14 Jul
Shopify Plus is the ecommerce platform for growing online stores and brands. It is a hosted platform customized, staffed, and priced for big brands that are good for enterprise applications. Whereas Shopify Plus is a smaller and less complicated store.
Shopify Plus is the most cost-effective platform for big companies and the enhanced user experience. It gives you a lot more flexibility, more support options, and more access to your store’s underlying code.
What is Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus is the only cost-effective enterprise platform that’s built for change. Shopify and Shopify Plus have the same core offering when it comes to the dashboard and basic eCommerce functionality. The main difference is that Shopify Plus gives you a lot more flexibility, more support options, and more access to your store’s underlying code.
Moreover, Shopify Plus provides you with your own dedicated launch manager. It’s their job to make sure your website can be fully integrated into Shopify. They’ll help you write lines of code, and get you up and running on a Shopify custom theme.
Features of Shopify plus
If you are a merchant selling in high volume, you can focus on expanding your business with Shopify’s enterprise-level plan. Shopify Plus includes the following great features:
- access to the Shopify organization admin, which lets you manage all the stores in your organization from a single location
- advanced Shopify apps that are designed for high-growth merchants
- access to the checkout.liquid file, providing a customizable checkout that gives you more control over the branding of your store
- additional API calls that let you integrate with custom apps
- the Launch Team, who helps you get your store online faster by assisting with migration tools and strategy, custom integrations and solutions to meet your requirements
- the Merchant Success Program to help you get the most value out of Shopify Plus
- unlimited staff to help you grow your personnel without the risk of additional costs.
- nine expansion stores for internationalization, separate physical locations, and other related purposes
- access to exclusive beta programs to preview and influence the product roadmap
- access to technology, agency, and solution partners with our Shopify Plus Partner Program
- access to the Shopify Plus Academy for self-guided training on key topics related to growing your business
- membership to the Shopify Plus Community on Facebook to share strategies and experiences with other high-volume merchants
- the ability to add up to 100 themes on your Shopify account to try out any new themes, keep seasonal versions of your published theme, or test changes to a copy of your published theme
- additional permission settings for more control over the actions your staff can take in your Shopify admin, including separate report export permissions and permissions to specific apps
- a wholesale channel that lets you create a separate, password-protected wholesale store
- Shopify POS Pro for every location in your organization at no additional charge
Debunked design restrictions
1. With Shopify Plus, you have to use a pre-existing template, so all Shopify stores look the same
Perhaps the biggest misconception about Shopify Plus is that, as a merchant, you’re restricted to using pre-existing templates. It’s a myth. Every Shopify Plus store we build is fully bespoke (i.e not from an off-the-shelf template). As a merchant, the choice is yours:
Install a (free or paid) template from the Shopify theme store independently.
Use a template and have a Shopify agency extend it (but keep in mind, they aren’t built to gain more features than they contain, so customizations will be limited).
Have your own, fully-bespoke theme designed, as we do for all of our clients. It might be a difficult choice for some brands but it’s a choice you do have. Consider your goals: if conversion and brand image are top-of-list, then we say a custom theme is what you need.
2. Shopify Plus will limit what you can do with custom sections
Not true. Having a custom store design doesn’t only mean you can use and structure sections more flexibly throughout your site. It also means you have the freedom to design any individual section you do want, right from scratch. This means they can be entirely tailored to you, without restrictions.
Take an image carousel, for instance. When we see these offered in pre-existing templates, they can take a rigid format. Maybe they have a set height, a limited number of slides, and fixed text alignment.
But if you were to have one designed custom, you’d have full freedom with this; you could have it completely adjustable for desktop and mobile, able to house video and animations, and have it support complex text formatting too.
Ultimately, go custom and you’ll define the flexibility of whatever sections you use within your store. This is the very beauty of having a bespoke design. There are no restrictions.
3. Shopify Plus is only good for simple e‑commerce, not content‑heavy brands needing a flexible CMS
A common complaint of Shopify Plus is that the use of dynamic sections (which is what allows you to alter your pages’ content layout) is limited to the homepage. Because of this, people sometimes think the platform isn’t geared towards content-driven brands needing to customize beyond their homepage.
There are, however, third-party apps available to help brands showcase content and build pages throughout their stores. Shogun’s Landing Page Builder is a popular choice for those wanting to build specific, content-heavy pages (think ‘About us’ or ‘Our history’ -type pages).
We’ve also developed our own, Custom Content Tool, to allow clients to do similar. Though this isn’t an app that you install and pay a monthly fee for. Instead, it’s a way to extend Shopify’s native CMS functionality whilst preserving the speed of your theme editor. By comparison, our solution is for a one-off cost, supports multi-language and is built using Shopify’s UI components. The latter means it feels that bit more familiar to use our clients see it as a natural extension to Shopify admin.
4. With Shopify Plus, you can’t change the design of your store’s checkout
Well, actually, you can. Merchants on Shopify Plus have access to something called the ‘checkout.liquid’ file which specifically allows further checkout customization than what’s enabled in the theme editor (what you’d use if you weren’t on Plus).
Editing this file allows you to completely change the look and feel of your checkout to ensure a coherent brand experience that’s in keeping with the rest of your store. For instance, on Shopify Plus, you’ll be able to adjust a number of UI elements much more freely (colors, fonts, logos, images) and also edit/reorder the checkout fields, should you need to.
In terms of the UX, Shopify’s checkout is somewhat fixed compared to competing platforms, but we must stress, this is for good reason. Their default checkout is carefully researched, thoroughly tested, and fully optimized for conversion. Plus, there are rarely any issues with Shopify Plus’ checkouts (which can’t be said for many others!).
5. You’ll have to use all these apps and they won’t look good
If you’re looking to extend the functionality of your Shopify store, chances are, there’ll be an app for it. But will this be your only option? Rarely. And if it is, will you be restricted to the app’s default look? Hardly ever.
Here’s how you can extend your store’s functionality without harming your branding:
1. Use bespoke theme development
Certain functionalities can be achieved without using any third-party system, but instead, through bespoke theme development i.e having a Shopify developer use HTML, Javascript, and Liquid. With this option, you have complete control and your functionality can be designed entirely to your specification.
2. Use a third-party app and customize it
Shopify has an incredible ecosystem of apps for you to leverage too. And when you do choose to use these, it’s likely you’ll be able to customize the UI so they fit seamlessly into your store’s aesthetic. Here, a Shopify developer would customize the app using HTML, CSS or Javascript.
3. Understand what’s globally accepted
We said it will be rare that you won’t be able to customize an app to match your branding, but, of course, there’ll be exceptions. Trustpilot is a good example. OK, you can’t make it look like ‘yours’ but brands want that little trust signal to be distinct and recognizable. It’s critical, in fact.
4. Use a ‘private app’
Lastly, certain features are best built as ‘private apps’ because a pre-existing integration or plugin simply doesn’t exist for the merchant’s exact needs. Private apps are a side-door into Shopify, allowing you to send and retrieve information from any database via an API.
Everything the customer sees and interacts with is built into the theme (as with option 1) so we have complete control over look and feel. In the background, the private app is retrieving, storing or sending data. One example of this is the prescription upload form we built for Revant Optics. A customer is able to upload their prescription information to a HIPAA-compliant server so that the customer service team can fulfill their order. We used a private app to build a form with a file upload field that submits an image of a customer’s prescription to this server outside of Shopify.
Wrap up
Shopify is the most popular ecommerce platform in the world. It’s a user-friendly solution that makes it easy to launch an online store quickly. However, it has some limitations when it comes to scaling.
Moreover, it is created for enterprises that want more from their ecommerce platform and enables them to take their store to the next level. It’s incredibly flexible, but still user-friendly, it enables great speed to market for new projects, it has dedicated Apps, flexible API calls and much more.