Shopify for Retail: Run Stores and Online on One Platform

What Shopify for Retail Actually Includes

Most people arrive at "Shopify for retail" asking a business question, not a product one: can Shopify actually run my shop — the till, the stockroom, the staff, and my website — instead of stitching a point-of-sale system to a separate e-commerce platform? The answer is yes, and the reason it works is architectural. Everything below shares one catalog, one inventory pool and one customer list.

Retail is a big enough prize for Shopify to invest heavily here. US retail sales are forecast to reach $5.6 trillion in 2026, up 4.4% over 2025, and the vast majority of it still happens in physical stores. Shopify's own offline business is growing into that: offline revenue grew 33% year over year, spanning Shopify Payments for offline, POS Pro and Retail plan subscriptions, and POS hardware.

Concretely, the platform is six pieces working as one. The register (the Shopify POS app) is where a sale happens; the rest is what makes that sale part of a single business rather than a disconnected till.

What Running Retail on Shopify Costs

There is no single "retail price." Your bill is a plan fee, an optional per-location POS Pro fee, and card processing on every sale. Get the plan right first — our guide to choosing the right Shopify plan walks through what each tier includes beyond the register — then layer POS Pro and processing on top.

The plan sets your monthly fee, your in-person card rate, staff-account allowance and location cap. Basic, Grow and Advanced list at $39, $105 and $399 a month, with in-person card rates of 2.6%, 2.5% and 2.4% plus 10¢ when you use Shopify Payments. Annual billing takes 25% off the plan fee (Basic $29, Grow $79, Advanced $299), but the card rates and the POS Pro fee are unchanged.

Source: Shopify pricing, verified July 2026. Third-party gateway fees apply only if you use a processor other than Shopify Payments.

On top of the plan sits your POS tier. POS Lite is included on every core plan for casual in-person selling. POS Pro costs $89 per month per location on Basic, Grow and Advanced; Plus includes 20 locations, up to 200 with Shopify Payments. Because Pro is billed per location, the fixed monthly cost of a multi-store operation climbs predictably — worth seeing before you commit.

Which Setup Fits Your Store

Four situations cover almost every retailer, and each maps to a plan-and-tier starting point. Find the row that sounds like you, then read the rest of the guide through that lens.

Still unsure which plan and POS tier to buy? Five questions narrow it down.

Hardware: What You Need at the Counter

The app is built to degrade gracefully from a full retail counter down to a phone in your hand. Nothing here is mandatory to open — it's a menu you add to as cash handling, receipt printing and scanning speed start to matter.

Source: Shopify POS hardware (US prices, verified July 2026). Availability varies by region.

Read the whole thing as three budgets. The $0 budget is a supported phone using Tap to Pay — enough to open a market stall or a first shop. The $49 budget adds a Tap & Chip reader for chip cards or where Tap to Pay isn't offered. The full counter — terminal, printer, drawer and scanner — comes to about $986 and only makes sense for a permanent, cash-handling store.

Payments at the Counter

In-person card rates track your plan, and Tap to Pay is billed at the same rate as a physical reader, so going device-only costs nothing extra. Manually keyed entries — rare at a counter — sit higher. If you route payments through an outside gateway instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a per-transaction fee that almost always outweighs any savings.

Source: Shopify pricing, verified July 2026 (see the cost section above). Rates apply with Shopify Payments in the US.

Tap to Pay on iPhone works on an iPhone XS or newer (iOS 16.7+ in the US), in the US (excluding Puerto Rico) and Canada, with no extra fee. Tap to Pay on Android is available on every plan on Android 13+ devices with a recent security patch, again at your normal in-person rate. Either turns the phone into a contactless reader, which is why the $0 hardware budget is genuinely viable for a new store.

Offline mode: what still works, and what stops

Shopify POS is a cloud register, so a dropped connection narrows what it can do. Cash keeps flowing; most of the value-added workflows do not. Know the split before a busy Saturday tests it.

Model your monthly cost

Plug in your in-person volume, average ticket, locations and whether you want POS Pro. The calculator returns an estimated monthly total per plan and flags the cheapest at your numbers — a faster answer than reading the rate table twice.

Omnichannel: Pickup, Delivery, Ship-From-Store and Returns

Omnichannel is not a buzzword when it shows up in the numbers. In a grocery-sector study by Incisiv, FMI and Wynshop, omnichannel buyers spent an average of $1,043 a month — about 1.5 times more than online-only ($659) or in-store-only ($669) shoppers. Letting a customer buy on the web and collect, swap or return in the shop is what captures that lift.

Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS)

Fulfilling online pickup orders inside the POS app is a POS Pro feature. The staff flow is three simple beats, and every step keeps inventory and the order record in sync.

Pickup pairs naturally with an appointment or scheduling layer if you need it; the Zapiet Pickup + Delivery app is a common add-on for stores that want tighter control over collection windows.

Local delivery and ship-from-store

For local delivery, you define who qualifies by a list of postal codes or a radius around each location — up to a 160 km (100 mi) maximum, with up to ten delivery zones per location. That turns a shop into a same-day fulfillment point for nearby customers without a third-party courier network.

Ship-from-store — fulfilling ship-to-customer orders from the shop, complete with packing slips, labels and tracking — is a POS Pro feature. It lets a store double as a micro-warehouse, which is how retailers use floor stock to clear online orders faster than a central warehouse could.

Returns, exchanges and gift cards

A straight refund to the original payment works on any paid plan. The richer returns tooling — exchanges, enforced return rules, and store credit — is POS Pro. Orders placed through the Shop app can be returned in store once you set up self-serve returns.

Gift cards are available on every plan, as digital codes or pre-made plastic cards, and they're redeemable across your store and online — one shared balance, whichever channel the customer uses.

Inventory Across Locations

Multi-location inventory is a base feature. Assign a product to multiple locations and Shopify tracks a separate quantity for each, so a sale at the counter decrements the right bucket and the online store sees the same number. The location cap is 10 on Basic, Grow and Advanced, and 200 on Plus.

Moving stock between locations runs on transfers: a POS Pro location can fulfil and receive them right in the app, while any plan can manage transfers from the admin. Purchase orders in the admin record the commercial terms you agree with suppliers and link to an incoming transfer, and stocktaking is handled through the "inventory adjustments by count" report.

Barcodes and labels

The Retail Barcode Labels app generates and prints Code-128 labels for Dymo, Avery and Zebra printers. Two cautions worth knowing before a bulk run: generating labels in bulk overwrites any barcodes you entered manually, and these variant-ID barcodes aren't suitable for Google Shopping because they can be shared across multiple stores.

Staff Accounts, Roles and PINs

Two things govern staffing: your plan's admin-account allowance, and your POS tier's in-app controls. On the plan side, additional staff accounts run 0 on Basic, 5 on Grow, 15 on Advanced and unlimited on Plus. On the POS side, the split is clean.

On Pro, custom POS roles gate who can process returns, apply discounts or handle cash — the default role is Associate — and POS-only staff get app access without any admin access, which is exactly what you want for seasonal hires. What Shopify does not include is a native time clock; stores that need scheduling, time tracking and payroll on the POS add EasyTeam from the App Store.

Reports That Matter in Retail

The retail sales reports are available only if you sell in person, and they answer the questions a store manager actually asks:

• Total sales by POS location
• POS total sales by staff member, and staff daily or total sales
• POS total sales by product, variant, vendor or type

Staff-level reporting depends on sales attribution, a POS Pro feature, and the daily sales reports and in-app retail analytics are Pro as well. When you want to move beyond the store to channel mix, cohorts and location performance, those figures roll up into Shopify Analytics.

Customers and Loyalty Across Channels

A customer profile holds contact details, purchase history and custom metafields — you can store specialized information such as birthdays or loyalty status — and marketing consent is captured at the customer's first checkout. Requiring or recommending which fields staff collect at the register is a POS Pro setting. The result is that a returning online buyer is recognised at the counter, and vice versa.

That customized experience is where Shopify leaves a gap: there is no native points-and-rewards loyalty program. Customer metafields are a workaround for storing status, but for an actual program you install an app. The common choices, all from the App Store:

Migrating From Square, Lightspeed or Clover

Most retailers switching to Shopify come from Square, Lightspeed or Clover. The catalog-and-customer move is straightforward; the data that doesn't survive is what to plan for. The mechanics of a cross-platform cutover, and how Shopify POS compares with Square and Lightspeed head-to-head, are covered in our Shopify POS for Retail guide.

For a large or messy catalog, Shopify sells a data-migration service priced by order count: about $500 for 0–40,000 orders, $1,400 for 40,000–200,000, $2,625 for 200,000–500,000 and $7,500 above that. One thing not to reach for: the old "Store Importer" app is delisted, so don't plan a migration around it.

Where Shopify Retail Falls Short

Before you commit, weigh the honest constraints. Each is manageable, but you should know it exists rather than discover it mid-launch:

• Offline mode is narrow. No returns, gift cards or discount codes offline; offline card payments need specific hardware and aren't available in France.
• No native loyalty program. Points and rewards require an app such as Smile.io, Marsello or LoyaltyLion.
• No native staff time clock. Scheduling, time tracking and payroll on the POS need a third-party app like EasyTeam.
• Migrations lose data. Inventory-by-location, reviews and more than three product options generally don't transfer, and prices-by-location collapse to the highest.
• The Stocky gap. With Stocky retiring in August 2026, purpose-built forecasting and low-stock workflows shift to native features that some merchants find less specialized.
• Location caps. Basic, Grow and Advanced stop at 10 locations; only Plus reaches 200.
• Keyed cards cost more. Manually entered cards are 3.5% + 10¢ — fine occasionally, expensive as a habit.

Launch Playbook: Signup to First In-Person Sale

Use this as a working checklist. Progress saves in your browser, so you can tick steps off across the days it actually takes to open. Expand any step to see what "done" really means before you check it.

The Bottom Line

Shopify for retail is the same platform that powers the website, extended to the counter — which is exactly why it's compelling. You're not integrating a till with an e-commerce system; the till is the system. That unification is worth more day to day than any single feature, and it's the reason omnichannel workflows feel native rather than bolted on.

Frequently Asked Questions