COHN NutritionPlatform decision brief27 August 2026
Shopify, by the numbers
Your fee research was right to the decimal. Here is what it costs, what it saves, and the one number Christopher still needs to give you.
Your last 12 months
$174,702
Averaging $14,558 a month
The plan
Grow
$79/mo billed annually
Net new cost
$188/mo
After WooCommerce savings
Affinity target
1.86%
To beat Shopify's own rate
What the store actually does
Read from your live WooCommerce data, not estimated
Gross monthly sales across 76 orders a month at a $192 average order. August is partial, through the 27th.
Grow is the plan, and it stays the plan
Cheapest from $5,000 a month right through to $55,000
Each line is a Shopify plan's total monthly cost: the plan fee plus the 2%, 1% or 0.6% charged for using an outside card processor. Where the lines cross is where the cheapest plan changes.
Annual billing. At $14,558 a month Grow costs $225 all in, against $320 on Basic and $386 on Advanced.
The real cost is lower than it looks
Because part of your current bill stops
Five WooCommerce extensions you pay for today are simply built into Shopify. That is $435 a year, about $36 a month, that ends.
Grow on annual billing at $14,558 a month of revenue.
Extension
Cost today
On Shopify
Smart Coupons
$129/yr
Built in
Table Rate Shipping
$119/yr
Built in
Product Bundles
$79/yr
Built in
Shipment Tracking
$59/yr
Built in
Checkout Field Editor
$49/yr
Built in
Ends altogether
$435/yr
$36/mo
WooCommerce Subscriptions
$279/yr
Needs a paid app
Affiliate for WooCommerce
$179/yr
Needs a paid app
TaxJar
$39/mo
~$51/mo past $100k
Order export, the subscriptions enhancer, the self-service dashboard and the Zapier connector are also replaced but not yet priced. Vendor prices checked 27 August 2026.
What Affinity needs to give you
The 1% only exists because you keep Authorize.net
Take the outside-processor fee away and the alternative is not zero, it is Shopify's own rate of 2.7% plus 30 cents an order. At your average order that works out to about 2.86% all in. So Affinity has to land under 1.86% for keeping them to be the cheaper choice.
Compared against Shopify Payments at 2.7% plus 30 cents, on $14,558 a month across 76 orders.
What this means
If Christopher can reach 1.86%, keeping Affinity costs nothing extra. If he cannot, keeping him is a service decision rather than a cost one, running somewhere between $250 and $1,800 a year depending where he lands.
That may well be worth paying. Affinity clears the large orders by hand, and those matter. The point is to choose it deliberately rather than absorb it.
And the split channel lowers it further
Retail runs through Shopify. Bulk and wholesale go straight through Authorize.net, outside Shopify checkout entirely. Those large orders never attract the 1% at all.
Stored Authorize.net customer payment profiles import into Shopify's token vault. Available on any Shopify plan, not only the enterprise tiers.
Two caveats
The subscription engine gets rebuilt. Authorize.net has retired its own recurring billing inside the Shopify app, so contracts are recreated on a Shopify subscription app. The merchant account survives; the billing machinery does not.
PayPal is different. PayPal billing agreements do not migrate the way cards do. Anyone subscribed through PayPal needs handling separately.
Staying versus moving
Beyond the money
What staying costs
38 active plugins, 17 just for commerce. Each one a separate vendor, renewal, and thing that can break on its own schedule.
Checkout assembled from parts. Those duplicate orders were one customer charged $177.74 four times in four minutes, from two add-ons interacting badly.
Affiliate data out of reach. 378 recent orders carry commission, but the system will not say which affiliate earned it.
The store updates itself. Tuesday's plugin auto-update changed a live store at a moment nobody chose.
Truly Free stays manual. Indefinitely.
What moving gets you
Truly Free connects directly. Shopify is the only platform they integrate with, and MidStates needs a Shopify API token to build fulfillment.
Commerce is built in. Subscriptions, checkout and payments stop being three plugins negotiating with each other.
The site can be built the way you want. Shopify exposes far more of itself, so the design is not shaped around what the platform permits.
PCI, uptime and updates stop being yours.
$36 a month off the bill, at minimum.
What is still unproven
Said plainly rather than found later
Affiliates. 233 accounts hold the affiliate role. Shopify has options, but recurring commission attribution does not count until it has been tested end to end. That is a gate.
The Shopify subscription app. Which one pairs properly with Authorize.net decides the rebuild, and its cost.
Affinity's actual rate. The one figure that closes the money question.
Nothing moves until affiliates, subscriptions, fulfillment and a real test order all pass. The current store stays live throughout.