To compete with enterprise ecommerce platforms, Shopify created the Shopify Plus program. Shopify Plus is a fully hosted enterprise ecommerce platform designed for high growth merchants and brands. It have a set of robust features. 

Additionally, Shopify has four plans for all their stores: Basic, Shopify and Advanced and Plus. As your business grows, Shopify has a path for you and the different pricing plans will let your business access more features, lower your transaction rate and give you more tools to grow your business. Shopify Plus is trusted by brands worldwide.

What is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus is a commerce platform specially designed with high volume, enterprise-level brands in mind. Its core offering centres around taking what more basic systems do, and adding: More customisation and control. Greater automation capabilities. Improved multichannel and omnichannel functions.

With unrivaled scalability, low cost-of-ownership, and easy integrations, Shopify Plus is a compelling platform — especially for those businesses hungry to grow.

It’s flexible to your needs

Shopify Plus is fully flexible according to your requirements. Adding features is also easy and most offer ‘Apps’ that are significantly quicker to install than doing it manually. For integration Shopify API is available delivering the exact features that you need.

Moreover, with  Shopify Plus you’ll have a futureproof platform that offers new features as they become best-practice. A good example is Apple Pay and Google Pay, which became available to all Shopify Payments merchants soon after launch without any custom development.

It’s cut out for high traffic

Shopify Plus is designed specifically for larger businesses. Their platform promises unlimited scalability, in catering for the needs of growing brands. The platform’s fit to handle 1 million pageviews and 10,000 checkouts a minute. It also maintains an incredible uptime of 99.99%. Large numbers of visitors on your site won’t let your site perform poorly.

The Power to Scale

As your business grows, the complexity of everything takes off rapidly: more customers, more returns, more inventory, more things to remember to do every day! With Shopify Plus you get access to proprietary Shopify tools like Shopify Flow and Launchpad.

Server Costs

Shopify Plus is a fully hosted solution that will cost you much less than any other ecommerce platform when it comes to servers and maintenance. For example with Magento you need to pay for a license ($18,000/year), programming support for features as well as your own server which will cost you upwards of $500/month for a hardened dedicated server. In addition, you need to have server admin skills on staff to maintain, update and monitor the server to ensure everything is set up and running correctly. With Shopify Plus, Shopify takes care of the server and the maintenance, freeing you up to focus on improving your user experience and growing sales for your store.

It puts profitable automations at your fingertips

Brands on Shopify Plus automate marketing and operational flows because with Shopify-built tools like Flow, Scripts, and Launchpad, it’s so easy to.These Shopify-built apps will reduce the amount of time needed for admin and merchandising tasks, in turn freeing up your team to focus on the bigger picture.

They can also be used for effective automated marketing, such as rewarding loyal customers and winning back old customers that haven’t visited in a while.Brands on Shopify Plus will be harnessing the power of automations like these in no time, increasing customer lifetime value and driving profitability.

Launchpad – Flash Sale Automation

Many large Plus merchants are doing weekly or monthly product launches and flash sales on a regular basis. Preparing for each of these one off events manually is time consuming and stressful, which is why Shopify announced the creation of Launchpad as the automated command center for your major ecommerce sales events. Launchpad allows merchants to schedule product launches, pricing, adjust inventory levels and even theme customizations well in advance of the sale event.

It’s built to integrate

Shopify Plus is made for seamless integrations and your back-office operations are no exception. On this platform, you can get leaner by connecting your store to your core systems. The powerful and well-documented API allows us to integrate reliably in no time. This means operational efficiency without the headaches of traditional IT.

Shopify Plus Merchant Success Program

Shopify has a large Plus Merchant Success Team that is always available to assist 24/7. As a Shopify Plus merchant your company will be enrolled in the Merchant Success Program. The program is broken up into 5 key areas and they will have access to all of them:

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

New Shopify Plus merchants also get to work with Shopify Launch Engineers to assist with your technology needs and consult with you on your migration from another ecommerce platform.

It has the best app ecosystem out there

This platform comes with all the features you’ll need for an online store. Shopify’s app marketplace stands unrivalled. It has the broadest range of world-class technology partners from reviews and search to payment and shipping. Additionally this platform is ready to integrate seamlessly and grow your business from all angles.

Effortless Security

Shopify Plus comes PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant by default, which is The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard for organizations that handle credit card information. These are the highest standards of compliance for credit card processing, meaning the business and customers of every store powered by Shopify are always kept secure. 

Shopify Plus merchants never need to think about credit card security. Moreover, it is also constantly upgraded to deal with the latest security threats, to make your website more secure.

It’s easy to use

Amongst all the ecommerce platforms Shopify Plus is the easiest platform to run your online business. It has a modern, intuitive interface that e-commerce teams seem to love.

Though it has lots of functionality, still it’s interface is easy to use.With a simple store editor, Shopify lets you focus on your customer experience, rather than getting tangled up on back-end stuff.

It’s perfect for global growth

For brands looking to scale up and expand to international audiences Shopify Plus is the best option. It offers multi-currency and multi-language options. Shopify’s architectural options give merchants flexibility for the best to approach global expansion. 

For testing you can launch one store with multi-currency and as you see it’s succeeding you can solely launch another website for the specific region.

In addition to this, the Shopify app store offers a range of solutions for enhancing localizations and operations when selling to international markets. For example Take tax calculations, with Shopify Plus, you can simply switch on Avalara and they’re calculated automatically. Moreover, this platform continues to roll out new features on the regular, continuing to help merchants power their global retail.

Checkout Page Customization & Full SSL

This is a really big feature that pushes many clients into Shopify Plus. With the 3 standard Shopify plans you do not have the ability to modify the checkout page, but with Shopify Plus you can customize the checkout page experience by updating the checkout.scs.liquid file. By updating this file you can change the currency, text, layout, button states (regular, primary and inset) and create custom error messages, such as: Your Order Qualifies You For 10% Savings. This will allow you to create a completely branded experience on your checkout page that is fully responsive.

Also another key feature with Shopify Plus is that your checkout page URL will remain YOURDOMAINNAME.com instead of checkout.shopify.com. Your customers will stay on your root URL the entire purchase process.

Here is a summary of the checkout page benefits:

• Complete control over the checkout page experience, including buttons, layout, offers, etc
• Allow customers to pay with points from loyalty apps on the checkout page
• Include custom error messages/pop-ups for abandoned checkout pages or for special offers
• Full SSL experience on your domain name

You can expect a significant revenue uplift on sales by customizing your checkout page, if you are doing over $30,000 a month in sales, add another 5%-10% with a fully customized checkout experience.

It’s only getting bigger — and smarter

Since Shopify Plus has launched the company’s seen incredible growth. There are now over 1,000,000 brands selling online with Shopify all over the world. Shopify continues to put back into pushing their technology further. Exciting new features are added to the platform on the regular, making it smarter for their user base and ensuring they stay at the forefront of an ever-evolving industry.

Shopify Scripts

To get the most out of your Shopify Plus store you need to take advantage of Shopify scripts. Shopify scripts let you run your code on Shopify’s servers and this lets you create a number of features that you can’t provide with a regular Shopify store. For example, you can do the following:

• Create a set % discount on products
• Offer buy 3 get one 1 free, buy 2 get the 2nd ½ off, etc
• Developed tiers of discounts, based on volume orders or frequency
• Have a total dollar amount off a product, for example $20 off

There are many creative use cases for Shopify scripts, consider inserting a popover when someone adds a product to the cart offering a free giveaway or a discount on a related product. If you want to give volume discounts, you can now update the pricing real time on the product detail page when a customer increases the quantity they want to purchase.

You can make these changes in the Shopify scripts editor, here is where you can update the Ruby scripts that can be stored permanently in your Shopify Plus store. If you need help getting started, Shopify has created some great sample scripts and be sure to check out their Github repository for more script templates.

Unlimited Staff Accounts

With Shopify Plus you can grow your business and not worry about a limitation on who can access your site. Create individual staff accounts that can login, make updates and handle your inventory updates, product pricing changes, etc and track all their changes with Shopify Plus.

Selling Products to Wholesalers

Shopify Plus has long lacked the ability to create wholesale pricing on your store, but they recently announced wholesale channel functionality for their customers. In the past our agency has steered many clients to WooCommerce if they needed to create tiered pricing for their customers, but this new feature will make many people reconsider Shopify Plus. We created a report that explains how wholesale channels work for Shopify Plus customers, if you are thinking of rolling this out for your store hit us up with any questions.

Conclusion

Shopify Plus merchants get all the benefits of a hosted platform thanks to the SaaS approach to eCommerce. This platform is the best approach for companies on the growth fast-track and sizable enterprises who need to migrate to a more scalable solution. 

Moreover, this is the most agile mainstream ecommerce platform on the market with adding new functionality, applying front-end changes and even managing back-end tasks generally being a lot more straightforward and efficient than with other platforms.In nutshell, Shopify Plus is the new home for your online store.