Shopify Plus vs Shopify Advanced: Which is right for your store?

What is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus is a platform built by Shopify with features and functionality that are typically required to run larger, more complex businesses. It is suitable for companies that are already well established or that are looking to scale up quickly and create an impressionable brand image with speed.

Shopify Plus is aimed at emerging and enterprise level brands looking to use an eCommerce platform or migrate to a better platform. Shopify Plus is more robust than Shopify with a focus on custom everything- from the brand experience to workflows, automation and customer service. 

What is Shopify Advanced?

The Advanced Shopify plan helps you accommodate your growing business and use analytics to find expansion opportunities. The Advanced Shopify plan contains all the features of the Basic Shopify plan and the Shopify plan, and has the lowest credit card rates and transaction fees.

Shopify Advanced Pricing

The Shopify Advanced Plan is geared towards growing businesses and once you have outgrown the capabilities of Shopify Advanced- it may be a good time to consider switching to Shopify Plus. Shopfify Advanced costs $399 per month or $299 per month/ annually. Advanced comes with advanced reporting, access to the Shopify API for you to build custom integrations and access to third-party shipping rates for your store. 

Shopify Plus Pricing

The Shopify Plus plan starts at US$2,300 a month for standard setups and integrations on a 3-year term, or US$2,500 per month for a 1-year term. On top of the basic monthly licensing fee you need to factor is the fee structure that is based on your revenue. This will give you the actual price of the platform. This fee is capped at $40,000/ month depending on your revenue.

Key Features of Shopify Advanced

1. Competitive transaction fees
   The Advanced Shopify plan offers the most competitive transaction fees. Review Shopify’s pricing page to find the specific transaction fees under plans in your region.
2. Staff
   The Advanced Shopify plan supports 15 staff accounts.
3. Carrier-calculated shipping
   Carrier-calculated shipping lets you integrate with a third-party shipping service to provide your customers with up-to-date shipping rates and options at the time that they place an order in your store.
4. Reports
   The Advanced Shopify plan offers the most comprehensive reports to help you track your business performance. The Advanced Shopify plan also allows you to create custom reports and activate predicted values for certain reports.
5. International commerce
   The Advanced Shopify plan supports your international growth through Shopify Markets, a cross-border management tool that lets you configure specific settings for each international region. Through the Advanced Shopify plan, you can calculate and collect duties and import taxes for your customers, and control the prices in different markets using price percentage adjustments, and by setting the product prices by country or region.
6. Markets
   The Advanced Shopify plan includes 3 Markets, with the option to increase up to 50 Markets at an additional cost.
7. Customer Support
   The Advanced Shopify plan offers enhanced 24/7 chat support.

Key Features of Shopify Plus

1. Organization Settings
   Organization Settings let you manage all the stores in your organization from a single location. The Billing, Stores, Users and Analytics management tools in Organization Settings can be used by Shopify Plus merchants only.
2. Specialized apps and channels
   Shopify Plus merchants have access to advanced Shopify apps that are designed for high-growth merchants. The B2B, Wholesale, Launchpad and ShopifyQL Notebooks channels and apps can be used by Shopify Plus merchants only.
3. Customizable checkout
   The checkout.liquid file provides a customizable checkout that gives you more control over the branding of your store.Checkout.liquid has been deprecated for the Information, Shipping, and Payment pages and will be removed on August 13, 2024. Shopify Plus merchants can now use checkout extensibility to customize these pages instead. If you customize the Information, Shipping, or Payment pages in your checkout, then upgrade to checkout extensibility before August 13, 2024.
4. API resources
   Shopify Plus supports additional API calls that let you integrate with custom apps. You can request increased API rate limits by contacting support. The following API resources can be used by Shopify Plus merchants only:

REST

• GiftCard
• Multipass
• User

GraphQL

• publishablePublish
• publishableUnpublish

5. Unlimited staff
   Shopify Plus supports unlimited staff accounts to help you grow your personnel without additional costs.
6. Permissions
   Shopify Plus offers additional permission settings for more control over the actions your staff can take in your Shopify admin, including separate report export permissions and permissions to specific apps.
7. Expansion stores
   Shopify plus supports nine expansion stores for internationalization, separate physical locations, and other related purposes.
8. Development stores
   Shopify plus supports unlimited development stores.
9. Shopify Plus Partner Program
   The Shopify Plus Partner Program has service partners who are curated for their technical expertise to provide solutions that support your high-growth business.
10. Themes
    With Shopify Plus, you can add up to 100 themes to your Shopify account to try out any new themes, keep seasonal versions of your published theme, or test changes to a copy of your published theme.
11. Shopify POS Pro
    The first 20 POS Pro locations are included in all Shopify Plus plans.
12. Integrations
    Some integrations, such as Tax services with Avalara AvaTax, can be used by Shopify Plus merchants only.
13. Locations
    With Shopify Plus, you can add up to 200 locations so you can track inventory and fulfill orders at various locations.
14. Markets
    The Shopify Plus plan includes up to 50 Markets that can be added at any time.
15. Shopify Plus Academy
    Shopify Plus offers access to the Shopify Plus Academy for self-guided training on key topics related to growing your business.

Why choose Shopify Plus over Shopify Advanced?

Now that we’ve gone over the key features of Shopify Advanced vs Shopify Plus, let’s take a look at some of the advantages of using Shopify Plus. 

1. Checkout Extensibility

Checkout Extensibility is a faster, better performing, more secure, and upgrade-safe option than checkout.liquid for checkout customizations. Checkout Extensibility also works seamlessly with Shop Pay. By upgrading to Checkout Extensibility, you can take advantage of several of the following new features and capabilities:

• Checkout customizations
• Checkout Editor
• Shopify Pixels
• Branding API

Checkout Extensibility lets you create checkout customizations that are built into apps. These apps are fast to install and upgrade-safe.To add to this, Checkout Extensibility is continuously evolving to meet your needs through new or improved features, alongside new apps.

2. Shopify Functions

Shopify Functions, is a powerful way to extend and customize Shopify features to meet the unique business needs of all Shopify brands.With Functions, developers can build powerful customizations that execute in under 5ms, and can scale up for the biggest sales events on the planet. 

3. Shopify POS Pro (Point of Sale

This creates an omnichannel experience for customers of Plus merchants. For example, it gives the opportunity to buy online and pick up the product in store, or alternatively, if someone is in the physical shop but wants to go home and consider the purchase, merchants can follow up with them for a later conversion online. It allows merchants to sync online and offline products, and integrates with apps for useful functionality like loyalty, returns, appointment booking and more.

4. Selling Internationally

Expansion Stores on Plus has features including market-specific fulfilment priority, payouts in different bank accounts or currencies, and creation of local teams and staff permissions.

5. B2B tools

Shopify Plus offers a range of features and tools that can help your business to set up and manage B2B and wholesale sales effectively. 

B2B specific tools:

• Companies, locations and buyers
• Product catalogues
• Payments (pro-formas and terms)
• Price lists and discounts
• Buyer self-serve portal
• Draft orders and requests for quotes
• One-off shipping address
• Quantity purchasing rules

6. Custom storefront experiences

Larger merchants often want to move away from a predetermined theme – they may have a different CMS they want to use, for example. It is entirely possible to build bespoke and custom storefronts on the Plus platform. Plus gives you access to Hydrogen and Oxygen, enabling merchants to deploy headless solutions.

7. Multipass

Merchants often have a separate website (perhaps a blog, or a forum etc) and they want to pass their customers from there to Shopify seamlessly. Multipass on Plus will let customers do this using the same logins they already used to log into the first site. It deploys single use tokens for enhanced security.

8. Streamlined operations

Plus admin can be used to access all stores (up to 10). It provides the ability to create roles and permissions, view sales data for different stores, create new stores for different markets etc.

9. Shopify Launchpad

This feature helps merchants automate the launch of new products or collections. It can enable merchants to schedule product releases and create custom landing pages for new products, set timers for products to launch etc.Using Launchpad makes it easy to create a buzz and efficiently implement sales. Price changes can be set to update in advance so they change automatically at the point a sale launches.

10. ShopifyQL Notebooks

This allows developers to write and execute QL queries in a notebook environment. It uses Shopify APIs to analyse data, create custom reports and automate tasks.

11. Merchant Success Services

Plus merchants have access to a Merchant Success Manager. The MSM acts as the merchant’s advisor and brand advocate, and can be contacted via email or on a call.