{"id":257,"date":"2026-08-26T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/?p=257"},"modified":"2026-08-24T09:52:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T09:52:15","slug":"shopify-pricing-malaysia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/shopify-pricing-malaysia\/","title":{"rendered":"Shopify Pricing in Malaysia: What You Actually Pay Each Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nShopify pricing in Malaysia starts, for most people, at a plan page showing US$19 a month. That converts to something manageable in ringgit, and it goes straight into the budget.<\/p>\n

The number is real. It applies to narrower conditions than most people assume.<\/p>\n

Two things sit between that figure and what leaves your account, and neither is concealed. Both are printed on the same page as the offer, in the places nobody reads twice.<\/p>\n

The advertised price assumes you pay for a year up front<\/h2>\n

Shopify quotes the annual rate by default. Pay month to month and the same plan costs more on every tier.<\/p>\n

Checked against Shopify’s Malaysia pricing page<\/a> on 21 August 2026:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Plan<\/th>\nPaid monthly<\/th>\nPaid yearly<\/th>\nThird-party transaction fee<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Basic<\/td>\n$25 USD\/mo<\/td>\n$19 USD\/mo<\/td>\n2%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Grow<\/td>\n$65 USD\/mo<\/td>\n$49 USD\/mo<\/td>\n1%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Advanced<\/td>\n$399 USD\/mo<\/td>\n$299 USD\/mo<\/td>\n0.6%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Basic costs 32% more if you are not ready to commit twelve months in advance. Grow is 33% more, Advanced 33% more.<\/p>\n

There is also an introductory offer running at three days free followed by US$1 a month for three months. Genuinely cheap, and genuinely temporary. A store that launches on the promotional rate and budgets from it is measuring the wrong thing.<\/p>\n

That is a normal way to sell software. It becomes a problem when the annual rate gets quoted as a flat monthly figure, because the person testing a new idea is the one least likely to prepay a year.<\/p>\n

The column that matters more is the last one.<\/p>\n

How much does Shopify actually cost per month in Malaysia?<\/h2>\n

Budget the plan rate plus the payment fees, which on a RM100 domestic card order come to about 6% on Basic. So a Basic store paying monthly runs US$25 in subscription, then loses roughly RM6 per RM100 order once the gateway and Shopify have each taken a cut.<\/p>\n

That percentage moves with your average order value, and the reason it exists at all comes down to where the business is registered.<\/p>\n

Why stores in some markets carry an extra cut<\/h2>\n

Shopify Payments, the in-house processor, is not available to Malaysian merchants. Shopify maintains a list of supported countries<\/a> and Malaysia has not appeared on it, which is why the request keeps resurfacing in Shopify’s own community forums year after year.<\/p>\n

If you cannot use Shopify Payments, you use a third-party gateway. And if you take card payments through a third-party gateway, Shopify charges a transaction fee on top of whatever that gateway charges you.<\/p>\n

Both parties take a cut of the same sale.<\/p>\n

Work it through on a RM100 order with Stripe, which publishes a domestic Malaysian card rate of 3% plus RM1.00 per successful transaction<\/a>. Stripe takes RM4.00. Shopify’s Basic-plan third-party fee takes another 2%, so RM2.00. Total RM6.00 before the subscription.<\/p>\n

Note what the fixed RM1 does. On a RM50 order the same stack costs about 7%, and on a RM200 order about 5.5%. Low average order values are punished hardest, which matters if you sell accessories rather than furniture.<\/p>\n

On Grow the same RM100 order costs RM5.00, and on Advanced RM4.60, because the Shopify side drops to 1% and then 0.6% while Stripe’s share stays put. So a more expensive plan can be cheaper overall once volume passes a certain point.<\/p>\n

The crossover is worth calculating. On monthly billing, moving from Basic to Grow costs US$40 more and saves 1% of revenue, so it pays for itself at about US$4,000 in monthly sales. On yearly billing the gap is US$30, and the crossover falls to US$3,000.<\/p>\n

The same arithmetic applies in any market where Shopify Payments is unavailable. Swap in your local gateway’s rate and the shape of the answer does not change, only the numbers.<\/p>\n

Where the rest of it goes<\/h2>\n

The subscription and the payment stack are the predictable parts. The rest of a Shopify bill arrives gradually.<\/p>\n

Apps are the usual surprise. A store that needs subscriptions, or bundles, or proper multi-currency, or a review widget that does not look like a review widget, ends up carrying several recurring charges. Individually they are small. Together they can exceed the plan fee, and they are billed in USD alongside everything else.<\/p>\n

Themes are a smaller, one-time version of the same story. The free ones are genuinely decent now.<\/p>\n

Then there is currency exposure. Shopify bills Malaysian merchants in US dollars while your revenue arrives in ringgit, so a move in the exchange rate changes your cost base without anyone deciding anything. Minor at RM5,000 a month in sales. Not minor at RM50,000.<\/p>\n

None of this makes Shopify a bad choice. It makes the sticker price a poor way to compare it against anything.<\/p>\n

When the platform fee stops being the interesting question<\/h2>\n

At low volume this is all noise. A store doing RM3,000 a month at a RM100 average order pays roughly RM180 in payment fees, and should be spending its attention on whether anyone wants the product.<\/p>\n

Run the same rates at RM30,000 a month and the percentage becomes the dominant line, with the plan fee a rounding error beside it. The question stops being which tier and becomes whether a percentage of revenue is the right shape of cost at all.<\/p>\n

A custom store answers that differently. There is no platform cut of sales, though your gateway still takes its share, and the build cost lands once while hosting and maintenance continue. The full breakdown of what an ecommerce build costs<\/a> covers that trade properly, and the general website cost guide<\/a> covers the wider range.<\/p>\n

The honest answer is that most stores should start on Shopify anyway. Ship first, find out whether the thing sells, then worry about the percentage once there is enough revenue for it to mean something.<\/p>\n

Just budget from the real number rather than the advertised one.<\/p>\n

Common questions<\/h2>\n

Is Shopify Payments available in Malaysia?<\/h3>\n

No. Malaysian merchants use a third-party gateway such as Stripe, iPay88 or Billplz, and Shopify applies an additional transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced on top of the gateway’s own rate.<\/p>\n

Why is my Shopify bill higher than the advertised price?<\/h3>\n

The advertised price is the annual rate. Monthly billing costs about a third more on every plan, and app subscriptions plus movement in the USD exchange rate add to the total.<\/p>\n

Which Shopify plan is cheapest overall?<\/h3>\n

It depends on volume. On monthly billing, Basic is cheaper below roughly US$4,000 in monthly sales, near RM17,000. On yearly billing the crossover is about US$3,000. Above it, Grow’s lower transaction fee outweighs the higher subscription.<\/p>\n

Can I avoid Shopify’s third-party transaction fee?<\/h3>\n

Not when accepting card payments through an external gateway from a country where Shopify Payments is unavailable. Manual methods such as bank transfer or cash on delivery fall outside it, which is part of why they stay common locally.<\/p>\n

Working out whether a percentage-of-revenue platform still suits your volume is a twenty-minute conversation, not a project. Send me your monthly revenue, average order value and current app list on WhatsApp<\/a> and I will tell you honestly whether to stay put.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Plan rates, the monthly versus yearly gap, and the extra transaction fee that applies wherever Shopify Payments is unavailable. With the maths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-e-commerce"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ryanoccg.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}