Our developers at fjorge specialize in a multitude of eCommerce platforms, with one of our favorites being Shopify. Shopify is one of the fastest-growing eCommerce platforms on the market, catering to both small and large eCommerce businesses. How can one platform cater to simple mom and pop shops, as well as rapidly growing enterprise businesses? Enter Shopify Plus.

What is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus offers everything that Shopify offers but is more targeted to enterprise-level businesses. Starting at $2,000/mo, Plus can handle thousands of transactions per minute and has no limit to sales volume, bandwidth, and storage. It is often compared to other enterprise eCommerce platforms like Magento or BigCommerce.

Benefits of Shopify Plus:

Themes

Plus is top-notch when it comes to customization. There are a variety of themes to choose from, and users are able to manipulate them or work with developers on more advanced customization, making the possibilities endless. Plus’s theme kits give users the power to easily choose what they want, and reduce development costs.

Security

All stores hosted on Shopify/Shopify Plus are PCI compliant, which means that customers’ payment information is safe and secure. Shopify also provides SSL certificates which encrypt store information and publish it securely. It provides an extra layer of security and builds customer trust.

Payment Gateway

When it comes to conversion,  Plus is the only eCommerce platform to offer a payment gateway, Shop Pay, which can provide metrics on conversion rate, as well as accelerate check-out payments by offering one-click purchases. This sets Plus apart from competitors like Magento, and BigCommerce because you do not have to use a third party to perform these functions.

Scalability

In terms of scaling, Plus is fully equipped to handle 1 million pageviews and 10,000 checkouts per minute. It also has an uptime of 99.99% which means you don’t have to worry about your store crashing during large online sales events. Plus promises unlimited scalability to meet the needs of fast-growing brands.

More out of the box integrations than any other platform

From a customer acquisition standpoint, Shopify Plus is an omnichannel solution, making it easy to sell on any screen and/or a third-party app. Plus has the ability to integrate with 100+ social media channels and 80+ online marketplaces, making it easy to reach more customers and expand your brand

Another benefit of Plus is its ability to help with retention by automating messages and emails through Shopify Flow. Flow, only available to Shopify users, can build workflows to automate tasks, campaigns, and processes within users’ stores and across apps. This automation gives merchants the power to build custom solutions to fit business needs.

Drawbacks of Shopify Plus:

Like every platform, Shopify Plus does have its limitations. Some drawbacks are:

Saas customization limitations

Shopify is a SaaS (software as a service), meaning that all code needs to run on their servers. Once you make the decision to use Shopify, you are pretty locked in. Your site has to be hosted through them and you might not be able to use specific payment gateways.

Content limitations

From a marketing perspective, there are more user-friendly CMS platforms out there that allow for more in-depth customization, such as WordPress. Since Shopify Plus is an eCommerce platform, there are not as many features to add and publish content. A lot of Shopify stores exist on a subdomain or use subdomains for their blogs for that reason.

Costs

Costs start at $2000 per month, or if your store makes more than $800,000 per month, the fee turns into a revenue-based model where you’ll pay 0.25% of your monthly revenue. It is also important to take into account that integrated apps are an additional monthly recurring cost that can add up in the long run.

Conclusion:

In short, Shopify Plus provides users with more options for customization and automation, as well as faster speeds and better omnichannel services, compared to regular Shopify. In terms of its competitors such as Magento or BigCommerce, Shopify Plus provides a more sophisticated, and user-friendly experience. Overall, if your business is rapidly expanding and you wish to scale into the enterprise level, Shopify Plus might be worth the investment.