Shopify Plus is the Shopify version for enterprise and high-volume ecommerce businesses. It’s home to billion-dollar brands like Fashion Nova, Pepsi, Nestle, and Unilever. 5,698 websites are using Shopify Plus.
Let’s dive in.
What is Shopify Plus?
If for high-growth businesses, Magento offers Magento for Enterprises and BigCommerce offers BigCommerce for Enterprise, Shopify offers Shopify Plus.
In short, Shopify Plus is a fully hosted, scalable SaaS ecommerce platform, providing a wide range of advanced features to help high-volume brands control their operations more efficiently and expand their business successfully.
With Shopify Plus, you can handle thousands of transactions per minute while your website is still running smoothly. There’s no limit to sales volume, the number of products, bandwidth, and storage. If you’re looking for a Magento alternative or BigCommerce alternative for your enterprise, Shopify Plus might be a good choice.
Recommended reading: Shopify Plus Review: the Best Enterprise Ecommerce Platform?
Shopify Plus key features
Using Shopify Plus, you have access to exclusive, robust features as described below:
1. Launchpad
Launchpad allows you to set up and track automated events like sales, product launches, and inventory restocks. You can select a time and date to publish products to your sales channels, change product pricing at the start and end of the event, and more.
2. Script editor access
Using Shopify scripts is a great way to personalize customer experience in the cart page and checkout page. You can use scripts to create functionalities for items like percentage-based discounts, buy-one-get-one offers, and dynamic pricing with volume-based price breaks. Then, set to run those scripts in your online store only, or in your online store and in your private apps built with Storefront API or Mobile Buy SDKs.
The Script Editor is where you write, edit, manage and publish scripts. It provides templates to help you write scripts and a debugger to test them. With the Script Editor, you can create three types of scripts: Line item scripts, shipping scripts, and payment scripts.
3. Shopify Flow
Shopify Flow is another powerful automation Shopify Plus gives online business owners to automate backend busy work. With this tool, you can easily track how recent workflows perform at a glance, filter workflows based on status (in progress, completed, or failed), and use logic to identify what tasks didn’t bring results as expected.
Also, Shopify Flow is great for creating a triggered action when a specific order is detected and automating the segmentation of customers by their purchasing behavior. This way, you can develop pricing or marketing campaigns that match each customer group.
4. Multi-channel integration
Shopify Plus gives you over 20 channels to sell online, including marketplaces like Amazon, social media platforms, messaging apps, and online communities. If you’re selling to B2B customers, Shopify Plus makes it easy for you to expand your business.
You can also choose from over 100 payment gateways like PayPal, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, and Google Pay to integrate into your website. It’s amazing because your customers can pay the way they want and feel more comfortable to shop with you.
5. Shopify organization admin
The Shopify organization admin is an enhanced version of the standard Shopify admin. This feature is designed to help businesses manage multiple stores at the organizational level instead of at the individual store level.
The Shopify organization admin provides an analytics overview, Shopify Flow management, user management, and store management. From here, you can perform many tasks like checking the total sales and orders for your entire organization, adding new users to your organization, and more.
6. Shopify POS Pro
With Shopify POS, you can quickly launch physical stores attached to your online store, whether it be a pop-up shop or a permanent storefront. Shopify currently offers two POS app subscriptions: Shopify POS Lite and Shopify POS Pro. Shopify POS Pro is available for Shopify Plus merchants only.
With a Shopify POS Pro subscription, you have access to unlimited store staff, unlimited registers, smart inventory management, omnichannel selling features, staff stores and permissions, and in-store analytics.
Shopify Plus pricing
Let’s look at the prices of the three standard Shopify plans and Shopify Plus.
- Shopify Lite: $9 per month. It’s ideal for any website or blog that sells products and accepts credit card payments.
- Basic Shopify: $29 per month. It provides all the basic features that a new online store often needs.
- Shopify: $79 per month. It’s designed for growing ecommerce businesses.
- Advanced Shopify: $299 per month. It offers up to 15 staff accounts, 8 locations, and 5 languages.
- Shopify Plus: Start at $2000 per month. It’s a perfect solution for high-volume merchants that need advanced features, better performance, and more control over their online businesses.
As you can see, there is a big jump between Shopify Plus and other Shopify plans. Apart from all the powerful features mentioned above, the $2000/month Shopify Plus plan also promises to help you increase conversion rates up to 18% and checkout rates to 60%.
Keep in mind that the $2000/month cost can be higher depending on your custom development, credit card processing, apps for international stores, etc.
Another thing to remember is that if you use Shopify Payments, you don’t have to pay transaction fees. But a 0.15% fee per transaction will be applied if you use a third-party payment processor.
Recommended reading: Understanding Shopify Plus Pricing & Cost.
Shopify Plus pros and cons
Here are the pros and cons of Shopify Plus:
Pros
- Reduced hosting, maintenance, load testing, upgrades, security patches, point release overheads.
- Unlimited bandwidth and online storage, plus 99.99% average uptime.
- Automation tools like Launchpad and Flow to automate time-consuming tasks so you can free up resources for marketing and growth.
- An innovative ecommerce platform with continuously added new features and changes.
- A wide variety of customization tools and app integrations to choose from.
- Excellent customer service as a Success Manager will be assigned to each client.
- Easy to use SDKs and APIs.
Cons
- Content management limitations.
- Require a certain amount of technical knowledge.
- Lack of advanced multi-store architecture, compared with Magento for Enterprise and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
- Restrictions on types of products sold when using Shopify Payments.
- Lack of search engine optimization features.
Shopify and Shopify Plus: When to upgrade?
Among three standard Shopify plans (i.e., Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Shopify Advanced), Shopify Advanced is the highest.
But Shopify Advanced gives you access to only 15 staff accounts and a certain number of advanced features. That means if you have a larger team and need more upgraded functionalities, you need Shopify Plus.
Apart from this, here are some other things you can consider to decide if Shopify Plus is what you’re looking for:
- You need more clone stores—Shopify Plus gives you 10.
- You want to sell to different countries with different languages.
- You plan to expand your business to wholesale.
- You have more than 15 staff users you want to add to your store.
- You want to create rules for offering promotions/discounts, shipping logic, payments to different customers, or based on other variables.
- You want to automate repetitive tasks to optimize workflow for your team.
If you're still unsure, check out our in-depth comparison of Shopify and Shopify Plus.
By this point, you may wonder if you should choose Magento over Shopify Plus because Magento also offers almost the same features for enterprises. Is it better than Shopify Plus?
Here is a simple answer: Not necessarily.
Magento for Enterprise is designed for more complex stores, in terms of large, complex catalogs and multi-store. Meanwhile, Shopify Plus is for everyone. Even when you’re selling just two products but your team is large, and you plan to take your store globally, Shopify Plus is still worth trying.
Besides, Magento is a self-hosted ecommerce platform. So you need to put more time and resources into managing technical aspects of your store. In other words, you need a skilled team of developers to help you install, maintain, and upgrade the system.
Recommended reading: Magento vs Shopify: An Honest eCommerce Platform Comparison.
Shopify Plus website examples
Need some ideas to come up with a design for your new store? Check out the following Shopify Plus websites to get inspiration:
1. Finisterre
Website: https://finisterre.com/
Product types: Apparel and accessories.
2. Bethesda
Website: https://bethesda.net/
Product types: Video games, game-related apparel, accessories, and gears.
3. Thirdlove
Website: https://www.thirdlove.com/
Product types: Bras and underwear.
4. Bombas
Website: https://bombas.com/
Product types: Socks.
5. Bebe
Website: https://www.bebe.com/
Product types: Chic and contemporary clothing for women.
Click here to discover more websites using Shopify Plus.
How to get started with Shopify Plus
Now that you’ve understood Shopify Plus, its features, pricing, pros and cons. If you decide to upgrade your Shopify store to Shopify Plus, use this checklist to get started.
1. Understand your vision and goals
Sit down with all the stakeholders and answer these questions:
- What are your goals of moving to Shopify Plus? Do you want to sell multiple product categories, gain more new customers, reduce abandoned carts, or increase conversion rates?
- What exact features do you need to successfully expand your business, create an incredible customer experience, and achieve your profitability goals? Remember, you might not need all the features Shopify Plus offers.
- What is your budget? When do you want to launch your Shopify Plus store?
- Do you plan to use Shopify Payments and/or any other third-party payment provider?
Take time to answer these questions so you can know how much you need to spend on Shopify Plus.
2. Join the Shopify Jumpstart welcome webinar
Once you join Shopify Plus, you’ll be given a Merchant Success Manager who will help you make the most of the platform to grow your business. You’ll also be invited to the Jumpstart welcome webinar that introduces all the Shopify Plus features and resources.
Ensure you attend this webinar because it’ll provide you with a detailed overview of Shopify Plus, what you can expect from the platform, how Merchant Success Manager can help you, and where to seek help when you need it.
3. Visit the Shopify Plus Academy
Shopify Plus Academy is exclusively designed for Shopify Plus merchants, providing business and market training created by industry experts.
The Academy gives you access to in-depth courses, live online workshops, and short lessons to optimize your store for a better customer experience. You also learn marketing acquisition, business operations, and many other practical ecommerce strategies.
It’s free for Shopify Plus merchants, so make sure you don’t miss it!
4. Customize checkout experiences with Shopify Scripts
Shopify Scripts is one of Shopify Plus’ most robust conversion rate optimization features. To start using Shopify Scripts, ask your Plus support team to clone your existing store to a staging instance. The team will then guide you through all the steps you need to make scripts work for your business.
Read this official tutorial from Shopify to learn more about Shopify Scripts and Script Editor.
5. Set up Shopify Flow and Launchpad to optimize your workflow
Use Shopify Flow to automate customer service, fraud prevention, design and development requests, merchandising, communications, marketing and advertising. If you plan a flash sale, use Launchpad to create an event and put it on autopilot.
With the help of your Merchant Success Manager, you can get these tasks done in minutes.
6. Install a help desk ticketing system for your Shopify Plus store
When your store is growing, managing customer service can be more challenging. You may have to face many requests, from product features and pricing to order tracking numbers and missing items. To solve this problem, the best practice is to install a helpdesk app like Gorgias.
Gorgias is a help desk ticketing system specifically designed for ecommerce businesses of all sizes and industries. With Gorgias, you can:
- Manage support tickets for multiple storefronts.
- Use Shopify variables to auto-respond order-related tickets.
- Integrate with ecommerce third-party apps like Yotpo and Smile.io.
- Set rules based on customer intents to provide instant support.
- Convert social comments into tickets and hide/like/unlike/reply to them.
- Deliver omnichannel support, including phone, SMS, email, and social media.
- Use macros to perform several actions, like adding tags and updating multiple tickets at once.
Gorgias has tight integration with Shopify, making it the best customer service software for Shopify ecommerce businesses.
The best part? Gorgias is a Shopify Plus partner, meaning we’re certified and trusted to help online merchants like you reduce costs and increase profits.
Making a move to Shopify Plus
Going with Shopify Plus is so advantageous to your business, but it’s not an easy decision. That’s why we encourage you to do thorough research on Shopify Plus and understand its pros and cons early on.
Once you’re sure that Shopify Plus is “the one,” follow the checklist above to make it work for your ecommerce store.
Interested in using Gorgias to improve your customer service and drive more sales? You make the right choice! Sign up for a Gorgias account here and try all the premium features in 7 days for free. Let us know if you need any further help.
