course or hosting a community positions you as an expert in your niche. Whether you are selling fitness equipment and offering a "30-Day Transformation" course, or selling gardening supplies and hosting a "Master Gardener" community, you are building authority. This authority makes your physical products more desirable and allows you to command premium pricing, further insulating you from the impact of platform fees.

Implementation Guide: Setting Up for Success

To get the most out of your Shopify and Tevello integration, follow these steps:

1. Analyze Your Current Margins: Look at your most popular physical products. Calculate the net profit after Shopify’s 2.4%–2.9% cut, shipping, and COGS.
2. Identify a Digital Complement: What information does your customer need to get the most out of your product? This is the foundation of your first course.
3. Choose Your Shopify Plan: If your monthly revenue is over $5,000, run the numbers to see if moving to the "Shopify" or "Advanced" plan will save you more in transaction fees than the increase in subscription cost.
4. Install the Right Tools: Start by seeing how the app natively integrates with Shopify and begin building your community.
5. Set Up Unified Login: Ensure your customers can access their purchases, their community, and their order history with a single email and password.
6. Launch and Iterate: Don't wait for perfection. Launch a "Beta" version of your course or community to your most loyal customers and gather feedback.

Realistic Business Expectations

While digital products offer incredible margins, they are not a "get rich quick" scheme. They require the same dedication to quality, customer service, and marketing as physical goods. However, the benefits of this model are undeniable: diversifying revenue streams, building recurring revenue stability, and creating a brand that customers feel a deep connection to.

By using Tevello, you are not just adding an app; you are adding a robust tool that amplifies your existing efforts. You are taking the "what does shopify charge per sale" equation and tipping it heavily in your favor.

FAQ

Does Shopify charge a fee on top of my course price?

No, Shopify charges its standard credit card processing fee (e.g., 2.9% + 30¢ on the Basic plan) just like any other sale. However, unlike other course platforms, Tevello does not charge any additional transaction fees. You keep 100% of the sale after the standard processing.

Can I sell digital courses and physical products in the same cart?

Yes! This is one of the primary advantages of our native integration. A customer can buy a physical yoga mat and a digital "Yoga for Beginners" course in a single transaction. This provides a seamless experience and simplifies your reporting.

Do I need to pay for separate video hosting?

No. The Tevello Unlimited plan includes unlimited video hosting and bandwidth. You don't need to pay for external services like Vimeo or Wistia to host your course content, which can save you hundreds of dollars per year.

Will my customers have to log in to a different website?

No. We believe in keeping your customers on your own URL. Your students will log in directly through your Shopify store, ensuring they stay immersed in your brand and reducing the friction that leads to customer support requests.

Conclusion

Understanding "what does shopify charge per sale" is fundamental to running a healthy e-commerce business. While fees are an inevitable part of using a world-class platform, they don't have to be a drain on your success. By utilizing Shopify Payments and diversifying your catalog with high-margin digital products, you can significantly improve your bottom line.

At Tevello, we are committed to providing an all-in-one ecosystem where physical products, digital courses, and community engagement live side-by-side. We believe you should own your brand, your data, and your profits. With our $29.99 Unlimited Plan and 0% transaction fees, we provide the tools you need to scale without limits.

To build your community without leaving Shopify, start by reviewing the Shopify App Store listing merchants install from. Take advantage of our 14-day free trial and see for yourself how easy it is to all the key features for courses and communities directly within the Shopify ecosystem you already know and trust. Your journey from a simple storefront to a digital learning powerhouse starts today.