Is Shopify Plus right for you? Everything you need to know

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What is Shopify?

Shopify is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that provides entrepreneurs with the tools and resources they need to start, manage, and grow their online businesses. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or an established retailer, Shopify offers a wide range of features and functionalities that cater to businesses of all sizes.

With Shopify, you can easily create a visually stunning online store without any coding knowledge. Its drag-and-drop interface allows you to customize your store's deesign, layout, and content to reflect your brand's unique identity. From choosing a theme to adding product listings and setting up payment gateways, Shopify simplifies the entire process, making it accessible to even the most tech-challenged individuals.

What is Shopify Plus?

While Shopify caters to businesses of all sizes, Shopify Plus takes things up a notch by offering an enterprise-level solution specifically designed for high-growth and high-volume businesses. As your business scales and demands increase, Shopify Plus provides the additional features and support needed to meet the unique challenges faced by larger-scale eCommerce operations.

One of the key advantages of Shopify Plus is its scalability. With this platform, you can handle surges in website traffic and process a higher volume of orders without compromising on performance or customer experience. This scalability is crucial for businesses experiencing rapid growth or those operating in peak seasons, such as during Black Friday or holiday sales.

Moreover, Shopify Plus offers advanced customization options, allowing you to tailor your online store to meet your specific business requirements. From creating personalized checkout experiences to implementing complex integrations with third-party systems, Shopify Plus empowers you to build a truly unique and tailored e-commerce solution.

Key Features of Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus is meant to address those scaling challenges and take on larger columns of site traffic, greater levels of back end operations, international sales and more. Shopify Plus provides these emerging brands with powerful tools for expansion and strong branding. These are some of the you can expect with the platform;

• Omnichannel marketing
• Cross-device functionality, including 3rd party apps, mobile, and desktop.
• Multi Currency capability
• Automation of workflow processes.
• Personalized checkout.
• In-depth analytics, including transactional and customer analytics.
• Access to Script Editor. You can write your own scripts and run custom code.
• Easy management of customer interactions, pricing, and promotions.
• Cross-channel selling on platforms like eBay or Etsy.
• 24 hour support.

Shopify Plus provides merchants with unparalleled access to support and training resources. Their experts supply you with advice and consultation every step of the way and the Shopify Plus  Academy is host to a vast library of resources, training videos, workshops and more. This pool of resources is invaluable to merchants looking for answers, troubleshooting and looking for ways to grow their business.

One of the biggest advantages of Shopify Plus is the ability it gives you to scale with speed. The platform is ideal for brands growing quickly internationally or quickly expanding their product lines and launching to high volumes of traffic often

When and how to switch to Shopify Plus

One indicator is if you find that orders are processing too slowly or if surges in traffic bring your store crashing. If you find that you are spending more and more on IT solutions, website maintenance or transaction fees that is another indicator.

If you feel like the level of customization you currently have is not enough and you want to build a custom storefront experience or custom sites for regions or countries- that is something you'll need Shopify Plus for.

Shopify commits to having you fully migrated over to Shopify Plus in 90 days or less. Migration is also offered as a free service to qualified merchants.  You can transition to the platform without any down time to your storefront. The transition can occur while testing, setting up security, and hosting costs are taken care of. Migration services are provided free of charge with a Shopify Plus upgrade. However monthly fees of $2000 or 0.25% of monthly transactions still apply. A dedicated launch engineer is also made available to you  to help you build your store the right way and prevent future rebuilds.

The Shopify team provides the convenience of built-in hosting and added security features. They also handle any important patches and upgrades. Still, small changes and customizations can be performed by business owners or their teams. This helps to save time & money while eliminating the need for expensive outsourcing.

How much does Shopify Plus cost?

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. In addition, there are revenue based costs involved so expect to pay additional monthly costs based on your revenue. Since Shopify Plus bases pricing on usage and sales volume, the license cost increases when you exceed $800k in a month.

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. For example, according to Shopify Plus pricing, a $1,000,000 per month company pays $2,500 in monthly licensing fees. In order for that same merchant to pay the maximum $40,000 monthly license fee, they would need to reach $16 million in monthly sales.

So what do you get for this monthly fee? The fees cover a plethora of services including;

• • Hosting Fees
  • Maintenance Costs
  • Version Upgrades
  • Native Multi-channel Capabilities
  • Shopify's POS solution - along with integrated selling solutions for eBay, Facebook, and Amazon
  • Account Management - including a dedicated Launch Manager and Account Manager who typically provides:

Shopify vs Shopify Plus

Advantages of Using Shopify

Shopify offers a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for anyone to set up an online store quickly. Its extensive app store allows for customization and flexibility, while the built-in SEO features help improve search engine visibility.

Additionally, Shopify offers 24/7 customer support, enabling merchants to resolve any issues promptly. The platform's regular updates also ensure that you have access to the latest features and security enhancements.

Disadvantages of Using Shopify

Despite its many advantages, Shopify does have a few drawbacks. One common concern is the transaction fees charged on top of payment processing fees. Additionally, some users find the platform's built-in blogging capabilities to be limited compared to dedicated blogging platforms.

Advantages of Using Shopify Plus

For businesses with significant growth and high-volume sales, Shopify Plus offers several benefits. The platform's dedicated account management and priority support provide peace of mind to merchants dealing with complex operations.

Furthermore, Shopify Plus boasts remarkable scalability, allowing businesses to handle increased traffic and transactions without any disruptions. The multichannel selling feature also simplifies the process of expanding to various sales channels.

Disadvantages of Using Shopify Plus

While Shopify Plus offers unparalleled capabilities, the main downside is its cost. As an enterprise-level solution, the pricing may be prohibitive for smaller businesses. Additionally, the complexity of Shopify Plus may require additional time and resources to implement and customize.

Shopify Plus vs 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. Shopify 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. 

Why choose Shopify Plus over Shopify Advanced

• 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.

 

• 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. 

• 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.

• 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.

• 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
• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.