SHOPIFY VS SHOPIFY PLUS

Shopify vs Shopify Plus: Do you need to upgrade?

Your Shopify business is accelerating! Maybe an influencer has worn your product, and you're reaping the benefits from an organic endorsement. But, does that mean you need to spend and upgrade to Shopify Plus, or should you stay with your current plan? Shopify and Shopify Plus work in the same way, but your large business gets more benefits to help operations run smoothly with Shopify Plus.

You've probably heard of Shopify Plus merchants like Nike, Gymshark, Good American, Bonlook, and Knix. A large part of their business strategy is product drops, wholesale, and numerous distribution channels. Shopify Plus works exceptionally well for them because the web servers Shopify uses to host these large businesses can handle thousands of transactions per minute.

You'll use the same admin and dashboard and access the same help documents and apps. Still, the big differences are what it can do with automation, distribution channels, store design, and customer support to help your business.

 

When should you upgrade to Shopify Plus?

While each business is as different as the customers purchasing from them, we've put together a list of milestones that your business should hit before you should start seriously considering upgrading to Shopify Plus.

If your business checks off at least two things on this list, you'll be a good candidate:

  • Over 1000 orders per day

  • Over 1000 orders per day during product launches and drops

  • Generating over $60,000 in revenue per day

  • Annual revenue of over $1 billion

  • Your primary tech purchase considerations are for automation, high-traffic website stability, customized design, and multichannel integrations

 

Perks of Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus helps large businesses overcome their scalability challenges through its tech resiliency. Prices start at USD 2,000/month and go up from there based on your business's needs and traffic.

With Shopify Plus, you get perks optimized for international e-commerce, omnichannel e-commerce where your customers can checkout on their preferred device, POS, B2B, and access to premium Shopify partners. However, where Shopify Plus shines is through features like automations, total design authority, wholesale services, and stellar support to help launch on the platform.

 

Unlimited design

Shopify already offers great themes and customization options to make a store's branding appear front and centre. What Shopify Plus offers that regular Shopify accounts don't are:

  • Ability to customize the checkout experience with access to the checkout code

  • A mobile store builder

  • Store cloning so you can create many international stores or a wholesale store

  • Script editor

 

High-performing store processes, operations, and functions

These features are the reason you'd choose Shopify Plus to support your business. They are the meat and potatoes of the enterprise ecommerce software.

Automations

Automating your business's repetitive and manual tasks is crucial for reducing human error, saving money, making sure your customers are consistently happy, and your processes are clear and straightforward. So Shopify introduced two powerful apps to help automate parts of your online store, like promotions and product bundles:

Shopify Flow

The Shopify Flow app, only available to Plus merchants, lets you automate tasks across many verticals and includes third-party integrations to get even more done than what Shopify offers. You can automate processes in:

Buyer experience like automatically creating a support ticket when you receive a negative review

  • Customer management like tracking customers who order samples or refund items over $1000

  • Inventory & merchandising so you can standardize tagging for new products

  • Risk management so you can add high-risk orders for review to project boards in Asana

  • Order management so you can make fulfillment for product bundles faster when you expand a single bundle SKU into all the products

  • Loyalty & retention so you can automatically create email sequences when customers are at risk

  • Promotions so you can streamline your marketing campaigns and automatically add a gift to orders over $100 with Edit Order

Launchpad

The Launchpad app for Shopify Plus merchants is a scheduling tool that helps drive conversion automatically by letting you schedule and monitor sales, releases and content changes. With Launchpad, you can:

  • Set a collection discount to take effect at a scheduled time

  • Build a campaign-specific theme for sales

  • Automatically offer free shipping when a customer spends over $100

Wholesale

With the ability to clone your online store for other channels, Shopify Plus makes it easy to integrate with their wholesale features so you can quickly execute your strategy to grow into this lucrative market.

With your wholesale store, you can manage your wholesale orders and B2C orders in one central admin. Your inventory, orders, and customers will all be in sync. Shopify Plus doesn't leave you high and dry with the manual tasks that come with selling large quantities of items either. You can apply automation tasks to your wholesale store to do things like:

  • Automate your wholesale signup process

  • Create custom groups for your wholesale customers and automatically apply specific pricing rules, discounts, and volume-based logic.

Find out more about how Shopify Plus is leading the wholesale game.

 

Support

Signing up for the enterprise service gets you accelerated support, so you'll have a team of resources if something goes awry:

  • You get a dedicated launch manager to help you launch your business or port it over from another software provider

  • Shopify Academy

  • Get access to certified Plus partners and experts to build you custom solutions and extensions for your store

 

Other perks of Shopify Plus

  • Analytics

  • Unified dashboard for multiple stores

  • APIs

    • Access to all Shopify APIs, including the discount code API and Giftcard API, betas, and higher call
      limits

  • Page activity

    • A collaboration feature to let you see and be notified when a staff member is editing the same
      product page.

  • Unlimited staff accounts

  • Custom apps with certified Plus Partners

 

Final thoughts

If your large company is ready for a high-growth enterprise solution, Shopify Plus is the best platform. Companies across different verticles and industries get a simple, scalable way to incorporate automation, wholesale, and advanced design, with many other thoughtful and convenient perks along the way.

Shopify Plus removes the thought bubbles of server capacities and secure checkout and takes care of it all so you can build and control your brand the way you want.

 Shopify Plus helps you scale your ecommerce business.

If you have more questions about how Shopify Plus can streamline your enterprise’s online operations or just want the full run-down without the drama and filler, don’t forget to check out our unsponsored guide.