Why Join Shopify Plus (>40k Merchants)

Hey 👋

Shopify is used by over 4.8 million online stores worldwide — and you might be using it, too. As a merchant, you want the absolute best for your eCom store, and you’ve likely heard of Shopify’s cream of the crop “Plus” plan.

In today’s post, we’ll show you the good, the bad, and the new about Shopify Plus, including the updates it’s had since Shopify Editions ‘24 so you can decide whether you should join the 40k+ merchants using it 👀

Grab a drink, and let’s get into it 🔥

1. Who Even Uses Shopify Plus? 🤔

As of August 2nd, 2024, there are 47,500 domains running on Shopify Plus. Knowing that over 4.8m stores run on Shopify worldwide, that seems like a small number — this is why we need to understand who Shopify Plus is for.

The Shopify Basic plan is designed with small-to-medium businesses in mind, with everything included that you could ever need to run an eCom store.

Shopify Plus is more suited for B2B companies, luxury brands & high-growth merchants — think of brands like Ring, Gymshark, and Heinz (if you think those are BIG companies using it, even Tesla is powered by Shopify Plus).

And as for the stats — here’s a cool visual from BuiltWith showing the growth of Shopify Plus. They went from around 14k to 47k users in just 2 years 😲 

Now, let’s take a look at why these big brands use Shopify Plus, and make it easy for you to decide on whether to upgrade or not 😄

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2. The Good About Shopify Plus 🛒 

At its core, Shopify Plus offers a ton of additional tools, but we’ll list only the most useful features (and no, sadly, we’re not sponsored 😂).

1️⃣ All-Encompassing Store Management

• Centralized Control — you can manage multiple stores seamlessly from just one dashboard. A global brand can monitor inventory and sales across different regions, allowing for fast data-driven decisions.
  

• Unlimited Staff Accounts — onboard as many team members as you want, without any extra costs.
  

• Advanced API Access — integrate custom apps to automate processes. Retailers can connect their inventory system to update stock levels in real time, and even connect 3PL providers through the API to automate order fulfillment processes.

2️⃣ Customizable & Optimized Checkouts

• Checkout Extensions & Checkout Flows — you can leverage checkout extensions to create personalized upsell opportunities right inside the checkout process, which can boost AOV.

Here’s a stellar example of Ridge Wallet’s checkout upsell from our post Why CRO is Cool & Top Brands Confirming It:

• Checkout Branding — this feature lets you “brand” your checkout page completely, with your own logo & custom styles.

A great example showing just how much you can customize your checkout with this feature:

3️⃣ Global Selling Capabilities

• Shopify POS Pro — the first 20 POS Pro (point of sales) locations are included, meaning you can sell in person and manage inventory across retail stores & pop-ups.
  

• Wholesale & B2B Tools — you can set up dedicated portals for B2B clients that allow for customer-specific pricing, flexible payment terms & a faster ordering process.
  

• Organization Settings — this lets you manage all the stores in your org from a single location, with separate tools for billing, users, and analytics for each store.

4️⃣ A Few New Features (Since Editions ‘24)

• Shop Campaigns & Shopify Audiences — convert more customers across more ad platforms. Shop campaigns also offer zero-risk campaigns on Google & Meta to expand your reach and pay only when your customers convert.
  

• One Store For Many Business Entities — you can now run multiple Shopify Payments accounts tied to each of your business entities in one Shopify store.
  

• Checkout Blocks & Expand Pickup Points At Checkout — checkout blocks are a free, easy way to customize checkouts (no coding required), and you can build custom apps that connect to any 3rd-party pickup point network of your choice.

Phew! That’s a ton of great features, and while Shopify Plus may seem promising, under the hood there are a few things you should know about.

We’ve only revealed a few NEW features added to Shopify Plus since Shopify Editions ‘24. Soon we’ll show you everything they’ve added 👀

3. The Bad (it’s not that bad) 😤 

Let’s address the elephant in the room — the pricing. Shopify Plus starts at $2,500/mo for the 1-year term, and the 3-year term is $2,300/mo. For smaller and medium-sized businesses, this can be a huge expense.

And if you want to find out the exact amount you’ll pay per month, check out our post on Shopify Plus Pricing & Calculator — we went into all the specifics there.

Along with the pricing, once you choose Shopify Plus, switching to another platform can be tough, since you can only export certain data, and for whatever reason, Shopify cut out their dedicated launch help — now, newly migrated merchants have to do things completely on their own 🤔

Now that you’ve seen it all — before we help you decide whether you should migrate or not, let’s have a final look at what’s been added to Shopify Plus since Shopify Editions Summer ‘24 🔥

4. What’s New Since Shopify Editions ‘24? 😍 

In case you missed it, Shopify Editions Summer ‘24 dropped not too long ago, and if you want to read about managed markets, better analytics, and more of the newest updates, check out our post on Shopify Editions.

Let’s see what’s exclusive for the cool kids using Plus (be warned, there’s a LOT of new features):

1️⃣ Combined Listings — you can showcase unique rich media galleries, descriptions & URLs for multiple options of a product under a single parent listing.

2️⃣ Customize Your Store For Each B2B Market — create multiple B2B markets, each with its own unique catalogs & storefront theme customization (no coding required, by the way!). This feature isn’t out yet, but it’s coming soon.

3️⃣ Collect Deposits At Checkout — require %-based deposits at checkout, which can be configured for each B2B customer.

4️⃣ Filtering Support & Headless B2B Storefronts — you can use metafields to quickly filter company location indexes, and also build headless B2B storefronts using Storefront API & Customer Account API.

5️⃣ Company Profiles (Support 10K Locations) — create up to 10K ship-to locations per company for your largest, most complex B2B customers.

6️⃣ Retargeting Boost Lists — powered by Shopify Audiences algorithms, retargeting boost lists can increase your orders for every $ you spend on retargeting.

7️⃣ Import More Data from Existing Stores — you can quickly create production or development stores with existing store data like products, variants, collections, and their associated metafields.

8️⃣ Finally, Enable More Gift Cards & Credit Cards — build payment extensions that allow merchants to accept 3rd-party gift cards and private-label credit cards.

If you want to take a closer look at all they’ve added, check out their official changelog.

Okay, now it’s time to find out whether it’s a good plan for your store or not.

5. Is Shopify Plus For You? 🤔 

Answer these questions before considering migrating to Shopify Plus:

1️⃣ Do your annual sales exceed $1M?

2️⃣ Will you make use of most of the features Shopify Plus offers?

3️⃣ Can you accommodate the expense of $2,300-$2,500/mo?

P.S — Note that lower fees at high sales volumes could make Shopify Plus more cost-effective compared to standard plans.

Considering all of the pros & cons, are you ready for the long-term commitment of migrating to Shopify Plus?

If you’ve made your decision to migrate, we’d be happy to help you! 😄 

Need help with your ecommerce project? Wanna learn more about Shopify in our weekly blog? Just hanging around?

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Thanks for reading and supporting E&U (Ecommerce & Unicorns)

Daniil from ECORN