How Much Does a Shopify Store Cost in Egypt?

The costs at a glance

Keep two groups apart when you budget. One-off costs get the store launched: development, a paid theme, and content such as product photos. Monthly costs continue for as long as the store is open: the plan, apps, payment fees and any ongoing work.

The Shopify plan, billed in US dollars

Shopify bills stores in Egypt in US dollars. Its help center lists local-currency billing for only a few places, including the EU, the UK and India, and says bills everywhere else are issued in USD.

That has two practical effects. The card on your Shopify account has to accept recurring international payments in USD, so check with your bank before launch, not when the first bill fails. And the cost in Egyptian pounds moves with the exchange rate and with any fees your bank adds to international transactions.

Which plan to start on

Most new stores can start on Basic. The money reason to move up is the fee on third-party payments: higher plans charge less on payments taken through third-party providers, which is how stores in Egypt take card payments (more on that below).

On yearly billing, Grow costs $50 a month more than Basic and cuts that fee from 2% to 1%. So once a store takes about $5,000 a month in online card and wallet payments, the saving covers the difference. On monthly billing, the point is about $6,600. Cash on delivery orders don't count toward it, because Shopify doesn't charge this fee on them.

Payments: no Shopify Payments in Egypt

Shopify Payments, Shopify's own payment processor, isn't available for stores based in Egypt. It isn't on Shopify's list of supported countries. To accept cards or wallets online, you connect a third-party payment provider instead. Shopify's payment provider directory includes providers that operate in Egypt, such as Paymob and Kashier, and your Shopify admin shows which ones are available to your store under Settings, then Payments.

That gives every online payment two separate costs:

• The provider's processing fee, which each provider sets and quotes to you directly.
• Shopify's third-party transaction fee, which depends on your plan: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced at the time of writing. Shopify charges it on top of the provider's fee.

Cash on delivery

Cash on delivery is set up in Shopify as a manual payment method. Shopify doesn't charge its transaction fee on manual payment methods, so COD orders don't carry the 2%, 1% or 0.6%.

COD has costs of its own, though. Your shipping company may charge for collecting cash, and some orders will be refused at the door or never collected, which means paying for delivery on orders that earn nothing. None of that shows up on your Shopify bill, but it belongs in your budget.

One practical point: payment providers run their own approval checks and usually ask for business documents. Start that application early, because it can take longer than building the store.

Theme: free, paid or custom

The theme controls how the store looks and how its pages are laid out. There are three routes:

• A free theme. Shopify offers free themes in its Theme Store. They're a reasonable base for a first store, with no license to pay for.
• A paid theme. Paid themes in the Shopify Theme Store are bought once and licensed to the store you buy them for. When we checked, they were listed from about $150 to $450. Support and updates come from the theme's developer, not from Shopify.
• A custom theme. A theme developed for your brand. There's no license to buy, but the development time is the cost, so it costs more up front than a paid theme.

A paid theme is a starting point, not a finished store. Someone still has to set it up with your products, collections, navigation, pages and brand, and that work is part of the development cost below.

When a custom theme is worth it

• The way you present products needs layouts that available themes can't do without heavy modification.
• You'd otherwise add several apps just to get features a theme could include directly, each with its own monthly fee and its own effect on page speed.
• You're rebuilding an established store and want it built around how your customers already shop.

If you're launching to test a product, or selling a small catalog, a well-set-up free or paid theme is usually the sensible start. You can move to a custom theme once you know what the store needs. If the store will run in Arabic as well as English, check that the theme handles right-to-left layout properly before you commit to it.

Apps: the monthly cost that grows quietly

Most stores add apps for features Shopify and the theme don't include: product reviews, upsells, WhatsApp chat buttons, custom order forms, shipping integrations. Many charge a monthly subscription, usually in US dollars, and some charge per order or by usage.

• List the apps you need before launch and check each one's pricing page. It's easy to reach launch day with a monthly app bill nobody planned for.
• Check whether your theme already does what an app promises.
• Uninstall apps you've stopped using, then check the theme, since some apps leave code behind.

Design and development: where totals differ

This is the part with no list price, because it depends on scope. Shopify development work usually falls into one of four levels:

• Setting up a store on an existing theme: products and collections, navigation, core pages, payments, shipping, and your brand's colors and fonts.
• Customizing a theme: changing or adding sections, templates and product page layouts beyond what the theme's settings allow.
• Developing a custom theme: a theme built around your brand and products.
• Redesigning or rebuilding an existing store: any of the above, plus moving products and content across and redirecting old URLs so you keep your search traffic and existing links.

What moves the price

• The number of distinct page designs: home, collection, product and landing pages.
• How many products you have and how clean the product data is: titles, variants, sizes and photos.
• Custom features, and integrations such as your shipping company's system.
• Whether the store needs two languages.
• Whether your content is ready. Missing product photos and copy can hold up a launch as much as development can.

How to compare quotes

Two quotes for “a Shopify store” can describe very different jobs. Ask each developer what's included:

• Which pages and templates will be designed, and how many rounds of changes.
• Whether payments, shipping and taxes are set up, or left to you.
• Whether tracking is included: the Meta pixel, Google Analytics, and conversion tracking for the ads you plan to run.
• Mobile testing and page speed work.
• What happens after launch: fixes, training, and the cost of later changes.

What keeps costing money after launch

Once the store is live, the regular costs are the Shopify plan, your apps, payment fees on online orders, the yearly domain renewal, and any ongoing development or maintenance.

A cost that's easy to leave out of a launch budget is traffic. Unless you already have an audience, people won't find a new store on their own, so plan for an ad budget and the creative those ads need. Our guide to how much to spend on Meta Ads shows how to size that budget from your margins.

When to work with a Shopify developer

You can set up a simple store yourself on a free theme. A developer earns their fee when you need a custom theme or heavy customization, when you're redesigning a store that already has customers and search traffic, or when the store has to be ready for paid traffic from day one.

Boostify builds custom Shopify themes, customizes existing ones and redesigns stores for e-commerce brands in Egypt. See Shopify Development for what that covers.