From its launch in 2006, Shopify rose quickly to become one of the top platforms for ecommerce stores of all sizes. It’s home to various brands, including Gymshark, Kylie Cosmetics, Penguin Books, and more.
In recent years, Shopify brought a full range of features for enterprise-level businesses with Shopify Plus. Designed to support growth, the new plan can handle over 10,000 transactions per minute and maximizes high-volume sales.
Shopify Plus also comes with a range of exciting features to help businesses succeed. But that’s reflected in the high monthly price. If you’re looking into upgrading, consider what Shopify Plus has to offer.
What is Shopify Plus?
Beginning in 2014, Shopify Plus is the top tier of the Shopify plans and boasts all its features, plus some exclusive benefits. The plan is geared toward helping scaling businesses succeed with better apps and integrations, a centralized dashboard, and other features.
Businesses should upgrade to Shopify Plus when they’re ready for more customization, expanding into new markets, looking to grow, or supporting high-volume sales.
What Are Shopify Plus’s Benefits?
Integration
Flexible APIs and Shopify Partners integrate into your business’s existing resources seamlessly, including enterprise resource management systems and customer relationship management systems such as headless commerce.
Shopify Plus also supports headless architecture for complete customization, compared to the pre-made templates and minimal customization of other plans.
Lower Transaction Fees
All Shopify plans include transaction fees on top of your monthly cost. If you’re selling a lot, those transaction fees add up quickly. In exchange for your high monthly fee with Shopify Plus, you have a much lower transaction fee.
Shopify Plus only charges 0.15% per transaction, compared to 0.5% of Shopify Advanced. This can make a massive difference over thousands or millions of sales. You also have no fees if you take payments from Shopify’s payment platform.
International Sales
If you’re interested in entering the international market, Shopify Plus helps you option multiple store variants that the same dashboard can control. Managing multiple stores in various countries is time-consuming, but with this feature, you can customize your variants to specific languages and currencies.
The plan has up to nine store clones with currencies from your main storefront dashboard. You can customize the stores to create targeted marketing campaigns and promotions that only launch locally.
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High-Volume Transactions
Ecommerce businesses struggle with high-volume sales periods, such as the holidays and Black Friday. The site traffic can lead the site to crash, leaving many customers unhappy and losing sales.
Shopify Plus tackles this issue with over 10,000 transactions per minute capacity. So when the Christmas rush hits, you can rest assured that your store can handle the traffic.
What Features Does Shopify Plus Have?
Looking at the following features can help you determine Shopify Plus Worth:
Shopify Flow
Shopify Flow is an exclusive feature that automates operations to make your business more streamlined and efficient. You can prioritize tasks, monitor performance, and track changes to reevaluate and improve your processes.
Multi-Channel Integration
Shopify Plus integrates with multiple sales channels, just like Shopify. You can also integrate with social media to set up messaging and engagement from the same centralized dashboard. You can also set up dedicated, secure payment gateways, such as Google Pay to make customers feel comfortable shopping with you.
Shopify Admin
Shopify Plus includes the Shopify Organization Admin, an exclusive feature that upgrades the capabilities of the Shopify admin from other plans. This feature enables you to manage multiple stores in one location and operate them. You can make bulk changes organization-wide, add new users, manage orders, and more.
Wholesale Channel
As more ecommerce stores venture into wholesale, Shopify Plus offers a wholesale channel that runs from your central dashboard. You can protect it with a password to keep it separate from your ecommerce store, but customize, scale, and run both simultaneously. Additional features are included, such as discount triggers and exclusive, wholesale-only products.
Launchpad
Launchpad is a feature that supports flash sales and promotions, product upgrades, new collection launches, and more, with you in complete control. You can tailor every aspect of your promotions and launches, including setting start and end times, triggering campaigns, and automating discounts.
Bulk Inviter
The Bulk Account Inviter is a tool that allows you to invite existing customers to activate accounts on your store. If you’re already running a Shopify store or a store on another platform, you can migrate your user experience (UX) base quickly and efficiently when you upgrade. You can also send automated invitation emails to your customers.
Script Editor
Shopify Scripts lets you customize your store to reflect your brand, such as personalizing the checkout process to provide a better experience. You can activate different customizations like dynamic pricing, BOGO sales, VIP customer service, and discounts.
Shopify Plus includes the Script Editor to enable you to edit your own custom scripts on the platform, rather than having to download another app.
How Much Is Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus has many features and capabilities, but the cost may be a barrier for small and medium businesses. All of Shopify’s plans offer essential features for selling on the platform, including abandoned cart recovery, fraud analysis, and multi-currency selling.
You get more features when you upgrade and pay more, as expected. The best features, such as full checkout customization and professional reporting, come with Shopify Plus.
Unlike the previous plans, Shopify Plus pricing requires you to contact Shopify for a quote. But generally, the plans start at $2,000 per month or 0.25% of your sales, with a limit of $40,000. If The you sell more, you will pay more.
Is Shopify Plus Worth It?
Shopify Plus is worth it for enterprise-level businesses looking to scale or expand. In fact, some leading companies in the world are already using it.
If you’re just starting out or your business is slowly and steadily growing, you may be better off with the lower plans. Basic Shopify is the lowest tier designed for solo business owners and startups. Beyond that, the plans add more features and capabilities suited to your business size and needs.
As you grow, evaluate whether it’s time to make the jump to the next plan. The leap to Shopify Plus is a pretty big difference, not only in price, but in the features you’ll have. It’s essential to be sure that your business is at the level and that you’re prepared to use all the features.
Here are some things to consider:
- What is your business’s annual revenue? Shopify Plus isn’t cheap, which is why Shopify recommends upgrading when you hit $1 million in sales.
- Do you need more staff accounts? Each Shopify plan comes with its own number of staff accounts. As your business grows, you may need more staff accounts to control your store, and that’s when Shopify Plus is valuable.
- Do you struggle to manage tasks? Growing businesses are more challenging to manage, significantly if you’re expanding into additional markets. Shopify Plus offers tons of automation for different processes, as well as a centralized dashboard to manage it all from one place.
These are just a few advantages of upgrading to Shopify Plus, but there’s a lot more. Deciding to upgrade is up to you and you alone, so be sure to consider your revenue, your business goals, your budget, and the features that matter most.
Ready for Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus is an enterprise-level platform designed for enterprise-level businesses, complete with tools and features to support massive growth and high-volume sales. If you want to scale and need greater personalization, customization, and sophistication, consider what Shopify Plus offers and how you can use it to your advantage.
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About Author
Sean Richards is the VP of Strategy & Partnerships for Vincit. Richards provided business development, react-native consulting, digital marketing strategy and partnership development at several reputable companies and marketing agencies in both California and Arizona. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Design Management from Arizona State University.
