The Best, Non-Sponsored Guide to Shopify Plus

If you're staging for the next growth phase of your business, you've probably landed on this guide to aid your research efforts for the best ecommerce platform to handle your enterprise's specific online operations.

The high-touch, customer-facing experience is essential, but so is the less-glamourous back-end that your team interacts with daily. Your job is to determine when it's the right time to migrate and which platform will give your company the best support.

It's no secret that we love Shopify. We build on the platform because we believe it's an amazing tool to prosper entrepreneurship. Helping merchants succeed has been a goal we've had in common for a very long time, hence this guide.

In this guide, we'll cover many topics and questions for helping you make better business decisions when considering Shopify Plus, like:

• What is Shopify Plus?
• What about headless commerce?
• When should you migrate to Shopify Plus?
• What features do you get with Shopify Plus?
• What are some examples of companies using Shopify Plus?
• What are some Shopify Plus alternatives?

What is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus is a product ecommerce engine for enterprises, meant for businesses that are ready to expand into a global omnichannel experience. If you're considering Shopify Plus, your company should ideally be making a minimum of USD 800k/month in sales (more on this later). Shopify Plus offers flexible features for your technology requirements like:

• Automating manual operations
• Sandboxes for your development team
• Data importing and exporting tools
• Reporting
• Exclusive sales channels
• and more

When is it Cheaper to Switch to Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus starts at USD 2000 per month. At what point can you justify that ROI for your business? When is it cheaper to switch to Shopify Plus rather than staying on the Advanced Shopify plan?

We discussed above how your business should ideally be making USD 800K/month. While that's not a requirement on Shopify's side, here's the math to back up that claim:

• Shopify Plus starts at USD 2000/month until you make $800K/month in sales. Once you cross that threshold, the monthly cost changes to 0.25% of your sales (up to $40K/month).
• Shopify Advanced credit card fees are 2.4%, Shopify Plus credit card fees are 2.15%, saving you 0.25%.
• 0.25% of 800K = 2000, Shopify Plus becomes cost-effective when the credit card fees are more significant than the monthly fee.

To migrate to a Shopify Plus account you already know it's not a prerequisite to be making USD 800K/month to migrate, so if you're making less, you can still consider a Shopify Plus account for its many great features. However, the monthly plan doesn't become cost-effective until you reach that sales volume.

Benefits of Shopify Plus

All this talk about cost, but what are you getting for $2000/month? Shopify offers enhanced design, and you may decide that the features alone are worth the upgrade even if you're not hitting that $800K/month mark yet. When you switch, you get access to:

• A dedicated Launch engineer and account manager
• Lower credit card fees (2.15% compared to 2.4% on Advanced)
• Access to Shopify Plus-exclusive apps:
  • Shopify Flow
  • Launchpad
  • Wholesale channel
  • Transporter app
  • Bulk account inviter

Successful Shopify Plus Merchants

You know the staple Plus merchants like... Staples, Kylie, Gymshark, and other fantastic brands are listed here. But here are a few more that are killing it in their space using Shopify Plus:

Qalo

Qalo specialized in wearable jewelry for an active lifestyle. Their engagement rings are beloved by married athletes and adventure-seekers for their flexibility and injury mitigation.

YouFoodz

YouFoodz is an Australian subscription box company specializing in fresh, chef-prepared meal boxes, snacks, and juices.

Third Love

Third Love is on a mission to make the perfect bra. They quickly took the lingerie market by storm with their virtual fitting room offering and half-cup sizes.

Shopify Flow

We talk about this automation app a lot around here. Automation takes care of the mounding backlog of tasks, like adding free samples and promo items to orders. Shopify Flow connects you to native and third-party workflows that automate the repetitive tasks of your online store. Your operations have fewer human-made mistakes in areas like bundle and subscription fulfillment, customer loyalty programs, and fraudulent orders.

More Shopify Plus-Exclusive Apps

Launchpad

Shopify knows that automation is the successful way to run a business in today's climate. Launchpad is an automating event scheduler that saves you time with tasks like promotions and campaigns. You'll be able to schedule and monitor your sales, product launches, and content changes. The downside of this app is that you're only able to schedule one event at a time.

Transporter App

This app's superpower is to help migrate merchants from a platform like BigCommerce or WooCommerce to Shopify Plus. Who has time to update key pieces of data one at a time? The Transporter app, available to Shopify Plus merchants, lets you perform actions in bulk. Upload CSV files into the app to bulk import data like order, customer, and product info.

Wholesale Channel

Switching to Shopify Plus gives you an opportunity to break into a new market. Shopify Plus's wholesale channel lets you create a separate storefront exclusively for your wholesale clients to deliver an experience tailored to them.

Shopify Scripts

Automation and personalization are big themes when using Shopify Plus, and Shopify Scripts lets you create dynamic sales and discounts automatically based on customer segments. Your customers get the personalization they're looking for, and you're able to customize the checkout user experience with shipping, product discounts, and payment gateways.

Unlimited Bandwidth

In order to be the omnichannel selling giant they claim to be, Shopify Plus comes through with their bandwidth offerings. With unlimited staff accounts, you also get unlimited, unthrottled bandwidth, a doubled API call limit of 4 requests/second, and a platform capable of handling 15,000 checkouts per minute on a single store. Meaning that customers will only have to wait in an online checkout queue if it's your product drop strategy, not because of bandwidth limits.

Custom Checkout

Enterprises need custom checkout experiences they can tailor to their brand; it's the most important space in your online store. Shopify Plus merchants can manipulate and customize their cart and checkout code to bring an experience to customers that Standard and Advanced Shopify users can't access. You can make customizations like special shipping rates, discounts to customer segments, and preferred payment options.

Shopify Plus Alternatives

Exploring eCommerce platforms is a daunting business decision that demands a lot of care and research. You have to make sure whichever platform you choose can support your business goals and supplies critical features for your company's niche. When researching different options, what goals are you trying to accomplish with the platform?

Are you trying to:

• Reduce your costs
• Add more customizations, and where do they need to be added?
• Expand through more selling channels, like wholesale or international markets
• Increase operations efficiency (automation)
• Be on the cusp of the newest and best user experience for your customers (i.e. AR)

It's also important to think about your pain points with your current platform or subscription plan, and what's fueling your search for a new solution in the first place. Do you need help with:

• Integrations
• Traffic bandwidth
• PCI compliance
• Manual tasks
• Budget-friendly

We looked at the top three competitors to Shopify Plus and evaluated them based on pricing, available customizations, and exclusive tools like automations and account executives.

Shopify vs. Itself

If you're already on Shopify, does your business really need to switch to Shopify Plus? From the outside, Shopify Plus and other Shopify tiers all use the same admin to conduct internal operations.

Top reasons to switch to Shopify Plus instead of staying on Shopify Advanced:

• Credit card rates are more economical and reduced by 0.25% compared to Shopify Advanced credit card rates.
• You can create multiple stores from one account to access different markets.
• Get exclusive access to Shopify's wholesale marketplace to break sales records.
• Automate redundant operational tasks with exclusive Shopify Plus apps.
• Get paired with an account executive to help you get the most out of your account.

Shopify's Top 3 Competitors

The ecommerce space beckons many quality SaaS players to the field, but we're focussing on the big three that you should be considering in your research:

• BigCommerce Enterprise
• Magento
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud

When comparing platforms, we considered Shopify Plus against its competitors for the price (in USD), available customizations, and exclusive tools.

Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce Enterprise

Shopify Plus vs Magento 2 Enterprise Solutions

Shopify Plus vs Salesforce Commerce Cloud - Signature

Which Enterprise Ecommerce Solution Should You Choose?

Your business goals and pain points ultimately decide which platform you should invest in for your online store.

Salesforce is renowned for its selling tools and CRM, though you can integrate with it regardless of the ecommerce platform you choose. It has great native AI tools that will help you stay competitive in a world shifting toward highly-personalized marketing tactics. The biggest complaint from users is the lack of agency partners available for a platform that heavily relies on third-party developers. Users also find that their money is spent more on maintenance of the site rather than building customer relationships, though when you have access to Salesforce CRM, you're already in good shape.

If you're looking for the ultimate in flexibility for an omnichannel approach, and have the time and budget for heavy developer work for your customization, Magento is a great platform to streamline your separate sales channels. However, most users' criticisms apply to lack of resources available to manage the platform or having to retain an agency to manage it for them.

If you're making over $100 million/year, you might want to opt for BigCommerce because of its custom product features that allow for hundreds of variants and SKUs for a single product. Otherwise, Shopify Plus's exclusive tools for wholesale and automation surpass their offerings as both are simple and flexible platforms.

Shopify Plus is one of the leading and most talked about enterprise solutions thanks to its ease-of-use and platform flexibility. It has a mature app marketplace where you can find custom solutions to almost any ecommerce use case, and many Plus-certified tech partners to build bespoke solutions and allow your company to go headless. It also gives your brand a big competitive advantage if you're looking to break into the wholesale space by coupling a wholesale channel with their wholesale marketplace, Handshake. You can also help your team get more done with the available automations for customer loyalty, subscription and bundle fulfillment, and more.