Shopify vs custom ecommerce in Australia: which should you build on?

Should an Australian store use Shopify or go custom?

Use Shopify unless the way you sell is itself the hard part of your business. Shopify runs the catalogue, checkout, hosting, payments and security for a monthly fee, and its app ecosystem covers most Australian requirements. A custom commerce system replaces all of that with software you own and must maintain. That trade is only worth making when Shopify, even with custom apps, cannot express your pricing, ordering or fulfilment rules.

This page compares four options: standard Shopify, Shopify Plus, headless Shopify (Shopify’s backend with your own storefront) and a fully custom build. It stays on platform and integrations; theme design is a separate decision. Prices are from Shopify’s Australian pricing page at the time of writing (8 November 2026) and change often.

	Standard Shopify	Shopify Plus	Headless Shopify	Fully custom
Monthly platform fee	$42 to $431 AUD (yearly billing)	From $3,700 AUD	Shopify plan plus your hosting	Your hosting and maintenance
Checkout	Shopify’s, limited customisation	Fully customisable through extensions	Shopify’s checkout	Yours to build and secure
B2B	Up to 3 catalogues	Unlimited catalogues	As per the Shopify plan	Whatever you build
Who maintains it	Shopify	Shopify	Shopify plus your team	Your team
Best for	Most consumer brands	High volume and serious B2B	Content led or app linked storefronts	Unusual commerce models

What does standard Shopify handle for an Australian store?

Standard Shopify handles the core of an Australian store well: catalogue, GST inclusive pricing, checkout, payments, shipping labels and basic B2B. The three standard plans differ mainly in card rates, staff accounts and reporting.

Plan (AUD, at the time of writing)	Monthly, billed yearly	Monthly, billed monthly	Online card rate (Shopify Payments)	Extra fee with a third party gateway	Staff accounts
Basic	$42	$56	1.7% + 30c	2%	None listed
Grow	$114	$149	1.55% + 30c	1%	5
Advanced	$431	$575	1.35% + 30c	0.6%	15
Plus	From $3,700	From $3,700	1.15% + 30c	0.2%	Unlimited

Two rows in that table shape everything else. First, international and Amex cards cost more (3.5% + 30c and 2.9% + 30c online on Basic). Second, the third party gateway fee: if you want Stripe, Tyro or another provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own percentage on top of that provider’s fee unless you are on Plus, where it drops to 0.2%.

Standard Shopify is the right answer when you sell products with normal variants, ship parcels, sell mostly to consumers and can live with Shopify’s checkout. That describes the large majority of Australian online retailers.

What does Shopify Plus actually buy?

Plus buys a customisable checkout, unlimited B2B catalogues, more locations, higher API limits and lower payment rates. On the Australian pricing page, Plus lists up to 200 inventory locations against 10 on other plans, unlimited staff, custom functions, bot protection and API call limits up to 500% higher.

Checkout is the feature most stores upgrade for. Shopify has retired its old checkout.liquid customisation: it is unsupported for the information, shipping and payment steps, and was sunset for the Thank you and Order status pages on 28 August 2025. Customisation now happens through checkout extensions, and the deepest control sits on Plus. If an agency quotes checkout changes using the old method, that is a warning sign.

At the starting price, Plus costs $44,400 AUD a year in platform fees alone. The card rate saving (1.15% against 1.35% on Advanced) is worth about $2,000 a year for every $1 million of domestic online card revenue, so Plus pays for itself on rates only at very high volume. Most stores move to Plus for B2B or checkout reasons, not fees.

When does headless Shopify pay off?

Headless pays off when the storefront has to do things a theme cannot do well, and you have the engineering capacity to own a second codebase. You keep Shopify’s admin, inventory and checkout, and build the shopping experience yourself on Shopify’s APIs.

Shopify’s Hydrogen documentation offers two starting points: React Router 7 deployed to Shopify’s Oxygen hosting, or a Next.js template deployed to Vercel. Either way you now run a front end application with its own hosting, monitoring and release process.

Good reasons to go headless:

• Content and commerce are woven together, as in a publisher or a brand with heavy editorial.
• The storefront shares components or accounts with a mobile app or customer portal.
• A product configurator or quoting step needs more than a theme can offer.
• Strict performance targets that a heavily customised theme keeps missing.

Poor reasons are a desire for a different look, or “speed” on a store that is slow because of too many apps. Fix those within the theme first.

When is a fully custom ecommerce build justified?

A custom build is justified when commerce is one part of a larger system you need to own, or when your selling model breaks Shopify’s assumptions. Typical cases:

1. Contract and account pricing at scale. Thousands of customer specific price lists, rebates and approval rules beyond what B2B catalogues and custom functions can manage.
2. Configure, price, quote. Products built to order from many options, where the quote and the order are the same object.
3. Marketplaces and platforms. Multiple sellers, split payments and payouts, which need a payment platform such as Stripe Connect rather than a store.
4. Commerce inside a product. Subscriptions, bookings or ordering embedded in an app or portal where a separate store would confuse customers.

Before choosing custom, check whether a Shopify custom app or a separate service connected by API would solve it. That middle path keeps Shopify’s checkout and security while adding the logic you need. Our build vs buy guide sets out the wider decision.

Which Australian integrations decide the platform?

Australian requirements rarely force a rebuild; they mostly decide which apps or custom integrations you need. Work through this checklist with any platform:

• GST and price display. The ACCC requires the displayed total price to include taxes and all unavoidable fees. Prices should be GST inclusive for consumers and invoices must carry the right tax details.
• Shipping. Australia Post, StarTrack and couriers through label apps or a direct integration. Our shipping carrier integration guide covers the options.
• Buy now, pay later. Afterpay and Zip through the payment provider or an app; fees are much higher than cards, so price accordingly.
• Accounting sync. Xero or MYOB, either order by order or as daily summaries. Decide how fees, refunds and gift cards post before you choose the connector. We cover the patterns in Xero and MYOB integration.
• Inventory across channels. If you also sell on marketplaces or wholesale, stock needs one source of truth. See how to sync inventory across sales channels.

What changed for ecommerce payments on 1 October 2026?

Card surcharges on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa ended on 1 October 2026, so payment costs now sit inside your prices. The Reserve Bank’s conclusions, announced on 31 March 2026, removed surcharging and lowered interchange caps on domestic cards from that date. A cap on foreign card interchange follows on 1 April 2027. According to the RBA, American Express, PayPal and UnionPay also removed surcharging.

For an online store, that makes the fee rate a margin question. On $2 million a year in domestic online card sales, every 0.1 percentage point of card rate is worth $2,000 a year, so the gap between Basic (1.7%) and Grow (1.55%) is about $3,000 a year before the 30c per order. If you previously passed fees on with a surcharge, recalculate your prices now rather than absorbing the cost quietly.

What does each option cost over three years?

For a mid size store, Shopify is usually far cheaper over three years than a custom build, even on Plus. This worked example is a hypothetical store with $2 million AUD a year in domestic online card sales and an average order of $120 (about 16,700 orders a year). Custom build and running figures are assumptions for illustration, not quotes.

Option	Platform fees (36 months)	Card fees (3 years)	Apps or running costs (3 years)	Three year total (approx. AUD)
Shopify Advanced	$431 × 36 = $15,516	(1.35% × $2m + 30c × 16,700) × 3 = $96,000	Apps assumed at $500/mo: $18,000	$129,500
Shopify Plus	$3,700 × 36 = $133,200	(1.15% × $2m + 30c × 16,700) × 3 = $84,000	Apps assumed at $500/mo: $18,000	$235,200
Custom build on Stripe standard rates	Build assumed at $150,000	(1.65% × $2m + 30c × 16,700) × 3 = $114,000	Hosting and maintenance assumed at $30,000 a year: $90,000	$354,000

Stripe’s Australian page says its fees include GST; check how your chosen provider treats GST before comparing to the cent. A larger business could negotiate custom card rates, which narrows the gap but rarely closes it. The custom option only wins when it removes costs Shopify cannot, such as manual order handling or a separate quoting system.

What are the migration risks?

The three migration risks that hurt Australian stores are lost search rankings, broken customer accounts and missing order history. Plan for each:

1. URLs. Map every product, collection and content URL to its new address and set permanent redirects before launch. Shopify uses fixed URL patterns, so moving onto it usually changes paths.
2. Customer accounts. Passwords generally cannot be migrated between platforms, so plan an account activation email and a clear login message.
3. Orders and history. Decide what history customers and staff need to see, and import it or keep the old system read only.
4. Integrations. List every system that reads or writes orders and test each against the new platform before cutover.

How AWLabs approaches ecommerce platforms

We usually recommend staying on Shopify and building around it: a custom app, an accounting or warehouse integration, or a separate service for quoting or contract pricing. We are not a Shopify partner and have no commission on any platform. When a custom commerce system is the honest answer, senior engineers lead the build, the code is assigned to you as it is paid for, and the repository is handed over on final payment. It starts with a 15 minute Development Consult, then a paid Discovery Audit and a fixed price Schedule of Work with three options: The Minimum, The Recommended and The Complete. See custom software and app development or our retail and ecommerce work.