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Julien Mamalian
After an exciting 5 years of designing and optimizing Shopify sites for well-known French startups, I launched Bloggle.
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Shopify is the best eCommerce platform you can find. It provides a complete kit to businesses that want to open an online store, market their products to customers all over the world and accept payments securely. The beauty of Shopify is in its appeal to both beginner and experienced business owners.
The setup is easy, there is no need for any coding knowledge, and if you do get stuck or stumble upon some problem you can’t easily solve, have no fear — Shopify provides customer support around the clock!
But, what if your small business starts booming? Your home décor items become a hit, and you find yourself struggling to scale up and answer all requests efficiently with the options provided by Shopify. Should you look elsewhere and try to find another eCommerce platform? Certainly not! That’s the moment Shopify Plus comes into play. Shopify Plus offers more customizable and scalable solutions to growing and enterprise businesses. So, which option should you choose?
In this blog post, we will settle the battle of Shopify vs Shopify Plus once and for all. We will cover all the differences between Shopify and Shopify Plus, compare the pricing, features, and everything else you need to help you decide what’s the best solution for your business.
As we already mentioned, Shopify is the best eCommerce website builder used by many small and medium businesses to build online stores. Shopify also provides POS (point-of-sale) that are ideal for small business to use in their brick-and-mortar stores.
Shopify is great at supporting businesses that are searching for an all-in-one solution for their eCommerce. They provide payment processing, shipping discounts, other banking services and inventory management. Also, for business owners who are just getting started, Shopify is very affordable. Their cheapest plan starts at just $24 per month, most suitable for solo entrepreneurs.
The standout features of this plan are:
If you are just entering the world of eCommerce, this is all you need. If you already have an established business, the Shopify Plan that costs $69 per month allows you to add five additional staff accounts. But, if your team is larger, you should get the Advanced Plan for $299 per month that will give you 15 additional staff accounts and added global customization for $59 monthly per market.
However, when your business starts growing (or you already own an enterprise business coming to Shopify), you need more options. That’s where Shopify Plus comes into play.
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Shopify Plus is Shopify’s enterprise eCommerce option for high-volume and fast-growing businesses. At a first glance, the price tag is a hefty one - starting from $2500 per month, if you take a 1-year term, or $2300 monthly for a 3-year term. However, this is catered towards enterprise businesses that are racking over $1.5M annually. It should be seen as a business investment, and if this plan boosts your sales by about 5-10% only (and there are businesses that are reporting 30%+ growth with this plan!), paying $30k annually for that is nothing.
Shopify vs Shopify Plus pricing difference raises eyebrows, and if you are asking yourself is Shopify Plus worth it, believe us, you are not alone. To answer that question, we need to take a look at Shopify Plus features:
We know it is hard to differentiate and measure every single additional tool that Shopify Plus is offering over Shopify, especially when it comes to Shopify vs Shopify plus pricing. That’s why we created a list of the most impactful changes and upgrades you’ll get if you upgrade your plan to Shopify Plus. Let’s delve into it!
We will start with a difference that is obvious to most people at first glance. Standard Shopify plans don’t provide a huge number of added accounts for other staff. That makes sense, because Shopify is catered towards small businesses primarily. Even Shopify Advanced, which costs $299 monthly, allows only up to 15 staff accounts.
And if you asked yourself what is the difference between Shopify and Shopify Plus, that’s the most obvious answer — Shopify is an option for small business owners, or the ones that are just started growing, while Shopify Plus is an option for enterprise business owners, or businesses that are scaling rapidly.
So, if you need more people to have access to your eCommerce platform, Shopify Plus is definitely your go-to solution. Dedicated permission settings will allow you to create different levels of access to your store for staff members. For instance, you can set up specific accounts for customer service agents, technical administrators, product uploaders, price adjustments, and so on.
Additionally, you will see and control everything from one integrated admin center on Shopify Plus platform, which is another great benefit.
This is another difference between Shopify and Shopify Plus that fulfills an obvious need of an enterprise business. If you need to have more staff members managing your eCommerce business, it is likely that you also have more stores to manage as well. A unified dashboard that allows you to manage all your stores will boost your efficiency and cut your costs. In this dashboard, you can access everything you need to enhance the performance of each individual store you have.
There are automations tools for workflows (Shopify Flow for example), extensive analytics, bulk account inviter that allows you to get as many people as you like involved with handling the workflow.
Also, a complete dashboard is great for agencies that are managing stores of their clients, since it is much easier for them to allocate their resources and workers and monitor everything from one place.
We already mentioned that Shopify standard customer support is very impressive. You can contact them via phone, email and live chat 24/7. Also, Shopify built a community of great developers and technical experts that can assist you at any time. You just need to browse through the Shopify Experts list to find someone to help you.
All those perks would be enough for a small business, run by a few devoted individuals who need a bit of help from time to time.
However, it is not possible for enterprise business owners, who have way more tasks and requests to handle in any given timeframe. Shopify Plus excels in this department!
Each customer gets a personal account manager, completely dedicated and responsible for ensuring everything works smoothly. The tickets are solved quicker and the dedicated account manager can be your go-to source for everything.
If you need help with optimizing or launching a new website, you are covered as well. Launch engineers provided by Shopify Plus can help you create a new website, migrate it from another platform and even make custom changes to your store. Setting up integrations and even finding you partners on the platform are also a part of their job.
Merchant Success program can be viewed as an extension to the previously mentioned Shopify Plus feature. In a nutshell, this is a dedicated platform that can be used by business owners to find solution engineers, consultants and other professionals that can help them with the development and growth of their store.
The services these professionals provide range from sourcing the right products to leveraging integrations and everything in between. Also, they can provide training for your staff members to help them become better at making your business grow.
After upgrading to Shopify Plus plan, you will get access to a community specifically designed for Shopify Plus users. You will also be able to browse through the partners directory, to get help with API integrations, and automation.
If you need more time and help to utilize Shopify Plus platform to the fullest, you can use the Shopify Plus Academy to learn everything you should know.
On top of all that comes possibly the greatest benefit in this segment - Shopify Plus customers also get access to beta programs early, so they can test new features before they are available to regular Shopify users.
This is very important for both parties. Shopify Plus gets better and better with great user feedback, while Shopify Plus users get an edge over their competition.
In the Shopify vs Shopify Plus battle, wholesale option can be a decisive blow and the main reason why enterprise business owner decides to upgrade to Shopify Plus. This benefit means that your growing business can increase the annual revenue even further by selling products in bulk to other merchants.
You will get access to all the tools needed to create a unique, password-protected storefront for a small business that wants to buy products in bulk from you.
By doing this, you will be able to offer the same products to other merchants and give them a discount for bulk orders, without changing the pricing for those products in your standard store.
That saves a lot of time and possible confusion with tracking the orders — everything is set automatically and bulk orders with different pricing are tracked separately from standard orders.
This means you can send invoices and leverage the existing product data and apps on your standard store to manage B2C and B2B sales at the same time without any hassle.
The number of customization options is one of the most striking differences between Shopify and Shopify Plus. We covered the best Shopify themes to make your Shopify store stand out, but if you really want to make a unique store, Shopify Plus is the way to go. With Shopify standard plans you can use the Theme editor, but it is hard to make significant changes.
Shopify Plus gives you full control over your store design. You’ll get access to backend and a possibility to code everything in Liquid. If you are not an expert in that field, that’s ok. Remember, launch manager and Shopify experts are at your disposal. You can even ask other Shopify Plus users in the community if they can help you with specific issues you have.
There is always a chance that somebody encountered the same problem and solved it before.
Comprehensive checkout control is one of the most wanted Shopify Plus features and the reason why many business owners are deciding to get the upgrade to the Plus plan. The amount of optimization control of your checkout and shopping cart is not even comparable to what you have with standard plans.
Shopify Plus makes it easy to customize every shopping experience, giving customers different payment options and shipping rates, based on conditions such as cart value, or their location.
You’ll get access to Shopify Scripts, the tool you can use to experiment and test different customer fields, payment options, CTAs and everything else during the checkout.
Fully customizable checkout will allow you to test every single option and choose the best for your business. Some of the Shopify Plus users are reporting 30% growth after successfully applying checkout customization options!
Of course, you can get different payment processor and payment getaway options with regular Shopify plans, but not to this extent, and you will often need to integrate third-party apps to explore those options, which is certainly a worse solution than having all-in-one options from the Shopify Plus plan.
If you want to automate more processes on Shopify and make them more efficient, you will need access to more tools and APIs available only on Shopify Plus plan. You have access to some tools and APIs in the Shopify standard plans of course, but Shopify Plus gives way more freedom.
This solution comes with resources such as GiftCard, Multipass and User. GiftCard gives customers alternate multi-currency payment methods. Multipass is there to redirect website visitors to your Shopify store without entering separate login credentials, and we all know that those additional fields you must fill are the reason for drop-offs, especially if you need to do the same thing twice.
User allows you to edit, adjust and retrieve information about staff accounts, which is of great help when you have a big team under you.
When it comes to API solutions, Shopify Plus users can use them to create workflows with custom apps, or even build their own apps from scratch!
Small businesses on standard Shopify plans can utilize some tools and apps to boost their business growth, but Shopify Plus offers way more support if you want to connect full platform tools to your store.
You can link your website to third-party logistics solutions (3PL), product information management tools (PIM), warehouse management software tools (WMS), customer relationship management tools (CRM), enterprise resource planning platforms (ERP), or one of the top 17 Shopify apps for eCommerce success we covered previously.
Another major difference between Shopify and Shopify Plus is the access to more analytics options.
Standard Shopify gives access to a dashboard that can track top products, referrals, sales and basic landing page performance.
Naturally, Shopify Plus gives way more insight. If you can take advantage of that, you will grow your business much faster.
For example, using the option of connections with leading analytics solutions will let you track the latest trends in your industry. If you can recognize that, and jump onto the bandwagon early, you could dramatically increase your sales.
What’s more, the advanced report builder makes it easy to share reports with other staff members. You can track everything from sales from gift cards to channels our customers use to approach your store.
Shopify Plus is definitely worth it! But, if you still have any doubts, our Shopify vs Shopify Plus comparison should give you a clear answer.
You certainly have much more knowledge about the added benefits of Shopify Plus now, but when it comes to Shopify vs Shopify Plus pricing, you may have more doubts. After all, the difference in pricing between these plans is huge, and having doubts is understandable.
To help you choose, we will state the main benefits of Shopify Plus one more time. You most likely need to upgrade to Shopify Plus if you:
If we talk about the money, $2000+ monthly is a huge amount. However, with getting all these options and access to additional tools, scaling your business might become much easier and faster.
It is often said that $1.5M yearly revenue is the moment when you need to upgrade your plan. If Shopify Plus gets you 10% more revenue next year, it means that for $30k you got an additional $150k. That’s a deal you should take every day!
To wrap this all up, Shopify Plus definitely offers many unique and exclusive benefits you won’t find anywhere else. However, since the gap in pricing between the standard and plus plan is massive, you should be really careful before making a decision.
If you own a small business, and you don’t have a huge number of sales across a variety of platforms or stores, it is unlikely that you need Shopify Plus yet.
However, if your business is scaling fast, or you are already an enterprise business owner, then the extra options, support, tools and integrations available in Shopify Plus plan is worth that extra expense.
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After an exciting 5 years of designing and optimizing Shopify sites for well-known French startups, I launched Bloggle. Our mission? To assist merchants worldwide in crafting compelling articles that rank high in SEO and truly engage their audience. In just 3 years, over 2,000 clients have trusted us, publishing more than 55,000 articles through Bloggle. Thanks to them, I’ve learned the keys to success and the pitfalls to avoid
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