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Shopify Plus licensing starts at CA$3,400 per month in Canada, and a proper Plus build typically lands between CAD $30,000 and $150,000 depending on integrations. Here is the honest math, what actually moves the number, and when Plus is the wrong answer.
Updated · 3 min read
Shopify Plus in Canada starts at CA$3,400 per month on a three year term, or CA$3,650 on a one year term, and moves to a variable platform fee for higher volume merchants. Watch the currency: the widely quoted USD $2,300 is the American list price, and Shopify sets prices per currency rather than by exchange rate, so converting it understates a Canadian bill. That is before a single line of custom work: apps commonly add a few hundred dollars a month, and payment processing is its own line entirely.
If your store does under roughly CAD $1.5 million a year, standard Shopify or Advanced usually makes more sense than Plus. Above that line the case for Plus is driven by features rather than fees: checkout extensibility, B2B, expansion stores, and API limits. The lower card rate alone does not repay the licensing gap until volume is many times higher.
In the Canadian market, a theme-based Plus build with light customization typically lands between CAD $30,000 and $60,000. A custom design with real integrations, inventory, PIM, loyalty, subscriptions, usually runs CAD $60,000 to $150,000. Past that you are in complex B2B territory: custom checkout logic, multi-store, punch-out catalogs.
The single biggest cost driver is never the design. It is how many systems the store has to talk to, and how messy their data is when you open them up.
Data migration is priced as an afterthought and billed as a surprise: product data, customers, orders, redirects, and reviews all have edge cases, and the state of your current data decides the effort. App subscriptions accumulate quietly until they rival the platform fee. And every store needs a plan for after launch, because the store that converts is the one that keeps getting worked on.
Ask any agency quoting you to break out migration, apps, and the first six months of post-launch work as their own lines. If they will not, the quote is not comparable.
Plus is the wrong answer when the revenue does not support the licensing, when the real problem is traffic or conversion rather than platform limits, and sometimes when the business is B2B-only with requirements so specific that a custom build on standard infrastructure costs less over three years.
A good agency should be willing to talk you out of Plus. That conversation costs them a bigger project and saves you a five-figure annual mistake.
Builds are fixed-fee, scoped after a discovery call, in CAD. Ongoing work runs on the Development retainer at $5,000 CAD per month, which covers a senior team rather than a single hire. The theme, the code, and every integration belong to you, documented well enough to hand to anyone.
A theme-based build typically ships in 8 to 16 weeks. Custom builds with inventory or subscription integrations usually run 4 to 6 months. The calendar is driven by integrations and data quality far more than by design.
Yes, if the migration includes a full redirect map, parity on titles and structured data, and a crawl comparison before and after cutover. Rankings dip briefly and recover when this is done properly; skipped redirects are how stores lose years of SEO overnight.
Yes. Takeovers are normal work: we audit the theme and apps, document what exists, and take over cleanly from the previous agency or in-house developer.
Most stores should stay on a Shopify theme. Headless earns its cost when you need control Shopify's theme layer will not give you, and it charges you in build time, hosting, and a permanent front-end maintenance job. Here is the honest test.
EcommerceA Shopify migration for a catalog of a few hundred to a few thousand products typically takes 8 to 14 weeks, and the work that protects revenue is a complete 301 redirect map built before anything else. Customer passwords never migrate, Shopify sets your URL structure for you, and the old platform's bad data follows you unless it is cleaned first.
EcommerceGoogle's Core Web Vitals thresholds are a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits. On most Shopify and custom stores the failures come from images, third-party scripts and fonts, in that order, and fixing those three is a few weeks of work rather than a replatform.
Nockta builds ecommerce, custom software, and Amazon operations for businesses across Ontario and Quebec. See where we work or the full service list.