What an online shop actually costs

It is also the part that varies least. Every platform worth considering has a monthly figure, they are broadly in the same range once you are past the free tiers, and it is the number on every comparison page because it is the easy one.

It is rarely more than half the bill. The other half is spread across six lines that are quoted separately, charged separately, and usually discovered one at a time after you have already moved in.

Two different percentages come off a sale and they are easy to confuse. One is the card processor taking its cost of moving the money. The other is the platform taking a share of your revenue for hosting the shop, and it is charged on top.

Shopify charges that second percentage on every order if you use any payment provider other than its own, and the rate falls as you move up to a more expensive plan — so the cheaper plan costs more per sale, which is the opposite of how most people assume it works. Squarespace charges it on its entry plan and drops it to nothing above that. Big Cartel does not charge it at all.

Stashed charges 5% of each sale and returns it in full when you refund an order. That last part matters more than the rate: a platform that keeps its cut on a refund has charged you for a sale that did not happen.

Someone has to move the money and they charge for it. This is the one line no platform can make disappear, and any pitch that implies otherwise is folding it into a bigger number somewhere else.

What differs is whether you are free to choose the processor. A platform that runs its own payments generally prices the alternative badly enough that you do not go looking, which is a real cost even though it never appears as a line item.

Stashed uses Stripe, and Stripe bills you directly at its own published rate. We do not mark it up and we do not see it.

On some platforms the free themes are kept deliberately plain, and the shop that looks like a real business is a separate purchase. It is not a scandal — somebody designed it and wants paying — but it belongs in the total, and it is usually left out of one.

Squarespace includes its templates. Shopify keeps a store of paid ones alongside a free set. Big Cartel sits in between, with the design tools on its paid plans.

Stashed sells themes and does not require one. Every theme opens in the same page builder that ships with the plan, so a bought theme is a head start rather than a gate, and the builder is free to use for as long as you like.

This is the line that breaks the budget, and it is invisible until you are inside. A platform that keeps its core deliberately thin has an app store where the missing pieces are sold back to you, mostly as monthly subscriptions, mostly small enough individually that you say yes to each one.

The honest version: an app ecosystem that large is genuinely useful, and if you need a specific integration it very probably exists there. The cost is that the basics are in it too.

Stashed has no app store. The things a shop needs in order to be a shop are on the plan, and there is no tier above the one you are on holding one of them.

Order confirmations are transactional and every platform sends them. Anything you would actually call marketing — a list, a campaign, an automation — is usually a separate product with its own monthly price that scales with the size of your list.

Stashed includes 2,500 contacts on the plan, with campaigns and automations, and the order mail is designed in the same builder as the rest of the shop. Past that allowance it becomes a paid add-on, and the pricing page says what it costs.

You buy the name from a registrar either way, and that is a small annual cost nobody can remove. What varies is whether the platform lets you point it at your shop without charging for the privilege, and on the cheapest tiers it sometimes does not.

It is worth more than it looks. A shop on your own address accumulates its own search ranking and its own reputation. A shop on somebody else’s subdomain is building theirs.

Stashed includes a custom domain on the plan, with certificates issued automatically.

Etsy is not a more expensive storefront platform, it is a different arrangement, and comparing the monthly figures misses what is being traded. You get an audience that is already there and already shopping, which is the hardest thing to build and the reason the fees are worth it for a lot of sellers.

What you give up is ownership. The shop is a page on their site, the customer is theirs rather than yours, and the terms can change underneath you. The fee structure is stacked rather than single: a charge to list an item, a percentage of the order, payment processing on top of that, and an advertising fee on orders they attribute to their own ads.

That last one is worth understanding before you start rather than after. Every seller is enrolled automatically, and once a shop passes a revenue threshold the enrolment becomes permanent for the life of that shop. At that point the advertising fee is not something you can switch off, and the threshold is not high for a shop that is going well.

Big Cartel takes no percentage of your sales. If you sell a lot through a shop that does not need much around it, its flat plan beats ours on total cost and it is not close — our 5% is a real number and at volume it is the largest line on this page.

Squarespace above its entry plan charges no transaction fee either. If what you want is a website that also sells things, rather than a shop, that is a fair description of what it is better at.

Shopify has an app for almost anything. If your business depends on one specific integration, check that it exists here before you move, because there is a reasonable chance it does not and no store to buy it from.

And Etsy brings customers. We bring none. Everything on this page is about what a shop costs to run, and none of it helps with the harder problem, which is that somebody has to find you.

One plan at $29 a month with nothing held back for a tier above it, 5% of each sale that comes back on a refund, and a shop you can build, publish and keep online for nothing before any of it applies. No card until you take your first order.

That is the whole offer, and it is deliberately easy to check. If the arithmetic on this page comes out against us for your shop, we would rather you worked that out now than in four months.

Every claim about another platform was read from that company’s own pricing or fee page in September 2026, and describes the shape of the bill rather than a price. We deliberately do not publish their figures: those are set per country, so any number here would be wrong for most of the people reading it, and a stale one is worse than none. Their pricing pages are the authority and are a click away.

Our own figures are read straight from the code that charges them, so this page cannot advertise a price we do not actually bill. If a line here about anybody, including us, has stopped being true, tell us and we will fix it.

For one platform rather than the whole picture: Shopify, Big Cartel, Gumroad and Etsy.

The full pricing page has our numbers in detail, and building a shop costs nothing, which is the only way to check any of this properly.