When it comes to ecommerce, nothing beats Shopify. The ecommerce platform offers numerous tools and functionality to help business owners launch and maintain an ecommerce store, whether it’s their first time or they’ve run successful enterprise businesses.
To make things easy for owners, the platform offers a range of plans to suit different needs. The basic plan starts at $29 a month, but top tiers can be hundreds or even thousands of dollars each month.
Shopify Plus is the highest tier of Shopify plans, but it’s also the most expensive. For many businesses, the extra features and capabilities are worth that cost, but what’s right for you?
What is Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus is the premium plan for Shopify and includes the entirety of the Shopify features, plus some exclusive features you can’t find elsewhere. Some of these include B2B and wholesale store options, customizable checkout pages, unlimited app integration, and 24/7 support.
For many businesses, the added features of Shopify Plus offset the investment.
Why Choose Shopify Plus?
Fast Transactions
Holiday seasons and busy shopping periods bring a ton of online traffic to ecommerce stores. During high-volume sales, websites may crash if they take on too many customers trying to shop, add to cart, and checkout. If this happens, it not only costs you money, but it leaves a bad impression on the customer.
As one of Shopify Plus’s biggest advantages, the faster transactions allow for more checkouts and purchases during high-volume shopping times. The Shopify Plus plan offers up to 10,000 transactions per minute.
Low Transaction Fees
Shopify plans all have transaction fees, but the rates depend on the tier. Shopify Plus is 0.15 percent lower than the second-highest plan. While that may not seem like a lot, that adds up over a lot of transactions.
Integrated Systems
Shopify Plus offers tools like flexible APIs and Shopify Partners to integrate tools to customize your store. These may include the storefront itself or user-experience aspects like the checkout page.
Scalability
International shipping offers businesses a chance to tap into new markets and reach a much larger customer base. Many business owners want to open international stores and offer shipping, but that can bring a lot of work and hassle.
Shopify Plus makes international sales easy with clone stores for up to nine countries, plus the original store. While they can all be managed from the same account, you can customize each store for the local languages, currencies, and cultural details. If you want to run local campaigns or promote specific products, you can set up a campaign for just that country’s site.
What Features Does Shopify Plus Offer?
Launchpad
The Launchpad is an automation feature that allows you to launch a product, set up a promotion, or create a flash sale quickly and easily. When you set it up, you can customize the settings to run the ad automatically, such as selecting start and end dates and automatic price adjustments.
Unlimited Staff Accounts
Large and growing businesses have huge teams of people to handle marketing, sales, customer service, and other departments. If you want your whole team to have access to your storefront, Shopify Plus offers unlimited staff accounts. You can give your staff complete control as admin or limit their actions to maintain some control yourself.
Customizable Checkout Page
The checkout experience is vital to a positive user experience. Shopify Plus is one of the few platforms that offers full customization of your checkout page without the need for a developer. You can tailor the messaging, themes, and look of your checkout page, as well as set up triggers that offer discounts and promotions for certain customers or certain cart thresholds.
Wholesale Channel
Businesses in both the B2B and B2C space benefit from ecommerce, but it can be challenging to maintain two stores, two sets of customers, two order and fulfillment processes, and more. This doesn’t even include the expense of running two stores.
Shopify Plus combines B2B and B2C offerings into one by giving you a password-protected wholesale channel that only specific customers can access. You can customize the store with custom pricing, tiered pricing, bulk discounts, exclusive wholesale products, and more.
Shopify Plus Pricing
While most Shopify plans have clear, standard pricing, Shopify Plus has a bit of mystery. You must contact Shopify to get a quote, but here’s a basic breakdown:
The plan starts at $2,000 per month or 0.25 percent of revenue, whichever is higher, and includes all the features and capabilities. The pricing caps at $40,000, no matter how much revenue you bring in.
Shopify Plus also uses lower transaction fees for third-party payment processes and no fees for Shopify Payments.
While this may seem like a lot, Shopify Plus is designed for high-volume ecommerce businesses that make at least $400,000 each month. Businesses with that revenue tend to make up the difference in rapid growth, lower transaction fees, and other features.
Sean Richards is the VP of Strategy & Partnerships for Vincit. Prior to Vincit, Richards provided business development, 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.
