The problem with launching a store is not finding tools. Every tool has a free trial, every app store has a hundred plausible add-ons, and by launch day a first-time merchant pays for six subscriptions and has sold nothing. This guide is the minimum: storefront, the email that recovers abandoned carts, the chat that answers pre-purchase questions, and the glue. Everything else waits for orders.
Prices are quoted at the time of verification (2026-09-09).
The stack at launch
| Job | Tool | Launch cost |
|---|---|---|
| Storefront, checkout, payments | Shopify Basic | $39 monthly ($29 annual) after the trial |
| Abandoned-cart and welcome email | Klaviyo free | $0 up to 250 active profiles |
| Pre-purchase chat and FAQ | Tidio free | $0 up to 50 billable conversations |
| Connecting anything else | Zapier free | $0 up to 100 tasks, two-step only |
Minimum: $39 a month plus payment processing, which on Shopify Payments starts at 2.9% plus 30 cents per online card transaction. Shopify's trial is 3 days free, then $1 a month for the first 3 months before standard pricing, so the first quarter is close to free if you launch inside it.
Storefront: Shopify Basic
Choose Shopify if you sell physical products, want payments handled without a separate merchant account, and may sell on social or marketplaces later. It is the fastest path from zero to a working store, and it scales without replatforming. Skip it if the site is content-first with a small shop attached, where Squarespace or Wix does the job cheaper, or if you sell courses and digital products through funnels, where Systeme.io charges 0% transaction fees on a free plan.
Two costs to plan for. Without Shopify Payments, Basic adds a 2% platform fee on every order. And the app ecosystem is where launch budgets die: paid apps and premium themes climb quickly. Launch on a free theme and install no paid app until an order tells you which one you need; abandoned-cart recovery and discounts are already built in.
Email: Klaviyo free
Choose Klaviyo if you are on Shopify. Its store integration is the deepest available, so abandoned-cart, welcome and post-purchase flows work from day one with revenue attribution showing what each earned. The free plan covers 250 active profiles and 500 sends a month, enough to prove the flows before paying. Skip it if your list is not a store list; a newsletter business will find MailerLite or Brevo cheaper.
The growth step is $20 a month for up to 500 active profiles and 5,000 emails, scaling continuously ($45 at 1,500 profiles), billed monthly only with no annual discount. The trap is dormant profiles: inactive profiles count unless you suppress them, so set a suppression rule before the list grows. Composer ($20 a month), Customer Hub (from $20) and Reviews (from $25) are later purchases, not launch purchases.
Chat: Tidio free
Choose Tidio if you want a chat widget that looks up Shopify orders and an AI agent that answers from your own help content. The free plan includes 50 billable conversations, 10 seats, 50 one-time Lyro AI conversations and live chat with ticketing: a month of real support for a new store. Skip it if you will never staff the chat; an unanswered widget converts worse than none.
The growth step is Starter at $24.17 a month on annual billing for 100 conversations, with Growth from $49.17 scaling to 2,000. The Lyro AI agent is a separate add-on from $32.50 a month, and branding removal is $16.67 a month on its own. Conversation billing plus add-ons makes real cost hard to predict, so count your monthly conversations before upgrading.
Glue: Zapier free, and probably not even that
Shopify, Klaviyo and Tidio connect natively; at launch you should need no integration layer. Add Zapier only when a specific job appears, such as pushing orders to a spreadsheet or alerting a supplier. The free plan's 100 tasks and two-step limit cover that. If you are building multi-step Zaps that fire on every order, check whether a Shopify app does it natively, because every action step consumes a task and Professional is $29.99 a month for 750.
The first growth step, priced
At roughly 500 email profiles and 100 chat conversations a month: Shopify Basic $39, Klaviyo $20, Tidio Starter $24.17 (annual), Zapier $0. About $83 a month plus processing. Shopify Grow at $105 monthly is only worth it when the lower payment rates and staff accounts pay for the difference, which for most stores is well beyond the first hundred orders.
The mistakes that make it fail
Buying a premium theme before the first sale. Installing reviews, subscriptions and upsell apps on day one, each with a monthly fee. Paying for Klaviyo before the free flows have recovered a cart. Leaving the chat widget on with nobody answering. Buying a Zapier plan for a problem a native integration solves. And choosing Shopify for a business that is mostly a blog with three products; a website builder with commerce is the right tool there.
Launch at $39. Add the second subscription when a number, not a feeling, tells you to. Compare the storefront options at /category/ecommerce and the email options at /category/email-marketing before you commit.