Is Shopify Plus Worth It? Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Shopify Plus
Shopify offers a range of plans to suit your business needs and budget. With different price points and features, it can be challenging to determine which one is the best option for your business.
Shopify Plus, Shopify’s top-tier plan, is the most expensive and well equipped on the list, but do you need the extra cost and capabilities? Having all those extra features can help your business succeed, but it may be more than your business requires at this stage.
Learn more about the features and real-world benefits of Shopify Plus vs. its costs, so you can make the right choice for your business.
Understanding Shopify Plus
Shopify offers numerous plans to help business owners of different sizes. Most business owners use Shopify’s low-tier plans, which offer features like additional users, low credit card fees, and integrated payment providers.
As you move up the tiers, the offerings increase, but so does the price. Shopify Plus is the highest tier of Shopify plans and comes with the most scalability and customization options. It also includes all the features of the previous plans. Some of the features include unlimited staff accounts, unrestricted app use, custom checkout options, and B2B functionality, ensuring that your business has no limits to what it can do.
But all of this functionality may be too much for a smaller or new ecommerce business, especially at a higher price.
Shopify vs. Shopify Plus
Shopify is best for small-to-medium-sized businesses, while Shopify Plus is designed for larger, enterprise-level businesses. The services function the same way, but Shopify Plus has more advanced features and capabilities.
That said, the dashboard, support center, and editor features are all the same. Shopify Plus gives you more control over the setup and customization of your store.
What are the Benefits of Shopify Plus?
Choosing Shopify Plus depends on whether the benefits are worth the monthly cost. Here are some things to consider:
Customization
Shopify and Shopify Plus offer more than 60 themes, some free and some paid, to help you design your ecommerce store. Shopify theme developers also offer premium themes designed for Shopify Plus specifically, which are available on their websites and cost several hundred dollars.
You can choose your language in your theme, which is excellent for businesses targeting multinational audiences. Common languages include English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, and Japanese.
Shopify Plus elevates these offerings with a launch manager that integrates your existing website into Shopify. The manager can help with coding and get your site up and running with a customized theme.
Shopify Plus also allows you to edit the checkout page, which isn’t available for other Shopify plans. Because user experience is so important, especially with the checkout page, you have the freedom to design this page in a way that will generate sales.
Scalability
Many businesses operate in multiple countries and want to reach international audiences. Whether you’re already shipping internationally or you want to, Shopify Plus offers the option to create store site clones for the most commonly used countries, such as .ca, .com. and .au, so you can create alternate stores quickly and easily.
Best of all, you can tailor each clone site to make sure you observe the cultural differences and relevance to that audience and language. You could also devise local marketing campaigns based on behaviors and trends in the target country without affecting your other alternate sites.
Included Features
Shopify Plus adds numerous features to Shopify’s capabilities, including Shopify Flow. This feature allows you to turn day-to-day tasks into automated workflows using a premade template or custom-built template. Some of the workflows you can create include email sequencing, purchase tracking, personalized product recommendations, and customer segmentation.
Why Choose Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus has numerous features that help you improve your productivity and profitability. Here are some reasons to choose Shopify Plus:
Low Transaction Fees
With its higher monthly fee, Shopify Plus offers a lower percentage fee per transaction. Shopify Advanced, a higher-tier plan, has a 0.5-percent fee per transaction. Shopify Plus lowers this fee to 0.15 percent per transaction. This is a matter of 15 cents per $100 transaction with Shopify Plus and 50 cents per $100 transaction with Shopify Advanced.
With numerous high-dollar transactions, that difference can add up and make a big difference in your bottom line performance. In addition, you can choose the Shopify payment platform and you won’t have transaction fees at all.
Stability
During high-volume sales periods, such as Christmas Eve or Black Friday, websites have a hard time with the extra traffic and experience lags, glitches, and delays. This can cost you sales and leave customers with a bad experience using your site. In fact, they may not return to purchase anything else in the future, if the experience was bad enough.
Shopify Plus has this issue covered. Many businesses made the switch to Shopify Plus because of these performance issues, in fact. The plan boosts performance rates to 10,000 transactions per minute. So, when you have a high-volume sale and tons of web traffic, you can trust that your site will be stable and perform at its best.
Seamless Integration
Shopify Plus allows you to seamlessly integrate the tools that you want most for your business. Aided by Shopify Partners and flexible APIs, this feature gives you the option of using headless commerce architecture to customize your storefront and backend to your exact specifications. This level of customization not only benefits your brand image, but ensures that you’re providing the best possible experience for your customers.
Shopify Plus Features
One of the most impressive aspects of Shopify Plus is its array of innovative features. Businesses can use these features to engineer a customized ecommerce experience that encourages customer loyalty and solidifies brand image and identity.
Here are some of Shopify Plus’s most desirable features:
B2B and Wholesale
Ecommerce can be challenging for B2B and wholesale businesses. Not traditionally part of the ecommerce model, these businesses need to maintain an entirely separate site for the wholesale/B2B part of the business, which adds to the expenses and site maintenance.
Shopify Plus offers a password-protected wholesale channel that only B2B customers can access, so you can keep your whole business under one “roof.” Some of the options include bulk discounts, tiered pricing, custom pricing, and exclusive wholesale products.
Checkout Page Customization
Ecommerce stores need to hire developers to customize their website to meet brand and customer needs. This can add to the expenses and challenges significantly. Most Shopify plans don’t offer customization options for the checkout experience, but Shopify Plus allows you to tailor your checkout virtually any way you imagine.
Some of the specific changes you can make include the number of pages for the checkout process, the flow of the page, the page design, and more. If you’re working toward conversion rate optimization, this is an incredible functionality to have at your disposal.
Launchpad
Sales and product launches are a huge part of running an ecommerce business. Shopify Plus makes this even easier with the Launchpad tool, which allows followers to setup and track launch events for sales and new products. To make everything more convenient, the Launchpad tool offers settings to schedule the beginning and end dates for the event, schedule seasonal flash sales, adjust the price automatically, and create launch themes. Everything is tracked in an analytics dashboard, so you can get valuable insights into how your launches are performing.
Script Editor
Script Editor is another customization feature that lets you tailor the shopping experience for your customers. When it comes to this feature, Shopify offers a lot of customization across its plans, but it’s mostly through third-party apps.
Shopify Plus builds on the existing offerings by providing an option to develop and edit custom scripts. As a result, you no longer need additional apps to set up scripts to improve the shopping experience for your customers.
Unlimited Staff Accounts
Many Shopify plans offer a few additional staff accounts. If your business is growing and you either need or expect to need access for more staff members on your website, Shopify Plus is the way to go. The plan has no limits to the number of staff accounts, so you can connect your team all across the country or the world.
Shopify Plus Pricing
Shopify Plus has a lot of benefits, but it comes with a higher monthly subscription costs. Here’s how the Shopify plans compare:
- Shopify Lite is the lowest plan and costs $9 per month. This is perfect for small businesses with websites that sell products and accept credit card payments.
- Basic Shopify is one of the most popular plans and costs $29 per month. You’ll get all the basic features you need for your ecommerce website with this plan.
- Shopify is a mid-range plan that costs $79 per month. Designed for businesses scaling, this plan provides a range of tools to fuel growth.
- Shopify Advanced is a top tier plan that costs $299 per month. You can add up to 15 staff accounts, five languages, and eight locations, making it a good choice for medium-sized businesses.
- Shopify Plus is the highest tier of the plans and costs $2,000+ per month. You get numerous advanced capabilities for your spend, however, which is ideal for large businesses with high-volume sales and traffic.
One thing to keep in mind is that Shopify Plus starts at $2,000 per month – the fees are variable and depend on your settings. Be sure you know the full costs before you make the switch.
Some of the costs of the subscription are offset by lower transaction fees with a third-party payment processor, but that only matters if you have a lot of sales. Shopify Plus may be too expensive and over equipped for small ecommerce businesses.
Making a Switch to Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus is a supercharged ecommerce option, but it’s important to weigh all the benefits, functionality, capabilities, and features against the costs to make sure it’s the best choice for your business.
