Worked exampleHow costs change as you grow
The example shows costs both with and without Shopify Payments. If you use another payment solution as your main checkout, such as Kustom, Qliro, Stripe or Adyen (common in the Nordics), Shopify charges a third-party fee on every order: 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. If you use Shopify Payments, you avoid that fee but pay Shopify's own card fees instead. The payment fees themselves are not included in any of the figures, since they apply regardless of which payment solution you choose. The difference lies in the terms you can get, which we come back to below.
The example is simplified and only covers the platform's fixed and variable fees, not the payment provider's own fees, implementation or apps. Exchange rate approx. €0.87/USD. The Shopify Plus figures are based on industry data on the variable platform fee, since Shopify does not publish it officially. The Medusa figures are an average based on Medusa Cloud's price list and the customer examples Medusa has published. The actual cost may be higher or lower, since it follows load and catalog size rather than revenue, but we have assumed that it increases as the business grows. At €50M, the figure is an estimate, since merchants of that size normally get custom pricing on the Enterprise tier.
The monthly platform cost is calculated as follows:
- Shopify Advanced: approx. €260/month in subscription + 0.6% of revenue if you don't use Shopify Payments
- Shopify Plus: approx. €2,180/month in subscription + 0.2% of revenue if you don't use Shopify Payments. When 0.40% of revenue exceeds the subscription, from around €6.5M in annual revenue, the subscription is replaced by the variable platform fee (one-year contract, B2C). The variable platform fee also applies with Shopify Payments.
- Medusa: 0% of revenue + hosting on Medusa Cloud, on average from approx. €230/month for a smaller store to approx. €920/month for a large merchant. The cost is driven by load, number of products and integrations, not by revenue.
Monthly platform cost with and without Shopify Payments (fixed and variable platform fees, excluding payment fees, EUR/month)
It is worth keeping in mind that Medusa is a more technical platform than Shopify, and may require a larger initial investment and ongoing work to maintain the platform. The curves, however, are clear: with SaaS and licenses, the platform cost grows with your sales; with open source, it doesn't. The larger you grow, the faster you recoup the implementation cost.
Why the freedom to choose your payment solution matters
Payments are often one of the larger ongoing costs in e-commerce. The fees are charged as a percentage of every order, so even a few tenths of a percentage point add up to large amounts as revenue grows.
Shopify's third-party fee makes it more expensive in practice to choose anything other than Shopify Payments, since it is added on top of the payment provider's own fee. Klarna, Adyen or Qliro therefore can't compete with Shopify Payments on equal terms: they must be cheaper by the full third-party fee for a switch to pay off. This shields Shopify's own payment service from real competition and weakens your negotiating position.
With a platform like Medusa, there is no such fee. You can procure a payment solution when it suits you, negotiate the terms, switch providers or combine several, without the platform charging you for that choice. It is competition between payment providers that drives prices down, and it only works if you are free to switch.
