Upgrading to Shopify Plus – Complete guide

Shopify is an amazing ecommerce platform that provides aspiring entrepreneurs with every tool they need to launch a successful online store. But as your business grows, you might start experiencing limitations and find that your current Shopify plan doesn’t feel quite so flexible. That’s where Shopify Plus comes in.

The platform’s most dynamic, customizable, and scalable solution is built for high-volume businesses ready to take their sales to the next level. And while free and paid Shopify themes can be great for launching your business, a custom-built Shopify Plus experience is essential to standing out in the crowded world of ecommerce.

When is it time to upgrade to Shopify Plus?

It’s easy to know when your pants don’t fit. The button won’t button, or they fall down when you stand up. Knowing when you’ve outgrown your Shopify plan can be more complex. 

First, you have to figure out and understand what isn’t working for you anymore. If your orders are processing too slowly, or if a surge of traffic crashes your store, it’s time. If you’re spending too much on IT, maintenance, and transaction fees, it’s time. If you want to customize sites for specific regions or countries, build specific shipping rules, or customize your front-end experience, it’s time to check out Plus.

Top features you get when you upgrade to Shopify Plus

1. Script Editing

Shopify Plus allows a user to edit scripts as per the requirement. For example, you can customize your website’s checkout dynamically like if a customer makes any changes of quantity or size that will recalculate the cart total automatically. So, you can modify the scripts as you like even in customer fields, shipping methods, and payment options.

2. Replicate Store

If you want to modify some scripts but you don’t have any test instance or store then Shopify Plus would be the best choice for you – your Merchant Success Manager can provide you a replica of your live store! They will replicate your Live Shopify store along with the theme, products and all other data. Just build your script and try there. Once you get the script that you require, use it on the Live store. You can get multiple instances at free of cost.

3. Automate Process

Shopify Plus provides you the access of great automation tools which can automate the process from inventory, orders, products to customer sections to security all without coding. It reduces the complexities and provides you an easy to use visual builder. Also, Shopify Plus is highly compatible with application integration – an intelligent integration platform such as APPSeCONNECT can easily integrate Shopify Plus with other business applications to bring more coherence and focus to the business.

4. Launchpad

It also provides a Launchpad where you can monitor major commerce events like flash sales and product releases. You also can monitor schedule theme or content changes to publish and unpublish automatically.

5. SSL certificate

Shopify Plus provides Level 1 PCI DSS compliance, a site-wide SSL certificate. It redirects traffic from HTTP to encrypted HTTPS, data protection, and risk assessment for every order. Now, sites are more trustable if they have SSL certification. Customers do business with those familiar websites which have EV SSL Certificate. This is one plus point to upgrade to Shopify Plus. It gets the customer’s trust and increases the traffic of the website more.

6. Support

Shopify already provides 24×7 service; after upgrading to Shopify Plus you will get E-commerce largest advisers’ support and they will help you to achieve your short-term and long-term goals.

7. Integration Level

Shopify always allows the user to enhance the compatibility and add multiples apps to Shopify. Shopify App also allows you to extend your compatibility and integrate Shopify Plus with other 3rd party platforms like PIM, ERP, 3PL, WMS etc.

8. Capabilities

Shopify Plus provides an unlimited bandwidth with scalable SaaS hosting that equates to a fully supported and reliable solution. It allows 4 million hits/second. The store will be up even in the festival days because Shopify Plus allows 8000 orders per minute to be placed. It also provides 200TB storage capabilities to the customers.

9. Discount Feature

By using the script editing feature you can use multiple types of discounts like percentage-based-discount, buy-one-get-one-free-discounts etc.

10. Shopify Payment Complexities

In Shopify Plus, you can have the feature of payment card details saving which will reduce the payment making steps and will save the time of the customers.

What to do when upgrading to Shopify Plus

1. Customize Your Checkout

With the Scripts Editor, you can customize your checkout to easily update the feel and look. Thanks to Shopify Scripts, your checkout process can also be streamlined to include things like automated discounts and promotions, precalculated shipping costs, and free shipping thresholds. You can use one of Shopify’s already created templates organized by line items, shipping rates, and payment gateways to get started. Improving your store’s checkout experience will give your customers convenience and help with store conversions.

2. Connect your Business Tools

Turn tasks into automations with Shopify Flow, so you can get more done in less time by reducing manual tasks. Flow integrates with Slack, Email, and HTTP Requests, and is only available to Shopify Plus customers. You can start by using a pre-designed template, or with a visual builder to customize your workflow. Here are a few areas you can automate:

• Buyer experience – Create support tickets and track negative product reviews
• Customer management – Tag customers based on their purchase behavior, organize customers by spend-tiers, and track customers who order samples or refund items
• Inventory and merchandising – Get notifications of low stock products and hide products based on inventory levels
• Risk management – Cancel or restock high risk orders
• Order management – Manage international orders by having them added to a spreadsheet
• Loyalty & retention – Reward loyalty points and create an email sequence to win back customers who are at risk
• Promotions – Add a free gift to select orders and send a discount code via text

3. Schedule and Monitor Sales, Releases, and Content Changes

With Launchpad, a scheduling tool that’s only available with Shopify Plus, you can now schedule and monitor sales, releases, and content changes. It’s a free, simple way to modify your Shopify store within your admin, and also integrates with Shopify Scripts to:

• Easily select, publish, and update inventory for your sale
• Create a collection discount when your sale begins, without requiring code
• Build a theme to showcase sale products within a campaign to better drive conversions
• Write line-item scripts to automatically give free shipping for orders over $100
• Track customer refunds on orders over $100
• Real-time tracking to better understand customer behavior during events

4. Reach B2B and Wholesale Customers

Now with Shopify Plus, you can expand into B2B and wholesale markets. Or, if you’re already there with your business, you can now more easily keep track of things by setting up a responsive wholesale store. For high volume orders, you can also create custom pricing, discounts, and volume-based pricing for select groups or customers. Shopify Plus is built for scale, with automations all in one place.

5. Lean on Your Dedicated Support Team

Shopify Plus’ merchant success program gives you expert strategy and support to grow your business. Industry experts, partners, and resources are readily available to you at all times, and the Shopify support team is always there to help. If you need assistance with technical issues, integrations, or anything business related you can also reach out to your dedicated account manager for guidance.

Things to do the moment you upgrade to Shopify Plus

1. Get a Jumpstart into onboarding

You might be familiar with how the admin works and the app partners that plug into your ecosystem, it doesn’t hurt to have a good old fashioned orientation. Join a welcome webinar that covers all the Shopify Plus basics, features, and resources available to businesses when they start with the platform. It’s the best way to get your bearings on the new-to-you service and set you on the course for success. During this orientation, Merchant Success Managers will give you a run-down of the support system and guide you on how to get the help you need navigating the platform.

They’ll also give an overview of all the features you get exclusive to Plus. Then, they’ll open the floor to a Q&A, so you’ll have a chance to ask anything that’s come up as you immerse yourself in all things Plus or that you’ve been wondering about since joining. These are live sessions, offered on a bi-weekly basis that accommodates multiple time zones. If you can’t make it on the scheduled dates, you can always get a recording afterward. 

While the orientation is fully optional, we’ve noticed businesses who attend Jumpstart have a better grasp of the Shopify Plus support system and are more likely to use the Plus features that lead to a great overall experience with us.

2. Sign up for the “New from Shopify Plus” newsletter

You’ll want to be kept up to speed on the latest Shopify Plus updates as they happen. Our newsletter, called “New from Shopify Plus” drops in your inbox weekly with all you need to know about new product feature releases, beta opportunities, and Shopify Plus-related events.

3. Visit the Shopify Plus Academy

Growing a business is a marathon, not a sprint. Consumer behaviors and demands are constantly changing and, as the year 2020 has taught us, literally anything can happen. So how do you stay on top of it all?

You may have used Shopify Academy before, but with Shopify Plus Academy, you’ll access in-depth how-tos and ecommerce strategies in key business areas. This is geared towards high-volume merchants with a focus on:

• Supporting your growth on Shopify Plus with product-specific resources
• Online workshops with industry experts across a range of topics
• The merchant growth model, designed to guide your business, no matter your stage of growth

At the Academy, you’ll find nearly 100 self-guided courses on everything from marketing acquisition strategies to business operations to customizing your checkout. You can also watch tutorials, and Q&As with business owners at your own pace and on your own time.

4. Customize checkout experiences with Shopify Scripts

All the sales-boosting and conversion rate optimization you were doing via multiple apps and workarounds now has a streamlined “set it and forget it” life on Shopify Plus, thanks to our product Shopify Scripts. Here’s what it’ll let you do: 

• Customize your checkout directly—both its look and feel, as well as customizing customer fields, shipping methods, and payment options 
• Personalize the checkout experience based on shopping cart values with the Script Editor

Here’s how you can start using Shopify Scripts:

• Ask your Plus support team to help you clone your existing store to a staging instance (or testing site). With Shopify Plus, you can access multiple store instances at no extra cost.
• Install the Script Editor
• Click “Create script” inside your apps. You’ll see 15 script templates organized by underline items, shipping rates, and payment gateways.
• These 15 templates represent the most popular and profitable scripts. You can preview each script, edit the code, and apply your changes within your cloned store before copying them to your live store.

5. Save time and energy with ecommerce automation

One of the biggest upsides of Shopify Plus is access to its premier automation tools, designed to save time and energy on routine tasks so you can focus on the big dreams and strategies necessary to grow your business. Meet our suite of time-saving automation tools: 

Shopify Flow

That crush of customer-facing and back-office task work that seems to suck up every hour of every day? Shopify Flow is a simple visual builder that automates a lot of those processes. These tasks include customer service, fraud prevention, design and development requests, merchandising, communications, and marketing and advertising (e.g. halting promotions when stock gets low or tagging customers for email segmentation).

Consider Shopify Flow the nerve center of your business: Its automation is able to consider “if this happens, then do that” to anticipate routine events in your processes. Flow stores and executes triggers, conditions, and actions that you enter once (and can update), no coding necessary.

Launchpad

Whether you’re introducing a new product or planning a flash sale, Launchpad lets you create an event and put it on autopilot. It will produce and deliver reports on the event’s activity so you can compare this year’s sale to last year and analyze the strategies that worked best when you plan for next year.

For example, amplified across four stores, Launchpad saves 100% Pure engineer Chris Tran 12 hours per sale or campaign. His time can now be directed towards solving other business challenges or innovating for future solutions. In the future, he’ll save hundreds of hours as he applies Launchpad for smaller campaigns and sales, too. With Launchpad, you can pre-plan everything on your campaign to-do list and instantly roll it all back once the sale or event is over.

6. Power your store with API call increases and enterprise-level integrations

Retailers seeing rapid growth particularly those with a range of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs), multiple online stores, online-to-offline retail locations, expanding supply chains, or international markets can also seamlessly integrate the third-party platforms already in use to streamline the whole business. Some of those platforms include:

• Product information management (PIM)
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
• Inventory and order management (IMS and OMS)
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Third-party logistics (3PL)
• Warehouse management software (WMS)
• Or a global fulfillment partner

In each case, Shopify’s open API allows you to flexibly customize and connect with the platforms you need most. All brands on Shopify Plus can access exclusive APIs, and can double their API call limit (to your private and public apps) after a review process is complete. Your limit can be increased further on an as-needed basis—just reach out to your Plus support team.

7. Manage users and multiple stores all from your admin

When you upgrade from Shopify to Shopify Plus, one of the first things you’ll notice is the enhanced version of the standard Shopify admin. With it, you can simplify the management of your entire company with the new organizational management tool. This system allows you to manage users, quickly create new stores populated with data, update workflows, and get a high-level overview of key business metrics across all stores in your organization.

If you operate multiple stores, you can make changes to operations at the organizational level instead of at the individual store level. Users with permissions to make changes to the Shopify organization admin can perform actions across multiple stores in your organization that affect users, stores, and Shopify workflows. Here are the benefits of each feature: 

• Analytics overview: This gives you a centralized view of your business results so you can make sure your business is running as expected. See and compare your live performance and key business metrics across multiple time periods for all stores in your company.
• Shopify Flow management: Flow offers a centralized view of the automation flows across all of your stores. It lets you save time and resources by automating repetitive tasks and helps you enable and manage workflows from one central location, sharing them with any store in your business.
• User management: This is a centralized hub to view and manage users across your company. You can trust the right users with the right tasks and manage staff across all stores from a central location. Add, modify, and remove users and allow multiple users to perform these tasks.
• Store management: This gives you a centralized view of all of your stores. Experiment with new strategies and create environments with new stores and leveraged data (users and first-party apps) from your existing stores.

8. Explore our wholesale channel

The wholesale channel lets you expand your business by creating a separate, password-protected storefront that’s an extension of your online store. This lets you track all your wholesale customers and orders under your store’s Shopify admin—no extra systems necessary. Use existing product data and integrations and manage your B2C and B2B businesses from just one place.

You can also offer customized price lists through an intuitive self-service buying experience. This lets you offer wholesale buyers the same products that are on the menu for retail customers. You can also make it an exclusive wholesale-only product-only menu this channel’s flexible.

Customize and scale your wholesale business by building an expansion store. Just ask your Plus support team to help you set up the expansion shop.

9. Grow your business with unrivaled support

Look, you’ve come this far building a fast-growing business drawing in hundreds of thousands (or even millions) in monthly sales is overwhelming and exhausting, but also something that should make you massively proud. The Shopify Plus team is here for you in those exhausting moments, when you need guidance and support when it comes to running the systems that power your business. 

Our merchant success program gives you access to the right products, platforms, and training to help you define a clear roadmap for success. We also offer 24/7 priority support. 

Whether you’re trying to plot out a flash sale, figure out some technical mechanism on the platform, or plan for the future, Shopify Plus’ support teams work tirelessly to help you make the most of your opportunities. They can also provide you with exclusive access to new features we’re just trying out. 

You can also ask for assistance with third-party integrations, and help to find approved Shopify Plus Partners to work on design and development projects specific to your business. These businesses are carefully curated, selected only for creating some of the best integrations with Shopify.

Check out our Shopify Plus Facebook community or our Partners Directory to find peer support and potential partners.

Wrap up

Shopify Plus is the world’s most robust, scalable, and agile commerce platform for high-growth companies. It gives you:

• Lower transaction costs, and with flat rates on Shopify Plus, many brands find huge savings. When sales volumes go up, savings increase. 
• An additional reduction in credit card rates for brands that use Shopify Payments.
• The ability to easily add a VIP channel, or a store for your staff or your sales reps. There are lots of ways to set up your shop so specific customers can see a tailored product list or get preferential pricing.
• Expert help in addressing pain points and driving growth.
• The fastest web loading times out there by speeding up communication between Shopify and any other apps or software you’re using.