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Does upgrading your Shopify plan actually make shipping cheaper?
Summary
Not by much, because label discounts start on Basic and Shopify's pricing page describes them the same way on Basic and Grow: up to 87% off. What you buy by upgrading is the stuff around the label, since Grow adds free insurance of up to $200 per eligible label if you use Shopify Payments, and Advanced adds live third-party carrier rates at checkout. Postage itself, and anything a 3PL warehouse charges, is billed on top of the plan at every tier.
What each plan adds for shipping
Every plan can buy and print labels. Here is what changes as you move up, with annual billing first and monthly second:
- Basic, $29 or $39 a month. Discounted labels. No third-party calculated rates at checkout.
- Grow, $79 or $105. Up to $200 of shipping insurance included on each eligible label when Shopify Payments is active, plus five staff accounts.
- Advanced, $299 or $399. Live third-party shipping rates and 15 staff accounts.
- Plus, from $2,300. Up to 200 inventory locations instead of 10.
Going from Basic to Grow costs an extra $600 a year on annual billing. If shipping were the only reason, that $600 buys the automatic insurance and a few logins. Grow to Advanced is another $2,640 a year, and the shipping reason is live carrier rates. That pays off for stores selling heavy or oversized items, where a flat rate can lose money on every far-away order. For a store shipping T-shirts, it usually doesn't.
Do discounts get deeper on higher plans?
Shopify won't say plan by plan. The pricing page only gives the "up to 87%" ceiling. The help center says the discount depends on your location, your plan, and the carrier, and adds that some discounts are the same on every plan. The number that counts is the rate shown in your admin when you create a label, and Shopify doesn't publish a table you could check it against.
How postage shows up on your bill
Labels are charged to the credit card on your Shopify account. The first label is billed by itself. After that Shopify uses threshold billing: you keep buying until you reach 110% of your current threshold, then get charged. If you never hit the threshold in a billing cycle, the label charges ride along on your monthly subscription bill. Unused labels can be voided within 30 days, and the refund comes back as a label credit, not cash. UPS demand surcharges and additional handling fees are added when you buy the label, so they won't appear in the rate your customer saw at checkout.
Stores whose default location is in the US can also send customers return labels. You can create up to 250 labels in one batch.
Handing fulfillment to a warehouse
If you would rather not pack boxes, the Shopify Fulfillment Network app connects you to Flexport's warehouses. Installing the app is free. Receiving, storing, and shipping your inventory are billed by the logistics company. Shopify also lists Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment, ShipBob, Bigblue, GoBolt, Shipfusion, Mayple, and DHL as partners, none with public prices on Shopify's site. DHL says it starts at 3,000 orders a month.
Local delivery and pickup
You set your own local delivery price, and entering 0 makes it free. The radius tops out at 100 miles, with up to 10 zones per location. It works with Shop Pay but not with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, or PayPal, and B2B checkouts can't use it. In-store pickup needs one location that fulfills online orders, and a customer can ship part of an order and pick up the rest. Shopify doesn't tie either feature to a plan.
Payment processing fees, which change more between plans than shipping does, are worked out for a store doing $25,000 a month in our Shopify fees guide.
Sources
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