The real cost of multiple brands: one Shopware instance vs. separate Shopify stores

Dutch consumers spent around €9 billion online in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor. Total spending dipped slightly, but product purchases grew and cross-border orders rose by 18%. If you run more than one brand, that combination is uncomfortable: demand is shifting across borders while margins stay under pressure.

When you operate several brands, labels, or country shops, you are choosing between two very different cost curves. One multiplies with every shop you add. The other stays roughly flat. Here is what each extra storefront actually costs, including the parts that never appear on a platform invoice.

Two architectures, two cost curves

On Shopify, a store is a tenant with its own admin, catalog, theme, apps, and settings. Plus lets you run several as expansion stores under one contract, but they remain separate systems that happen to share a bill.

On Shopware, a storefront is a sales channel inside a single instance. Shopware's documentation puts it plainly: one instance can serve multiple stores without duplicating data. Each channel gets its own domain, theme, language, and currency, while the catalog, customer data, integrations, and infrastructure sit underneath, shared.

That is why the curves diverge. On one side the heaviest cost lines are per store. On the other they are per instance, absorbed by the portfolio.

What each extra store costs on Shopify

Shopify Plus starts at €2,250 per month on a one-year term, and that base covers your main store plus nine expansion stores. The allowance is genuinely useful, but the licence is rarely where the money goes.

Beyond ten storefronts you pay again. Shopify lists roughly $300 per month for each additional store. Five brands selling in three countries each is fifteen storefronts, so a third of your estate falls outside the allowance.

Apps are the real multiplier. App subscriptions are tied to a shop. Install the same reviews app and the same feed manager across fifteen storefronts and you pay fifteen times. Typical Shopify Plus app spend runs between $500 and $5,000 per store per month. Even a lean stack at €300 per store adds €4,500 monthly, comfortably more than the platform licence.

Themes and currency add up. Each live expansion store needs its own theme licence, and selling outside your store's primary currency carries a conversion fee of around 1.5%: €7,500 a year on €500,000 of foreign turnover.

Shopify Markets removes part of this by letting one store serve multiple countries with local currencies and domains. The trade-off is autonomy: region-specific promotions, per-country homepages, and locally distinct assortments are awkward inside one Markets store. We covered the practical side in what multi-language on Shopify takes behind the scenes. Brands that need real autonomy end up back at separate stores, and back at the multiplier.

What each extra storefront costs on Shopware

It pays to be precise about where the Shopware licence sits. The core is open source and MIT licensed, so Community Edition carries no licence fee. Since March 2025, though, a Fair Usage Policy applies: once a shop system passes €1 million in annual gross merchandise value, you need a commercial plan to keep access to your Shopware Account and the extension store. That means Rise from €600 per month, Evolve from €2,400, or Beyond for enterprise setups. Since April 2026 that GMV is reported automatically, so it is measured rather than self-declared.

Two details matter for a portfolio. First, GMV is measured per instance and consolidates every sales channel running on it. Put seven brands on one installation and their revenue pools against the threshold, so any group of that size is on a commercial plan from day one. Plan for Rise or Evolve, not for free.

Second, and this is what shapes the cost curve: the plan is priced on gross merchandise value, not on store count, and includes unlimited sales channels. An eighth brand does not add a licence line. It adds revenue, which is the thing you wanted to grow anyway.

The rest follows the same logic. Hosting is one environment sized for combined traffic. Plugins are licensed per instance, so the payment plugin and the search extension are bought once and serve every brand. At Memo we prefer on-premise Shopware because it keeps hosting, performance, and customization under your control. And because every brand sits on one instance, they share one set of integrations: we implement Alumio so a single monitored connection to your ERP and warehouse serves the whole portfolio.

The comparison: five brands, three countries

The table models five brands selling in three countries each, using published list prices, and assumes the portfolio is above €1 million GMV. It excludes development and payment processing, which apply to both platforms.

The gap is not about one platform being expensive. It is about which lines multiply.

The costs that never reach the invoice

Platform bills are the visible part. A fragmented estate costs more in ways nobody budgets for: another admin to log into, another release to test, another environment to patch. Product updates and campaigns get repeated per store, and reporting means exporting from each shop and reconciling in a spreadsheet.

LifeGoods runs seven brands as separate storefronts on one Shopware instance managed by Memo. When the anti-sweat apparel brand Fibershirts joined the group, it arrived as three separate Shopify stores for the Netherlands, Germany, and France: three subscriptions, three sets of apps, three admins, and every product change done three times. Memo migrated it onto the existing instance and consolidated it into one multi-language storefront. Because the integrations were already there, no new ERP or warehouse connection was needed. The acquisition went from three extra systems to run to one more channel on a platform the team already knew.

When separate stores still make sense

Separate instances are the right answer when brands genuinely need to be separate: distinct legal entities with their own payment processors, regional teams with full control over assortment and pricing, or a brand you intend to divest. A shared instance also means shared risk, since a platform-wide issue touches every brand at once.

There is an honest counterpoint on the Shopware side too. Because GMV pools per instance, consolidating moves you up the pricing tiers sooner than several small installations would. In theory you could keep each below €1 million and pay nothing. In practice that means duplicating hosting, plugins, integrations, and admin work across all of them, which overtakes a Rise subscription long before you approach the threshold.

The question worth asking is whether your shops are separate because the business requires it, or because that is how they happened to be built.

Frequently asked questions

Learn more about multistorefront

If you run several webshops on separate platforms or plan to add brands, add up what you pay per shop today: licences, apps, themes, integrations, and the hours your team spends doing the same task twice. That total is usually larger than expected, and it is the number a multistorefront setup is measured against.

As a Shopware Business Partner and official Alumio partner, Memo builds and manages these platforms every day. Explore our solutions or get in contact with Memo: we are happy to run the numbers for your portfolio.

Sources: Shopify Plus plan (Shopify Help Center), Shopware pricing, Shopware Fair Usage Policy, Shopware automated GMV collection, Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor.