What is Shopify Plus and How Much Does it Cost

Shopify Plus is the most popular eCommerce platform for huge eCommerce business brands. 

Shopify has four plans: Basic, Shopify, Advanced, and Plus. Shopify Plus plan was created in 2014 with the aim of supporting growing businesses. 

The Shopify Plus platform’s business strategy is to cater to large-scale businesses. It comes with great features that support high-volume merchant store sales.

Large businesses that use Shopify Plus include: 

• Kylie Cosmetics
• Red Bull 
• Nestlé
• Gymshark
• Leesa

Wondering why these huge businesses are loyal to Shopify Plus? The catch is the features that support the management of enormous sales. 

As a business grows, the complexity of doing business becomes intense. That includes:

• Dealing with more wholesale and retail customers
• Expanding to different states and continents
• A higher number of inventories
• High traffic to your company website
• Incorporating different currencies
• More customer queries and returns

To succeed and compete with other market players, you must manage all the above facets smoothly and effectively. 

Lucky for you, Shopify Plus makes it easy for growing and multi-million businesses to perform all these functions simultaneously.

Let’s dissect what these Shopify Plus features are so that we can understand what it entails. To break it down easily, we’ll divide the key features into two categories: business management and customer support features.

- Business management features

- Customer support features

- Shopify flow

- Shopify pay

- Launchpad – flash sale automation

- Single sign-on for forums/group membership sites

- Shopify Plus Merchant Success Program

- Gift card API

- Avalara Tax Integration

- Discount code API

- Shopify Plus uptime and CDN

- Checkout page customization & full SSL

-Selling in different currencies

- Selling products to wholesalers

- Unlimited staff accounts

Business Management Features

Shopify Flow

Shopify flow is a tool that customizes and automates inventory tasks that were previously done manually. 

As such, a business can:

• Automate repeated tasks such as mandatory steps in a buying process.
• Build connectors to integrate tools, for example, when tracking and rewarding customers.
• Create system logic triggers to happen following specific events or criteria. For instance, sending stock order requests to manufacturers after reaching a certain number of sales.

The advantage here is that you don’t need coding knowledge to use Shopify’s flow.

Launchpad – Flash Sale Automation

Can you imagine how tedious and stressful it would be for Kylie Cosmetics to manually plan and execute weekly or monthly flash sales and product launches?

Well, Shopify created Launchpad to ease such-like processes. Launchpad is an automated command center that helps businesses to:

• Schedule merchandise launches
• Adjust prices and levels of inventory
• Customize themes ahead of a sale event

Shopify Plus Merchant Success Program

For your business-to-business relations and customer service, Shopify Plus has a 24-hour Merchant Success Team. The team helps businesses in these five key areas:

• Merchant Growth Model
• Shopify Plus Academy
• Platform and Ecosystem
• Specialized Support
• Plus Community

Additionally, a Shopify Launch Engineer is available to assist new Shopify Plus merchants with their technology needs. That includes migration from another eCommerce platform.

Avalara Tax Integration

It’s important to comply with legal requirements, like tax. Moreover, as a business, you need to charge the correct tax rates. For that reason, Shopify Plus collaborates with Avalara’s tax integration so that you can rest easy knowing the charges are accurate.

Avalara has real-time tax calculations comprehensive of 14,000 US tax jurisdictions. With this plan, you're assured of protection against antiquated tax laws, data, and tax audits.

Server and Hosting Services

Shopify uses Google Cloud among others, a worldwide cloud hosting provider, to maintain a huge bank of servers. That guarantees 99.99% uptime. 

Shopify Plus is powerful enough to handle a heavy uptick in traffic to your online stores. And so, you’re assured that your server won’t fail you on Black Friday, and neither do you have to worry about high-volume merchants’ scalability issues. 

For its global CDN (CDN saves images on edge servers then delivers data to websites quickly), Shopify uses Fastly. This ensures all Shopify stores have fast load times. Shopify also maintains a status history of all known issues so that you can track them in real-time.

Selling in Different Currencies

Once you start selling online globally, you’ll need to include additional currencies so that your customers have a relatable shopping experience. 

When using other Shopify plans, you need to create different Shopify stores with different currencies and pricing. Then link them together all the way to the checkout point.

However, Shopify Plus comes with nine more clone stores you can use to sell in additional currencies.

Selling Products to Wholesalers

Shopify Plus wholesale channel allows big businesses to: 

• Apply discounts to retail prices. 
• Create several wholesale price lists.
• Tag customers’ profiles and invite them to access your wholesale store.
• Process payments directly or have shoppers pay via their credit cards.
• Review and manage orders.

And to make it that much easier for you, Shopify provides a wholesale channel manual.

Unlimited Staff Accounts

A growing business comes with additional employees. 

On Shopify Plus, you can create personal staff accounts for all your team members. And yes, they can access all the tools they need to work on Shopify Plus.

Customer Support Features

Checkout Page Customization & Full SSL

The Checkout Page Customization & Full SSL is an outstanding feature only available to Shopify Plus users. 

One of the key differences with the other plans is that merchants on Shopify Plus can modify the checkout page. Consequently, that gives the businesses the power to:

• Adjust buttons, currency, layout, text, offers, etc.
• Enable shoppers to use points from third-party loyalty apps to make payments.
• Generate pop-ups or system error messages for specific offers such as “Your Order Qualifies You For 10% Savings”.
• Have full SSL experience on your domain name.

Another benefit to Shopify Plus is that your customers remain on your shop’s URL during the entire shopping process. That’s because your checkout page remains YOURDOMAINNAME.com instead of checkout.shopify.com.

Shopify Pay

When selling online, you want your customers to have a quick and easy checkout experience. And we like that Shopify Pay is a customer-friendly platform compatible with any browser or device. 

When customers are ready for checkout, it sends a 6-digit verification code to their phone for payment confirmation and completion. 

Shopify pay also integrates customer information from any Shopify online store that’s using Shopify Payments. 

Subsequently, it allows customers buying from an online store via Shopify to skip the shipping and payment details section. Customers can also save their checkout information on Shopify Pay so that they’ve got a seamless shopping and checkout experience next time.

Single Sign-on for Forums/Group Membership Sites

Customers can tire of logging into too many sites, especially when they’re looking to buy something urgently. 

Shopify Plus users enjoy a multipass login feature. It redirects people from your membership site to your store without making them log in again on Shopify. Just remember to enable the multipass login feature in the Setting-Checkout page.

Shopify’s API

Shopify Plus shops can access more API calls than other plans. You can contact your Plus dedicated account manager to increase the standard API call rate.

Discount Code API and Gift Card API

Shopify Plus has a discount API to help stores dealing with numerous discount codes. They can easily create, disable, enable, and retire discounts. 

For example, you can automate shipping methods by creating free delivery discount codes for customers who spend above a certain amount.

Similarly, you can use the Gift Card API to create, count, modify and disable redeemable gift cards.

Shopify Scripts

Shopify scripts are a feature on Shopify Plus that allows you to be creative. It enables you to run your code on the servers so that you can create features that a regular Shopify store can’t. For example, you can:

• Set percentage discounts.
• Formulate a range of discounts according to the number of orders or rate of buying.
• Create offers such as; buy 3 get one 1 free, $40 off, buy 2 get the 2nd ½ off, etc.
• Implement B2B Ecommerce capabilities

How Much Does Shopify Plus Cost?

Shopify Plus’ monthly charges start at $2000 and can rise to a $40,000 limit.

Note: Shopify plus pricing plan is inclusive of the server and hosting maintenance costs because Shopify Plus is a fully hosted platform. 

That way, you don’t need to worry about monthly costs, unlike the Magento enterprise plan.

Looking for an eCommerce Platform for Your Growing Business? 

The dedicated team of solution partners at Pivofy will help with the eCommerce design for your new Shopify plan.

Shopify Plus automation capabilities are what enable a huge eCommerce store, like Nestle, to sell online and be successful at their business. It’ll give you more control using advanced features so that you can manage and monitor all your stores. 

You can oversee order management, monthly sales, customers’ behavior, and monthly revenue statistics from multiple stores using a centralized, powerful platform.