What a Shopify online store costs

Most pricing pages in Bulgaria answer one question: how much the build costs. That is the one-time cost, and it is the smaller part of the bill. The more important question is how much the store costs you to run every month, whether or not you are selling. This page separates the four costs and gives the numbers for each.

The four costs that get lumped together

The platform subscription. Transaction fees. Apps. The build. The first three recur every month. The fourth is one-time. If someone quotes you a single figure, ask which of the four it covers.

1. The Shopify subscription

These are Shopify's published prices for Bulgaria, in euros.

Paying annually saves about a quarter. There is also an introductory offer: 3 days free, then €1 per month for 3 months. POS Pro is a separate add-on at €79 per month per location, and you only need it if you also sell in person.

Which plan you need. Basic is enough to start with and stays enough for much longer than most people expect. Grow makes sense when your volume makes the difference in transaction fees bigger than the difference in subscription price, or when you need more staff accounts in the admin. Advanced and Plus are for volumes where you already have someone tracking these numbers.

2. Transaction fees

There are two different things here, and they get confused all the time.

Card processing fee. Charged on every card payment. Through Shopify Payments, the online rate starts at 1.9% + €0.25 on Basic and drops to 1.7% on Advanced. International cards and Amex cost more.

Shopify's fee for an external processor. If you don't use Shopify Payments, Shopify charges a separate 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. This comes on top of the processor's own fee, not instead of it.

With cash on delivery (COD) you pay no card fee, but you do pay a courier fee for the cash transfer — a cost owed to Econt or Speedy, not to Shopify.

3. Apps

For a Bulgarian store, one app is practically mandatory: the one for couriers and cash on delivery. The options that work in this market are dostavi.bg, Fulfillvam, Izprati BG and Fulfillmate. They add office or locker selection at checkout, pull live Econt, Speedy, BoxNow and Sameday rates, and print waybills. Each one is a monthly fee.

The rest of the apps are a choice, not a requirement. Reviews, email marketing, bundles, quantity discounts, a slide-out cart. This is where money leaks most often: a store with fifteen apps pays hundreds of euros a month for features that could mostly live directly in the theme code.

We write them into the theme instead of renting them. The result is a faster site and a smaller monthly bill. See what we build directly into the code.

4. The build

There is no fixed price here, and anyone who gives you one without seeing your store is giving you a number, not a quote. It is more useful to know what drives the budget.

What pushes it up

The number of products and variants. Missing photos and copy that someone has to write. A connection to an inventory or accounting system. Custom logic for pricing, bundles or B2B. More than one language and more than one currency. Migration from another platform with a long order history.

What brings it down

Product photos and descriptions that are ready to use. A clean catalog without unnecessary items. One market and one language. Willingness to launch on a working foundation and build on it, rather than waiting for everything at once.

We work in packages and give you a specific final price after the free consultation, not a range. See the packages.

The costs people forget

• VAT. Once you are registered, you charge VAT on sales and pay it by the 14th of the following month.
• Advertising and input VAT credit. Invoices from Meta and Google are EU services under the reverse charge. They don't give you an input VAT credit to reduce the VAT you owe. If advertising is your main expense, the VAT due will be higher than a naive calculation suggests. Check with your accountant before you build a forecast.
• Refused COD parcels. Every parcel that isn't collected is a two-way delivery cost that stays with you. It is a real percentage of revenue and should be in your numbers from the first month.
• Returns. Beyond the courier cost, returns tie up time and stock. In apparel, the rate is significant.
• Legal compliance. If you show strikethrough prices, the struck-through price must be the lowest from the last 30 days. You avoid fines with the right settings, not by paying them.

How to calculate your monthly floor

Add up the subscription for the plan you need, plus the courier app, plus every other app you will actually use. That is the amount that leaves your account every month, even with zero sales. On top of that, add the transaction percentage on your expected revenue and the courier fee for COD orders.

If that amount looks large compared with the revenue you expect, start on Basic with as few apps as possible. You can upgrade your plan in a minute once volume justifies it. The reverse — scaling down from a bloated setup — is harder, because by then you are used to the features.