What if Shopify Payments is not available in my country?

What the fee actually is

If Shopify Payments is unavailable in your country, you connect a third-party gateway — and Shopify charges a percentage of every order for the privilege. 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced.

That is in addition to what the gateway itself charges. You are paying two companies to process one payment, and only one of them is doing the processing.

On $5,000 of monthly revenue across 100 orders, the Basic penalty is $100 a month — more than double the $39 subscription it sits on top of.

Check this before you build the store

This is the one platform question that has to be answered before you commit, because it changes the entire cost comparison. In a supported market Shopify is the obvious default. In an unsupported one, it becomes materially more expensive than WooCommerce, and the app ecosystem advantage has to earn a $100 a month premium rather than a $39 one.

Verify availability for your country on Shopify’s own list, not from a blog post. The list changes.

Option 1: absorb it

Simplest, and it is defensible while you are small. At 20 orders a month the penalty is $20, which is not the thing holding your store back.

Price it in though. On the standard $49.95 product, a 2% penalty is $1.00 per order straight out of a $35.20 gross profit, which moves break-even ROAS from 1.42 to 1.46. Put it into the break-even calculator as an extra per-order cost so the number you scale against is honest.

Option 2: upgrade to Grow earlier than everyone else

This is the part people miss. On Shopify Payments, Grow pays for itself at $33,000 a month, because you only save 0.2% on the card rate.

On a third-party gateway you also save 1% on the penalty, so the saving is 1.2% of revenue against $66 of extra subscription:

• $66 ÷ 0.012 = $5,500 a month

Six times earlier. If you are in an unsupported market and doing more than $5,500 a month, the upgrade is already overdue — the full plan arithmetic is in Shopify Basic vs Grow.

Option 3: leave Shopify

WooCommerce charges no platform fee on any gateway, which removes the problem rather than reducing it. The honest comparison is not “free versus $39” — it is $30-$80 a month of hosting plus 3-5 hours of maintenance against $39 a month plus zero, and that trade is worked through in Shopify vs WooCommerce.

In a supported market that trade favours Shopify for most people. In an unsupported one, at $100 a month of penalty and rising with revenue, it is genuinely close.

Compare the total, not the penalty

The 2% is only half the cost. Your gateway charges its own rate on top, and those rates vary far more between markets than Shopify’s fee does.

PayPal runs around 3.49% + 49¢ as a standard rate, and a local acquirer may be well under or well over that. So the number to compare is gateway rate plus Shopify penalty, per order:

• Gateway at 2.4% + Shopify 2% = 4.4%, or $2.20 on a $49.95 order
• Gateway at 3.49% + Shopify 2% = 5.49%, or $2.74 on the same order

Against 2.9% + 30¢ on Shopify Payments — $1.75 — you are paying $0.45 to $1.00 more on every single order. Over 200 orders a month that is $90 to $200, which is the real size of the problem.

The decision, by revenue

Everything else about what each platform really costs at 100 orders a month is on the platform comparison.