Shopify Starter Plan Review: Features, Pricing, and Comparison 2023

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Shopify Starter is an affordable $5/month plan designed for new or social media-driven businesses, offering basic sales capabilities.
• Shopify Starter is perfect for those new to online selling, social media influencers looking to monetize their fanbase, those working with a tight budget or solo entrepreneurs.

What is Shopify Starter Plan?

Shopify Starter Plan, sometime known as Shopify $5 plan, is a Shopify Pricing Plan that focuses on a quick and easy way to sell products online without requiring complicated tools, high prices, or even a website. With that said, it comes with the basic features of a Shopify plan while lacking most of the advanced features.

For merchants who are new to e-commerce, in June of 2022, Starter Shopify Plan became the entry-level plan offered by Shopify, replacing the old Shopify Lite Plan. While sharing almost the same features, Shopify Starter Plan starts at 5$ monthly, a lot cheaper than the Shopify Lite Plan (9$ monthly).

What can you do with Shopify Starter Plan?

Shopify Starter Plan is optimized for selling products through social media, SMS, WhatsApp, email, and wherever else you would like to share a product link.

Plus, you don’t have to spend a lot of time and effort setting it up. With Shopify Starter Plan and its optimization for mobile devices, your customers are able to purchase your products anywhere and anytime they find them on social media.

How does Shopify 5 dollar plan work?

Add a Product

To start selling with Shopify Starter, you will need to add your products to your Shopify Store.

Click on Products in your Shopify Admin Panel to create and edit your product information.

You will need to provide the following:

• Product Title
• Product Description
• Product Media (images, videos, or 3D previews)
• Pricing
• SKU (Stock keeping unit)
• Product options/variants

After that, hit Save and your newly added product is ready for the next step.

Your Linkpop page

What is Linkpop?

Linkpop, powered by Shopify, offers a free tool to create shoppable landing pages that can attract traffic from social media platforms. Linkpop is pretty similar to Linktr.ee, Shor.by or Tap.bio, with added ecommerce features.

Create your Bio landing page with Linkpop

Click on Linkpop in your Shopify Admin Panel.

Linkpop works as one of your sales channels and can be managed just like Shopify Apps. You might need to give Linkpop permission to install and access your store.

Click on Create page to edit your Linkpop profile.

After that, edit your Profile page URL, profile photo, profile name, and profile description. Remember that you can always come back to change this information if you want.

Click on Create profile, and your Linkpop profile is ready to go. However, we still need to add products to that Linkpop.

Add a product to your Linkpop profile

Then, click on Add product and choose the products you want to add.

In this case, I will add the demo product: a Shopify T-shirt!

Here is an example of how the Linkpop page will look after adding one product.

However, you can add an unlimited number of products (with unlimited product pages), and they will stack up vertically.

Social selling with your Linkpop profile

To start social selling with Shopify Starter, the first goal is to direct traffic from social media platforms to your Linkpop. Here are some ideas you can implement right away:

Bio link

For Social media platforms like Instagram or Tiktok, you can only add one URL in your bio, and it is a common practice for many social sellers.

Whenever a fan visits their profiles, they will be shown with Call-to-action to follow the page or to click on their bio link. This is where Linkpop shine!

With Linkpop, you will be able to redirect your profile visitors to your product pages and help them browse through your listed product.

At this stage, you might want to track these metrics:

• Your profile viewers: Almost every social media platform provides this metric (in their business modes/plans).
• Your Linkpop visits: Shopify tracks the traffic go to your Linkpop profile.

A simple conversion rate can be calculated with the following:

Link in Bio conversion rate = (Number of Profile visitors / Number of Linkpop visitors)%

The higher the conversion rate, the better! This conversion rate will also help you to optimize your bio copywriting (with bio length, wording, and emoji). But how should you know your bio link is on point?

According to flick.tech, with their study conducted on 54 thousand Instagram accounts, you should consider the conversion rate of 4% to be your benchmark.

Social Post

For some Social media platforms, you might not be able to attach URLs in the caption (for example, Instagram). However, you can use features like Instagram Story to showcase your product with a link sticker.

Another practice for Instagram is to quote “Link in bio” at the end of your post caption. That will navigate your fans back to your profile, where they can see your Linkpop page.

Upgrade to other Shopify plans

With Shopify Starter Plan, you can always upgrade to a higher plan with more advanced features while keeping all of your products and customer data.

Shopify Starter Plan Features

Features similar to other Shopify plans

Shopify Starter Plan includes:

• Unlimited products: You can sell as many products as you want in your Shopify store.
• Unlimited bandwidth: There is no limit on how many online visitors or files you upload to your store.
• Brand assets: Your logo, brand colors, and slogan can be added and managed.
• Fraud analysis: Shopify Payments comes with a built-in fraud analysis feature. To help you avoid chargebacks and losses, this feature flags orders that are potentially fraudulent.
• Manual order creation: The Shopify admin allows you to create new orders and enter payment details.
• Discount codes: Increasing your customer base is easy with discount codes.
• Abandoned cart recovery: If a customer leaves your store without completing the checkout process, abandoned cart recovery sends them an email. You can customize the email that is sent to customers who leave your store.
• Analytics: The Analytics page is available on all plan levels and displays sales, orders, and visitor data for the online store.
• Finance reports: These reports provide you with key financial information about your business. In the finances summary, you can see your sales, payments, and pending sales, or you can see the full finance reports for more information.
• Customer support: Call, email, or chat with Shopify’s Support team if you need assistance setting up your store.

These are the features available for all plans, which is a great start for selling online with Shopify.

Additional Shopify Starter Plan Features

Moreover, Shopify Starter Plan also offers the following additional features include:

• Start theme: The Starter Plan comes with a pre-designed theme that cannot be modified.
• Transaction fees: Shopify Starter Plan offers competitive transaction fees. Review the Shopify Starter plan to find the specific transaction fees for your region.
• International commerce: The Shopify Starter Plan includes Shopify Markets, a tool that helps you manage international sales from start to finish.
• Reports: You can track your business performance using reports. The Starter plan provides the analytics page, finances reports, product analytics, Live View, acquisition reports, inventory reports, behavior reports, and marketing reports.

How much does Shopify Starter Plan cost?

How much does it cost to start a Shopify store?

The Shopify Starter plan costs just $5 per month. Starting from November of 2022, Shopify even offers 1$ per month for the first three months with Shopify Starter.

On the other hand, you can opt-in for the Shopify trial to experience this plan and test if Shopify Starter is suitable for your online store.

Starter Plan Free Trial

Shopify Starter transaction fees

Shopify Starter transaction fee is at 5% + 0.3$ per transaction (with Shopify Payment).

And for credit cards issued outside of the United States, Shopify will charge an additional 1% fee per transaction.

Tips: How to check Shopify Pricing for your store location

Shopify has different prices and transaction fees for different countries and regions.

If you want to sell to a specific country, it is recommended to locate your Shopify store there. However, make sure you check Shopify pricing for that country first.

Step 1: Visit https://shopify.com

Step 2: Scroll down to the footer section and choose where you want to locate your store.

Step 3: A list of available languages and countries will be shown. Click on any country to view the Shopify version for that country/region.

Step 4: Click on the Pricing section - usually in the header bar (in this example, I have chosen the Canada version). You might find the Shopify Pricing for Canada here different from the original United State ones.

Step 5: Click on Compare Pricing Plans (or similar section in your language of choice) to view transaction fees for your store location.

Note: Just to be sure, you can turn on your VPN (if you are outside of your target country), or turn off the VPN (if you are inside your target country).

Shopify Starter Plan vs. Shopify Basic Plan

Shopify Starter Plan is 8 times cheaper than Shopify Basic, but the transaction fee is almost doubled.

In addition to that, you won’t be able to have the following features:

• Staff accounts: Shopify Basic offers two staff accounts, while you will have to fly solo with your Shopify Starter.
• Online Store & SSL certificate: Without these features, it might not be ideal for your customers in terms of user experience, branding, and payment security.
• Blog: Without a Blog function, you will be unable to do SEO and content marketing
• Shopify POS: you won’t be able to use Shopify POS to sell offline. (If you don’t plan to, this should be fine.)

Speaking of driving traffic, Shopify Starter is feature-wise for organic visitors coming from your social media platforms. Meanwhile, Shopify Basic offers the whole package for an ecommerce store wherever your traffic comes from.

This does not mean that you cannot run ads or do the SEO to drive traffic to your Linkpop. However, they would not be optimized and often perform much poorer than having your own Shopify Store with the other plans.

Tips: Shopify Starter could be a bargain, depending on your business size and model. But in most cases, when your business is expanding, you will eventually want to upgrade to another Shopify plan.

Who should use Shopify Starter Plan?

Shopify Starter Plan is suitable for you if:

It is your first time selling online

Shopify Starter is really easy for newbies to start with. It may be overwhelming initially, but you can ignore all of the advanced features and stick with your products and Linkpop pages.

You have fanbases on social media

You might have successfully built one or multiple social media profiles with a great fanbase. Then the Shopify Starter Plan is the easiest way to start monetizing while making your fan happy.

You don’t know how to set up an ecommerce website

It has taken years for web developers to develop a fully-functioned ecommerce website. Thanks to Shopify, it is much easier now, but we still need to explore and learn different use cases for selling to a specific niche.

You are tight on budget

A heavy investment comes with risks, and Shopify Starter is really useful for testing your products and finding out if you should step up and build your own online store later.

You are a one-man-army

Many great businesses start with one person who can manage everything at the earlier stages. Shopify Starter Plan helps you cut through the chaos and focus on the most important things like.

• List multiple products
• Driving and optimizing social traffic
• Inventory management
• Order management