If you’ve ever considered building an online shop, the name ‘Shopify’ has probably come to your attention. It is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms globally, claiming to work with “millions of businesses worldwide.” BuiltWith supports that claim, enlisting almost four million websites using Shopify, and the number continues to grow. Datanyze estimates its global market share among other e-commerce platforms at around 10%.
Shopify is renowned for its ease of use among novice e-commerce entrepreneurs. But what enterprises? For this category of merchants, Shopify Plus was created. In this Shopify Plus review, we will study why you should choose this plan and how it is different from regular plans to suit the needs of large businesses.
What is Shopify?
Before we discuss the benefits of Shopify Plus, let’s start with a brief overview of Shopify. It is an all-in-one e-commerce platform owned by the eponymous Canadian company. With its help, you can create and host your online shop, providing it with broad functionality to ensure a top-notch customer experience and effective business management.
Why is Shopify so popular? This platform is reliable, safe, user-friendly, and scalable. A business of any size can use it to create a suitable e-commerce solution. The beginners will value simple drag-and-drop options to develop their websites, reducing the time to market. Coding knowledge is not essential to start using the platform.
However, if you want something complex tailored to the needs of your enterprise-size business, you can also build it with Shopify. For instance, you can use this platform as the basis for your headless solution with a custom front-end. We will discuss this approach in more detail later in this article.
To accommodate a variety of customers, Shopify offers several different packages. The cheapest Starter plan, allowing you to sell through social and messaging apps, will cost only $5 a month. To start and grow an online business, you will need at least the Basic plan ($29 a month). It is followed by the Shopify ($79 a month) and Advanced ($299 a month) packages. The monthly fee for the most advanced enterprise-level option, Shopify Plus, starts at $2.000.
So, is Shopify Plus worth it? To illustrate the reasoning, let’s compare it to a standard medium-priced option, Shopify.
Shopify vs Shopify Plus
To begin with, whether you choose Shopify or Shopify Plus, you still use the same platform. That means the same technology as the cornerstone, the same core functionality, themes (templates), and interface for admins.
So, what is Shopify plus plan? It allows you to unlock some ‘enterprise-level’ features. In other words, this advanced plan offers everything the Shopify plan has ‘plus’ something extra. Here are some of the key distinguishing features in comparison to the standard Shopify plan:
- Lower transaction fees. Shopify will charge a fee for each transaction if you use a third-party payment provider. With Shopify Plus, this fee will be much lower (more details in the next chapter).
- More inventory locations. The maximum number for the Shopify plan is capped at five. For Shopify Plus, the upper limit is four times higher – 20.
- Advanced checkout customization options. With Shopify Plus, you can customize your checkout process the way you like. With full access to the page templates code and additional coding functionality via apps, you can add such features as automated discounts, free shipping thresholds, and precalculated shipping costs.
Moreover, Shopify releases a new Edition 2022, where the platform offers a collection of product updates, especially checkouts. Here is what Shopify claims “Shopify Plus merchants can now customize their checkout using apps. Add branding, loyalty programs, recommended products, and more. It’s secure, fast, and upgrade-safe, all while integrating with Shop Pay for the best-converting checkout on the internet”. To check all customization options, visit this page or contact us for a consultation!
- Progressive multi-currency features. Shopify Plus enables your e-commerce store to automatically set the customers’ currencies by analyzing IP addresses.
- Bot protection. With an advanced plan, you can prevent bots from purchasing products or crashing your online store.
- More point-of-sale (POS) features. Those features allow you to sell in physical locations too. With Shopify Plus, you can create purchase orders, provide custom receipts, facilitate exchanges, attribute sales to particular staff members. Many POS features are also included in the regular Shopify plans, but access to the premium ones will cost you $89 per month per location.
The pros of Shopify Plus
Considering the Shopify Plus pros and cons, the pricing will surely be on the ‘cons’ list. What about the pros? We have figured out that Shopify Plus offers ‘premium’ options. Let’s discuss its advantages in more detail.
Unlimited staff accounts
With the basic Shopify plan, you can have only five staff accounts. While the Advanced package offers 15, it may still be not enough for large businesses. Shopify Plus allows you to provide as many team members with access to your online store as you like.
Moreover, additional accounts come with more control over their actions for admins. For instance, you can grant special app access rights and report export permissions.
Low transaction fee
Shopify will charge you for using a third-party payment processor, but the fees vary greatly. For Shopify Plus users, it is 0.15% per transaction. The platform claims that this fee helps them maintain PCI compliance and data integrity. Regular Shopify plans have a much higher fee of 2%.
Note that those who use Shopify Payments are exempt from these charges.
Access to more applications
Shopify Plus users get access to more than 1,500 additional apps. Therefore, they can wield a larger selection of tools that provide more features, such as Shopify Plus Xero integration, enhanced inventory management, customer service dashboards, etc.
Here are some of those extra apps that may be extremely helpful:
- Script Editor for personalizing the checkout stage. This tool will help you change the code to customize payment and shipping options or apply discounts. Those amendments can reduce the number of abandoned carts.
- Shopify Flow for e-commerce automation. It helps automate many customer-facing tasks and business processes across your store and apps. With Shopify Flow, you can set up combinations of triggers and conditions followed by specific actions. The latter might be sending reorder requests, tagging loyal customers, and so on. This tool works with a simple-to-use builder, you don’t have to code anything.
- Launchpad for scheduling and automating flash sales, sales campaigns or product launches. It allows monitoring performance in real-time to better analyze customer behavior during promotional events. When the event is over, you can easily revert all the changes. We will mention more perks of this app later.
- Transporte app for importing records (product, customer, etc.) into your Shopify store. With its help, sending customer records across stores becomes almost effortless. Considering that Shopify Plus allows multiple stores, this tool may often come in handy for the users of this plan.
Optimisation of intensive traffic
With Shopify Plus, you have unlimited bandwidth. Focus on growing your business without worrying that it will become a bottleneck. Still, sharp rises in traffic may be detrimental to the performance of your site.
However, another benefit of Shopify Plus is the additional tools it provides. One of them is the Launchpad app we mentioned earlier. It is designed for managing and scheduling sales events responsible for traffic spikes. It will help to protect your online store from crashing at the most crucial moments.
Advanced API resources
Shopify Plus provides access to advanced API resources. In particular, its users can employ options called User, Giftcard, and Multipass.
With User, you can add, remove, get or edit information about staff accounts. Multipass login allows redirecting site visitors to the Shopify store, no separate entering login credentials is required. You don’t have to synchronize a customer database for that. GiftCard is your alternative for payments.
If the extensive Shopify app store isn’t enough to satisfy your needs, you can use APIs to integrate third-party or custom solutions into your store. Note that Shopify Plus has a higher top limit for the frequency of requests to Shopify API. That may be essential for building some complex solutions.
Multiple stores in one account
A regular Shopify account can be used only for one store. A Shopify Plus account allows you to create and manage up to ten shops without extra charges. You can add even more (of course, if you are ready to pay $250 per month per store). That is an excellent option if you want to separate online shops for sales in different regions or to support various physical stores.
Note that Shopify Plus also allows you to create so-called ‘sandbox stores’ – test sites. They can be used for training purposes, trying out apps, or conducting demos for clients. You can make as many ‘dummy’ purchases as you like through a phony gateway payment provider and process an infinite number of test orders.
More theme customization options
With Standard Shopify plans, you have a theme editor that provides some degree of customization. With Shopify Plus, you get access to Liquid – platform’s theme language. Therefore, you have much more control over how your online store looks and works.
Surely, to use the full power of this instrument, you need to be familiar with programming. There are multiple guides on using Liquid, and you can always ask Shopify support for help. If you have something big and custom in mind, it is best to find a reliable tech partner.
Wholesale Channels
This Shopify Plus tool helps businesses work effectively with customers who want to buy large quantities of products. With its help, you create a separate storefront, protected by a password. Thus, the store can sell exclusive wholesale-only products or offer regular products at special prices to wholesale buyers. You can offer discount codes or customized price lists.
All in all, the Shopify Plus users have one place to track orders, send invoices, use product data and integrations, and manage B2B and B2C operations.
Exclusive Access to Additional Resources
A Shopify Plus subscription makes available some resources that can foster the growth and development of your online store: