Is Shopify Plus Worth It? The Real Math vs Advanced (2026)

For one Shopify Plus brand I worked with, Plus was worth it many times over. After we rebuilt their checkout, monthly revenue went from $400,000 to $530,000, with fewer visitors.

For a lot of other stores, Plus is money thrown away. So in this article I’ll show you exactly what you save on fees, what you can do on Plus that you can’t do on Advanced, the real math for your store size, one checkout test that can actually lose you sales if you do it wrong, and a simple checklist that tells you whether to switch.

What Shopify Plus really costs

Plan	Price
Shopify Advanced	about $300–400 a month
Shopify Plus	from $2,300 a month (3-year term), $2,500 on a 1-year term

That’s about $2,000 more every month, roughly $24,000 more a year. Bigger Plus stores can also be moved to a revenue-based platform fee that Shopify doesn’t publish, so always get a quote.

So the question is simple: does Plus bring you more than $24,000 a year? There are two places the money can come from.

Money #1: lower payment fees

This is the easiest benefit to measure.

• Card payments through Shopify Payments cost about a quarter of a percentage point less on Plus (in the US, roughly 2.25% + 30¢ instead of 2.5% + 30¢; check your country’s page).
• If you use another payment provider as your main one, Shopify’s extra fee drops from 0.6% to 0.2%.

What that means in money, assuming all sales go through Shopify Payments:

Store revenue / month	Card-fee savings / year	Pays for Plus?
$100,000	about $3,000	No
$300,000	about $9,000	No
$800,000	about $24,000	Yes, fees alone

With a third-party payment provider you get there sooner, at about $500,000 a month. So for most stores, fees are a bonus, not the reason.

Myth: Plus makes your store faster

It doesn’t. Both plans run on the same servers. Speed depends on your theme and your apps, not your plan. The real reason to upgrade is what you can change.

Money #2: a checkout you can actually change

On Advanced you can change your logo and colours in checkout and add things to the thank-you and order-status pages. That’s it. You can’t add your own elements inside the checkout steps, where people type their address and card. On Plus, you can.

And the checkout is where the most painful leak is: these people already decided to buy.

How to measure your checkout drop rate

Open Shopify Analytics and compare sessions that reached checkout with sessions that completed checkout. If 2,500 people start checkout and only 1,000 finish, your drop rate is 60%.

Checkout drop rate	Rating
40–45%	Excellent
46–55%	Good
56–65%	Average (most stores)
Above 65%	Poor

Take a store doing $100,000 a month. Lower the drop rate by just two points and that’s about $60,000 a year in extra revenue. At $300,000 a month, the same two points are worth $180,000 a year.

Five checkout tests you can only run on Plus

Here are the checkout tests I’d run first. Number five is the one that can backfire.

1. Social proof next to the logo, like the number of happy customers.
2. Trust right above the Pay button: returns, free shipping, secure payment. And remove the long legal text next to it.
3. A “no surprises” line: duties and taxes included, no extra charges on delivery.
4. A clear delivery promise in the shipping step, like “order in the next two hours and it arrives Thursday”.
5. One-click add-ons inside checkout. They can grow revenue: if just 5 in every 100 buyers add a $30 product, a $100,000-a-month store makes about $18,000 more a year. But this is also the one that can backfire, because anything before payment can distract people from paying and lower your sales. Always A/B test it and judge it on revenue per visitor, not on clicks.

You don’t need a developer for most of these. Checkout Blocks, Shopify’s own free app for Plus, lets you add them yourself.

On that Shopify Plus brand, in the second month after we made changes like these, revenue went from $400,000 to $530,000 a month. The full list is in Shopify checkout customization: 7 changes.

What a point of drop rate is worth, by store size

Here’s a simple rule. If your checkout drop rate is around 60%, every point you take off brings about 2.5% more orders.

Store revenue / month	Extra revenue per year, per point
$100,000	about $30,000
$300,000	about $90,000
$500,000	about $150,000

If your checkout is already excellent, the gains will be smaller.

So for a store doing $100,000 a month, Plus costs about $24,000 a year more and saves about $3,000 in fees. Plus only pays off if you actually improve your checkout.

The checklist: should you switch?

• Below about $80,000 a month: wait. Fix your product pages and your cart first; you can do that on any plan. (Where most stores lose sales.)
• Around $100,000 a month or more: switch, if you’ll actually test your checkout.
• Above about $800,000 a month: a no-brainer. The fees alone pay for it.

And if you switch, don’t change everything at once. Test one change at a time, keep only what wins, and let the wins stack. Results are never guaranteed, but testing shows you what really works for your store.

If someone suggests going headless instead of Plus, read what headless cost us first.