Hostinger vs Shopify: Is a Cheap Builder Enough to Sell?

What Hostinger Sells an Online Store

When Hostinger says a plan comes with ecommerce, the store itself is still its own product. Hostinger's AI Builder ecommerce guide calls Hostinger Ecommerce “a separate subscription” that you add to a website, and the Help Center describes it as “a standalone subscription — one plan covers one ecommerce store.” The same Help Center lists three ways to put that store in front of buyers.

Manual or Agentic Mode: What Each Can Sell

The two modes of the builder split the store's features between them. Manual mode is the one Hostinger's setup guide pairs with the Ecommerce subscription; Agentic mode builds by chatting with AI and spends AI credits as it goes. Three differences matter to a seller:

• AI credits: “Manual mode doesn’t use AI credits.”
• Subscription products: the manual-mode guide says “to sell subscription-type products, use Hostinger AI Builder agentic mode instead,” and the Help Center's “Hostinger Ecommerce: Product overview” page adds that “Quick link stores currently do not support subscription product types.”
• Tracking: in the Store Manager, GA4 and Meta Pixel are marked “Available for Hostinger AI Builder agentic mode stores.”

What Each Platform Costs: Start Price vs Renewal

Both companies advertise a monthly number, and neither number is the whole bill. Hostinger's is a promotional price that needs years of prepayment and covers the website, not the store; Shopify's is the floor under apps and payment fees. The three parts below take them apart.

Why the Builder Price Is Not the Price of a Store

Hostinger's Website Builder page prices its cheapest plan, Premium, at $2.49 a month, read on October 22, 2026 during a Black Friday promotion. That price buys 48 months paid up front — $119.52 — and renews at $10.99 a month. Premium is also the one plan on that page without the “Ecommerce available” label, which appears only on Unlimited and Cloud Startup; the Unlimited card describes itself as “Unlimited websites, AI tools, ecommerce, full flexibility.”

Hostinger's own Help Center reads that label differently. Its page explaining what Hostinger Ecommerce is says it in one line:

The same page spells out what a branded store needs: “a Hostinger Ecommerce plan plus a hosting plan that supports Hostinger AI Builder manual mode.” The Ecommerce pricing page sells that subscription at $4.99 a month on a 12-month term, renewing at $8.99 a month, with prices that “exclude applicable taxes.”

So two Hostinger pages, both read on October 22, 2026, disagree about whether a new Unlimited plan comes with a store: the Website Builder page labels Unlimited and Cloud Startup “Ecommerce available,” and the Help Center says new “Unlimited or Cloud hosting subscriptions” no longer include Ecommerce. Until they agree, price a Hostinger store as a builder plan plus the separate subscription, because that is how the Help Center describes new purchases — and treat the order summary Hostinger shows before you pay as the bill that governs.

Every builder plan also carries a custom domain that is “free for 1 year,” so budget for the domain's renewal from year two.

What a Hostinger Store Costs in Year One, Years Two to Four, and After

Here is the arithmetic once, with Unlimited as the cheapest plan the builder page labels “Ecommerce available.” Unlimited's $3.49 a month runs for the 48 months you prepay ($167.52); the Ecommerce subscription's $4.99 runs for 12. So the store costs $8.48 a month in year one, $12.48 a month in years two to four once Ecommerce renews at $8.99, and $25.98 a month from year five, when Unlimited renews at $16.99 too.

A Quick link store skips the builder plan, so it costs $4.99 a month for the first year and $8.99 after. Shopify Basic, billed yearly, costs $29 a month the whole way through.

The steps come from two clocks, not from one price rise: the 12-month Ecommerce term renews first, the 48-month builder term four years later. The Website Builder page shows only the 48-month price, so that is the one used here. Even after both renewals the branded Hostinger store stays under Shopify Basic billed yearly — which is why price alone rarely settles this comparison.

What Shopify Charges at the Entry Tier

Shopify's entry plan, Basic, is $39 a month, or $29 a month billed yearly, in US dollars on Shopify's pricing page. A new store starts with a 3-day free trial, then pays $1 a month for 3 months on most plans before standard monthly pricing applies, and every plan on that page lists “Sell unlimited products.”

That still makes Shopify the dearer option in every year of the comparison above, and the plan fee is only the floor of a Shopify bill: card processing and app subscriptions stack on top, as our breakdown of Shopify's cost stack shows. What the higher price buys shows up in the sections below — currencies, tax calculation, a catalog without a cap — not in the monthly line.

How Many Products a Hostinger Store Holds

Ask Hostinger how many products a store can hold and its pages give four answers, all read on October 22, 2026:

A fifth page, Hostinger's import guide, also updated two days before we read it, uses a store with 2,000 product slots as its example.

Don't average the figures or pick the one you like. The number that applies to your store comes from the import tool: Hostinger's add-products guide says “a single import can add as many products as your store has free product slots,” and the import window shows the exact count. If your catalog could approach 1,000 products, read that count before you build, and plan around the lower figure until it tells you otherwise.

On Shopify the question doesn't come up: “The number of products that you can sell in your Shopify store isn't restricted,” according to its list of features on all plans.

Variants, Digital Files and Subscriptions

Beyond the product count, a few per-product rules decide whether your catalog fits as it is:

• Options: on Hostinger, “each product can include up to 50 options or variations,” and “options are not available for Digital or Appointment products.” On Shopify, “You can create up to 2,048 variants for a product,” per Shopify's variants guide — though some third-party themes, theme app extensions, public apps and sales channels might not support more than 100 variants.
• Digital products: each file can be up to 100 MB, with up to 10 files per product.
• Subscription products: on an AI Builder site, Hostinger's manual-mode guide says to use Agentic mode for them, and Quick link stores don't support them, as covered under Manual or Agentic mode above.

Payments and Transaction Fees

The two parts below take each side in turn: which processors a Hostinger store can use, then what Shopify charges with and without Shopify Payments.

Which Payment Providers a Hostinger Store Can Use

Hostinger's Ecommerce pricing page answers the fee question in one word — “None. You keep 100% of what you earn. Hostinger Ecommerce charges no platform transaction fees.” The same page says you can accept “100+ payment methods globally, including Stripe (Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, and Google Pay), PayPal, RazorPay, and Alipay.” The Help Center's list of payment gateways is narrower, and it is the one that tells you what your store can switch on:

“No platform fee” covers Hostinger's own share only. The processor you connect bills its own rate — the gateway guide says so outright for dLocal Go: “dLocal charges processing fees.”

When Shopify Adds a Transaction Fee

On Shopify the card rate depends on the plan. On Basic, Shopify Payments charges 2.9% + 30¢ for an online payment with a standard card and adds 1% for international cards, per Shopify's US-dollar pricing table read in October 2026.

Here Shopify has a cost Hostinger does not. If you take payments through a third-party provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a 2% transaction fee on Basic — which, its pricing overview says, covers “a secure checkout platform” and the integration with external providers — while that provider “charges you their credit card rates themselves, separately.”

The same overview adds a second case: on stores created on or after May 12, 2025, Shopify charges the third-party transaction fee on the part of an order paid with store credit or gift cards, even when the store uses Shopify Payments. Which stores and orders that covers is in our FAQ on gift card and store credit fees.

PayPal is exempt from the third-party fee when Shopify Payments is your primary provider. How the fee steps down on higher plans and when it is waived is in our breakdown of the third-party surcharge.

Does Hostinger Calculate Sales Tax for You?

Tax is where a Hostinger store asks the most of you. Hostinger's Help Center says that in Hostinger Ecommerce “taxes are managed manually by creating multiple tax zones with individual tax rates,” and states the consequence on the same page:

Four things follow, all from that page:

• Every rate is one you enter. Looking up the right rate for each zone is your job, and so is changing it.
• One set of taxes for every product: “All taxes apply to all products regardless of their type; it's not possible to apply a specific tax to a specific product.”
• No zone, no tax: “If your customer’s country is outside your tax zone, no tax is applied.”
• Your product prices include tax: “Taxes are included in product prices,” and they apply to the cart total, shipping included.

Shopify Tax works the other way round. It is built for merchants that sell to customers in the United States, European Union, United Kingdom and Canada, and its pricing page says it “is free to use until your store reaches a sales threshold, after which a per-transaction fee applies based on your store's location and Shopify plan.”

That fee is a cost Hostinger's manual zones never charge; the trade is your time against a percentage once sales grow. Whether a US store owes sales tax in the first place is covered in our guide to Shopify sales tax.

Shipping Zones and Labels

Shipping is less of a gap. Hostinger's store setup guide allows “an unlimited number of shipping zones and up to 20 shipping options per shipping zone,” and the Ecommerce pricing page says you can connect Shippo to “print labels in seconds, offer real-time tracking, and ship with 40+ carriers including DHL, FedEx, and UPS.” Shopify's own rate options are covered in our guide to Shopify shipping rates.

Selling Beyond One Site

Two questions decide whether a Hostinger store can grow outward: who it can sell to, and where else it can sell.

One Currency, One Language

Hostinger's Help Center states the limit without hedging: Hostinger Ecommerce “currently does not support multiple currencies or multiple languages.” You select “the region and currency your store will operate in” in the payment settings, and a later currency change does not recalculate your product and shipping prices. A store selling to one country in its own currency never notices; a store pricing for buyers abroad has no second currency to offer them.

Shopify handles that through Markets, which it describes as a way “to manage how different customers experience your store based on their location, customer group, retail location, or sales channel.” Setting it up is a project of its own, covered in our guide to Shopify Markets.

Marketplaces, Social Channels and In-Person Sales

The Help Center's “Hostinger Ecommerce: Product overview” page lists the channel types a store can sell through:

• a Quick link store;
• a site built in Hostinger AI Builder, manual mode;
• a site built in Hostinger AI Builder, agentic mode;
• a custom sales channel connected through the Public Sales Channel API;
• a Payment Link — “a direct, pre-filled checkout page for specific products and variants,” for selling without a storefront;
• the WordPress plugin.

The Public Sales Channel API is a developer's route rather than a marketplace connection: the product page says you can “use the Public Sales Channel API to connect your own storefront to Hostinger,” with Hostinger keeping the products, carts, orders and payments behind it.

Hostinger's marketing tells a broader story. An FAQ answer on its Ecommerce pricing page says that “whether you're selling on your website, TikTok, Instagram, or a marketplace like Etsy or Amazon, it gives you centralized inventory management for all your shops.” Its Ecommerce product page, read the same day, files social selling under “Coming soon”: “Connect with TikTok Shops, Meta, and other social platforms as integrations become available.”

No Hostinger help page we have found describes how to connect an Etsy, Amazon or Google Merchant Center account to Hostinger Ecommerce. On October 22, 2026 we read the Ecommerce pricing and product pages, the Website Builder page, and the Help Center articles on what Hostinger Ecommerce is, enabling ecommerce in AI Builder, creating an online store, the Store Manager, payment gateways and taxes. If marketplace selling is part of your plan, ask Hostinger to show you that connection before you build around it.

In-person selling is not among those six channel types. Shopify's answer is Shopify POS, “a point of sale system available on iOS or Android that you can use to sell your products in person.”

When Hostinger Is Enough — and When It Isn't

The table puts each ceiling from the sections above side by side. If any row above “A third-party payment provider” describes your store, start on Shopify; the last two rows show what Hostinger saves you.

Where Hostinger Is the Sensible Pick

Picture a maker selling a few dozen products to buyers in their own country, with a website that is mostly about the work and a shop attached to it. Every ceiling above sits far from that store, and the published prices favor Hostinger in every year compared here.

Two habits keep that choice cheap later. Keep your own spreadsheet of every product from the day you publish it, because Hostinger offers no product export, and budget for the domain's renewal once its free first year ends. Both come back in the migration section below.

Where Shopify Earns Its Higher Price

The case for Shopify is not the monthly line; it is what the store can grow into without moving. Selling to a second country means a second currency, and a Hostinger store has none to offer. Taxes that depend on where the buyer is become a list you maintain by hand, zone by zone. And a catalog heading for four figures runs into a cap Hostinger's own pages state two different ways.

The honest counterweight: Shopify is the dearer platform in every year compared here, a third-party payment provider costs an extra 2% on Basic, and Shopify Tax is free only until your sales cross its threshold. If none of the ceilings above is in your plans for the next year or two, that money stays yours on Hostinger.

Moving From Hostinger to Shopify Later

If the store outgrows Hostinger, what you can take with you is decided on the day you start, not the day you leave. Hostinger's Help Center is blunt about the product catalog:

Orders and customers are easier: the Store Manager exports each list to CSV. Deleted products, on the other hand, are gone for good — Hostinger's import guide says “Deleted products can't be restored in Hostinger Ecommerce” — so the spreadsheet you keep is the only copy of your catalog.

No Shopify page we have found names Hostinger as a migration source. As of October 22, 2026, neither the migration guides listed on Shopify's migrating-to-Shopify page (Amazon, Clover, Etsy, eBay, GoDaddy, Lightspeed, Square, Squarespace, Wix and WooCommerce) nor the platforms the Store Migration app imports from include it.

The app still accepts a file — “Upload a CSV file or, on supported platforms, connect your account to import automatically” — and Shopify's guide lists exporting “your data into CSV files” and importing them as one of its routes. In practice the move takes four steps, and the first one starts now:

Which route suits your catalog — CSV, a migration app or a hired Shopify Partner — depends on its size and how much of the work you want to do yourself; our comparison of migration methods walks through each.

Keeping Your Hostinger Domain

The domain is the easy part (which Hostinger DNS records to change). Shopify's Help Center has a guide for Hostinger domains that opens: “If you purchased a domain from Hostinger and want to use it on a Shopify store without moving the hosting to Shopify, then this guide will help you manually connect your Hostinger domain to Shopify.” Before the move, Shopify's migration guide adds that you “might need to disconnect any existing domains you want to transfer from your previous platform's settings.”

Connecting is not transferring. With a connected domain, Shopify says your domain provider “remains the registrar, and you continue to manage your domain settings, billing, and renewals through that provider” — so the renewal after Hostinger's free first year is billed by Hostinger, not Shopify. When it is worth moving the registration as well is covered in our guide to Shopify domains.

The Third Route: WooCommerce on Hostinger Hosting

If you would rather run a WordPress store than rent a builder, Hostinger sells that too. Its WooCommerce hosting page prices the Unlimited plan at $3.49/mo on a 48-month term, renewing at $16.99 a month, read on October 22, 2026 during a Black Friday promotion.

That is a different trade from the one on this page — a WordPress store with plugins on hosting you manage, against Shopify's hosted platform — and it has its own comparison: Shopify vs WooCommerce.

The Bottom Line

A cheap builder is enough for a store that stays small and local. The deciding question is not the price but whether your next year of selling fits inside one currency, hand-entered tax zones and a product cap Hostinger's own pages can't agree on.

Frequently Asked Questions