E-commercePricing

Shopify vs a Custom Store in New Zealand: What Moves the Cost

Kage Works11 August 20269 min read

Stripe cut its New Zealand rate for domestic online card payments on 1 December 2025, from 2.70% plus NZ$0.30 to 2.65% plus NZ$0.30, and gave the reason in writing: the Commerce Commission was reducing interchange caps and Stripe was passing the saving on (Stripe).

That is five basis points. The regulated caps underneath it moved much further on the same date: interchange on in-person credit cards fell from around 0.80% to 0.30%, online credit went from 0.80% to 0.70%, and the cap on New Zealand debit cards used online stayed at 0.60% (MinterEllison, EFTPOS NZ). Caps on foreign-issued Visa and Mastercard transactions came into force for the first time on 1 May 2026, and the Commerce Commission puts the total saving to New Zealand businesses at NZ$260 million a year against pre-regulation fees (Commerce Commission).

The wholesale cost of taking a card payment in New Zealand fell hard. The retail price of taking one on a flat-rate platform moved a little. That gap, rather than the subscription, is where an online store's money goes.

Half a point of card fees passes the whole Shopify subscription at NZ$13,000 a month

Shopify Basic lists at US$39 a month, or US$29 billed annually. The New Zealand dollar bought about 58.8 US cents on 10 August 2026 (Exchange-Rates.org), which puts Basic near NZ$66 a month.

Half a percentage point of card processing costs you that same NZ$66 once you turn over NZ$13,200 online. A full point reaches it at NZ$6,600. Push NZ$30,000 a month through the store and half a point is NZ$1,800 a year, sitting on a settlement line most owners leave unopened.

The subscription is fixed, small, and the number most comparison articles lead with. The card rate scales with every sale you make, and it is the one you can negotiate.

Shopify charges 2% for bringing your own payment provider

Shopify Payments carries no extra platform fee. Every other gateway does. Shopify adds 2% of the order on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced, charged on top of whatever your processor charges you (Taxomate, Craftshift).

That fee is bigger than the saving you would be chasing. A New Zealand acquirer passing through a 0.60% online debit cap cannot beat Shopify Payments on Basic when Shopify takes another 2% of the order on the way past.

The plan tiers change that arithmetic, and the crossover is calculable. Advanced costs US$360 a month more than Basic on monthly billing, around NZ$612, and drops the third-party fee by 1.4 points. The upgrade pays for itself at roughly NZ$44,000 of monthly online turnover, if running your own acquirer is the reason you are upgrading. On annual billing the gap narrows to US$270, near NZ$459, and the crossover falls to about NZ$33,000 a month. Under those figures, Basic with Shopify Payments beats Advanced with a cheaper processor.

Buy now, pay later adds its own rate on the orders that use it, and neither Afterpay nor its competitors publish New Zealand merchant rates openly. Build the checkout so a provider can be swapped: Laybuy's New Zealand and Australian companies went into receivership on 17 June 2024, with Deloitte appointed as receivers, and Klarna later bought the assets (Deloitte, NZ Herald).

Rural delivery pricing sits behind the Advanced plan

Shopify quotes shipping from rate tables you maintain by hand, unless you turn on third-party carrier-calculated shipping, which pulls live rates from the courier's own system. That feature runs on Advanced and Plus. Grow stores get it by switching to yearly billing, or by asking Shopify support to add it for about US$20 a billing cycle (Shopify Help Center, PluginHive). Basic and Starter cannot have it at all.

New Zealand makes that gate expensive. Couriers here price rural addresses differently from urban ones and charge by weight band, so one flat rate either overcharges town customers or eats the margin on every rural order.

A custom store has no equivalent gate, because the rate logic is code you own and it can read whatever the courier returns. That difference costs nothing extra on Shopify Advanced and costs developer time on a custom build, so it decides the platform only when your rules outrun what a rate table can hold.

The turnover a custom build has to clear

New Zealand studios put a small online store at NZ$5,000 to NZ$20,000 plus GST, rising past NZ$25,000 once wholesale logic or inventory integration is in scope (Nika Consulting, JXM Studio).

Take a NZ$15,000 build, spread it over 36 months at NZ$417 a month, and treat the running costs as a wash: hosting and a New Zealand gateway on one side, the Shopify subscription and its app stack on the other. The monthly online turnover you need before a cheaper card rate covers the build:

0.3 points cheaper on cards: about NZ$139,000 a month
0.5 points: about NZ$83,000
0.8 points: about NZ$52,000
1.2 points: about NZ$35,000
2.0 points: about NZ$21,000

Two points cheaper means moving from 2.65% to 0.65%, which sits on top of the 0.60% online debit cap and leaves nothing for the acquirer, the scheme or the gateway. No provider will sell you that. Eight tenths of a point is achievable for a store with volume and a negotiated blended rate, and it still needs NZ$52,000 a month, over NZ$600,000 a year online, before the build repays itself on fees alone.

Most New Zealand small stores sit well under that. On fees, Shopify wins. We build custom stores at Kage Works and this is still the first calculation we run, because a store that pays for itself in year four should have been a Shopify theme.

Costs that sit outside both quotes

Shopify bills New Zealand merchants in US dollars. Local currency billing covers a listed set of countries and New Zealand is not among them (Shopify Help Center). Your bank adds a foreign currency margin on top: 2.25% at BNZ, an offshore service margin of 2.10% at ASB, and up to 2.5% on a Westpac business credit card (BNZ, ASB, Westpac). Your subscription moves with the exchange rate whether or not Shopify changes its price.

Shopify also adds 15% GST to a New Zealand bill, and stops once you register for GST and put your IRD number in the account, applied to invoices issued after you add it (Shopify Help Center, Sufio). GST registration is compulsory above NZ$60,000 of annual turnover, so any store past that line should open its last Shopify invoice today and look for a GST row.

Apps are the line that grows without you touching it. New Zealand agencies put a typical stack between NZ$50 and NZ$400 a month, and Shopify's own community carries long threads from merchants watching paid apps replace features that used to ship free, including the Product Reviews app Shopify retired in September 2023 (Shopify Community, Skyrocket). Treat every app as a recurring rate that survives your quiet months.

Platform deadlines can force paid work you never budgeted. Shopify removed checkout.liquid in stages, taking information, shipping and payment pages out on 13 August 2024 and thank-you and order-status pages on 28 August 2025 (Shopify changelog), then hard-blocking legacy customisations on 13 August 2026, reportedly catching around 5,200 Plus merchants who had not moved. Agencies running those migrations reported project costs from US$8,000 to US$60,000 (SaaSRise). Plus merchants wore that one. Read it as the rule for every tier: you rent your checkout customisation, and the landlord sets the renewal date.

Shopify's New Zealand rate is 2.65%, whatever the roundups say

Shopify's own New Zealand pricing page lists Basic online card processing at 2.65% plus NZ$0.30, Grow at 2.45% and Advanced at 2.35%, each plus the same 30 cents, with in-person rates of 1.8%, 1.65% and 1.5% (Shopify, checked 11 August 2026). Comparison sites still quote the old 2.7% or repeat the United States table at 2.9% plus 30c. Two tenths of a point on NZ$30,000 a month is NZ$60, close to the plan fee itself, so read the rate off the pricing page and your own payouts rather than off a roundup, this one included once it ages.

The Commerce Commission gave businesses a benchmark before the December cuts: average merchant service fees for small businesses ran at 1.2% to 1.5%, and it encouraged anyone paying over 1.5% to go back to their provider for a better deal (RNZ). That benchmark covers all card transactions, cheap in-person rates pull it down, and it predates the December 2025 interchange cuts, so an online-only store should expect to sit above it rather than match it. A full point above it is the signal to ring your provider.

Choose on operations, then negotiate the rate

Two questions settle the platform.

Can a rate table, a discount code and a variant list describe how you sell? Standard products, standard shipping and one price list point at Shopify, and the money a custom build would have taken belongs in stock and traffic instead. Our guide to SEO for New Zealand small businesses covers where that spend goes.

Does your pricing or fulfilment run on rules the platform has no field for? Trade accounts on individual price lists, freight priced by cube, or stock allocated across a shop and a warehouse are the cases where a custom store stops being an expensive Shopify. Our comparison of Squarespace, Webflow and custom builds runs the same decision for a site that does not sell online, and our breakdown of what a website costs in New Zealand sets out the build ranges.

Either way, get the card rate in writing before you sign, and ask for it again each December. The regulator keeps cutting the wholesale price. Your provider will not volunteer to pass it on, and our questions to ask a web design agency covers the wording that pins the rest of it down.