Shopify Plus Overview: Features, Comparisons and Tips in 2023

What is Shopify Plus?

Introduced in 2014, Shopify Plus is one of the five Shopify main pricing plans (among Starter Plan, Basic Plan, Shopify Plan, and Advanced Plan).

Since then, Shopify Plus has been the most feature-rich plan, providing a fully hosted enterprise eCommerce platform specifically designed for high-growth merchants and brands.

If your ecommerce store generates more than 60 thousand dollars in monthly revenue, it is recommended to upgrade to Shopify Plus.

Why do you need Shopify Plus for Enterprise ecommerce?

Enterprise-level business ecommerce shares most of the use cases with small businesses like:

• Manage customers’ information
• Monitor sales and stock
• Managing product information
• Managing payments and deliveries

However, enterprise level businesses often have to deal with a massive number of SKUs (stock keeping units), multiple suppliers, multiple stores, spikes of traffic, selling internationally with or without offline shops, etc.

At the enterprise scale, it is troublesome when a certain department fails to do the tasks, which creates bottlenecks for the whole system. The problems could come from human errors, hardware/software errors, sometimes infrastructure failures, and malicious attacks from hackers.

An Enterprise e-commerce platform like Shopify Plus is the solution for that, depending on your business models, budget, and long-term strategies.

How much does Shopify Plus Plan cost?

Shopify Plus subscription fees

Shopify Plus costs a minimum of $2,000 per month.

After that, the fee becomes revenue-based once you make $800,000 or more per month, and you’ll pay 0.25% of nue. For example, for 1 million dollars monthly revenue, you will need to spend 2500$ for Shopify Plus.

On the other hand, the Shopify Plus fee is capped at $40,000 per month for 16 million dollars of monthly sales.

Shopify Plus transaction fees

Shopify Plus transaction fees/payment processing fees (with Shopify Payments) are at 1.6% + 0.35$, which is the cheapest among other Shopify plans.

If you use a third-party payment gateway, the transaction fee will be 0.15% (plus payment processing fees from your payment provider).

Shopify Plus Features

Features similar to other Shopify plans

• Unlimited products
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Brand assets
• Fraud analysis
• Manual order creation
• Discount codes
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Analytics
• Finance reports
• Customer support

Additional Shopify Plus Features

• Carrier-calculated shipping: When your customers place an order in your shop, carrier-calculated shipping allows you to offer them the most up-to-date shipping charges and options.
• Reports: To track your business performance, the Shopify Plus Plan offers the most professional reports. In addition to the analytics page, the Shopify Plus Plan includes finance reports, product analytics, Live View, acquisition reports, inventory reports, behavior reports, marketing reports, order reports, sales reports, retail sales reports, profit reports, and customer reports. A custom report can also be created with the Shopify Plus Plan.
• International commerce: Your international growth is supported by the Shopify Plus Plan through Shopify Markets, a cross-border management tool that lets you configure specific settings for each global market. By adjusting the price percentages and by setting prices by country or region, you can calculate and collect duties and import taxes for your customers. In addition, you can control the prices in different markets using the Shopify Plus Plan.
• Shopify organization admin: Manage all your Shopify stores from one place with the Shopify Organization admin. Shopify Plus merchants can access the management tools in the Shopify Organization admin, such as Overview, Users, Stores, and Shopify Flow.
• Specialized apps and channels: Shopify Plus merchants can use advanced apps specifically designed for high-growth businesses. These apps and channels are only available to Shopify Plus merchants Wholesale channel, Launchpad, Script Editor, Bulk Account Inviter, and Transporter app.
• Customizable checkout page: The checkout.liquid file provides a customizable checkout that gives you more control over the branding of your store.
• API resources: Shopify Plus offers additional API calls for integrating custom applications. The following API resources can be used by Shopify Plus merchants only:
• REST
  • GiftCard
  • Multipass
  • User
• GraphQL
  • publishablePublish
  • publishableUnpublish
• Launch team support: You can rely on the Launch Team for migration tools, strategy, and custom integrations to get your store online as quickly as possible.
• Merchant Success Program: Utilizing Shopify Plus to its fullest potential with the Merchant Success Program.
• Unlimited staff: The Shopify Plus plan provides you with unlimited staff accounts, allowing you to grow your team without incurring additional expenses.
• Permissions: Additional permission settings are available in Shopify Plus, including separate permissions for exporting reports and permissions for specific apps.
• Expansion stores: Nine expansion stores are supported by Shopify plus for internationalization and separate physical locations, among other functions.
• Shopify Plus Partner Program: As part of the Shopify Plus Partner Program, you will have access to a curated list of service partners who have been hand-picked for their technical expertise to provide solutions that will support your high-growth business.
• Themes: Shopify Plus allows you to add up to 100 themes to your Shopify account. You can test new themes, keep seasonal versions of your published themes, or test changes to a copy of your published themes.
• Shopify POS Pro: With Shopify Plus, you get Shopify POS Pro at no additional cost for up to 20 locations in your organization.
• Integrations: There are some integrations that are only available to Shopify Plus merchants, such as tax services with Avalara AvaTax.
• Shopify Plus Academy: As part of Shopify Plus, you’ll have access to a self-guided training course on key topics related to growing your business.

Shopify Plus Plan comparison

Shopify Plus vs. On-premise ecommerce

On-premise ecommerce

On-premise e-commerce means that the ecommerce platform is located within the company that provides the goods or services.

In other words, e-commerce businesses build their own online store from scratch, manage their own server, IT human resources, and develop their own features to serve the business needs.

While having unlimited ability to customize their website and sometimes better performance, on-premise ecommerce solutions often have to deal with the following problem:

• High costs: On-premise ecommerce usually require large upfront purchase with the following maintenance costs to ensure support and functionality upgrades.
• Lack of scalability: Using an on-premise platform means that all of the data is stored on a server, indicated the possibility of insufficient storage as the company grew or traffic requirements increased.
• Maintenance: In the case of an on-premise system, you are responsible for maintaining the hardware and software on the server, data backups, storage, and disaster recovery capabilities. For smaller companies with limited budgets and technical resources, this can pose a problem.
• Slow deployment: in most cases, on-premise features take longer to develop and could take months for an in-house IT department. Moreover, sometimes changing personnel can cause the company to lose productivity and expertise in the legacy system.

Shopify Plus

Fundamentally, Shopify Plus is a cloud-based ecommerce platform offering ready-made e-commerce solutions, letting you select the products that represent your brand best from an array of pre-made features and apps. At the same time, the host takes care of the rest.

Maintenance, storage expansion, security, updates, or anything else can be taken care of. The only requirement is prompt payment.

Despite being less customizable than an on-premise system, Shopify Plus aced with the following aspects:

• Accessibility: With a web browser, you can access your applications anywhere at any time.
• Affordable: Shopify Plus is cost-effective since there are no upfront costs; you pay monthly, making it an operating expense. Maintenance and support services are also included in the monthly fee.
• Predictable costs: Monthly payments that cover software licenses, upgrades, support, and daily backups are predictable.
• Worry-free IT: With Shopify Plus, everything is taken care of, from maintenance to compatibility and upgrades, by the cloud service provider.
• High levels of security: Most businesses cannot afford the security measures employed in data centers, so your data may be safer in the Shopify cloud than on a server in your office.
• Quick deployment: Compared to on-premise applications that require server installation, Shopify Plus apps and customization can be deployed over the Internet within hours or days.
• Scalability: With Shopify Plus, you only pay for what you use. For example, traffic spikes in sales days might require your infrastructure to expand vastly just to handle a few occasions in a year.
• Lower energy costs: Shopify Plus reduces energy costs by eliminating the need to power on-premise ecommerce platforms and maintain their environment.

Shopify Plus vs. Shopify Advanced

Regarding fees, the Shopify Plus subscription is almost six times higher than the Shopify Advanced one.

However, when talking about enterprise level, Shopify Plus is definitely a bargain and could be a lot cheaper than all of the other Shopify Plans.

For 200,000$ monthly revenue, Shopify Plus’s simple cost estimation will be at 6,300$. Meanwhile, Shopify Advanced will charge you 5,100$.

On the other hand, there is a huge difference in credit card fees if you use a third-party gateway provider: 0.15% credit card processing fee for Shopify Plus versus 0.5% for Shopify Advanced Plan. This is ideal for international ecommerce where you cannot always integrate Shopify Payments (which is only available in 13 countries).

Who should use Shopify Plus Plan?

You are an enterprise ecommerce business

Assuming you already have an ecommerce platform and have reached some of the thresholds with scalability, performance, or company workflow. Shopify Plus is the best ecommerce platform for you!

However, staying with your old ecommerce platform in the short term could feel less risky, and migration is scary for businesses at all scales. Knowing that Shopify Plus provides you with a Transporter app to migrate your Products, Customers, and Orders safely.

Whenever you have some limitations we have discussed, please do remember that Shopify Plus has the customization abilities and flexibility to solve your problems.

You have 60,000$ monthly revenue with your Shopify Advanced

As demonstrated above, at 60,000$ monthly revenue, Shopify Plus is the better plan for your ecommerce businesses, both budget-wise and feature-wise.

You serve wholesale customers

Shopify Plus includes wholesale channels, integrations, and a global store. Until you determine what your ecommerce goals are, stick with a basic plan like Shopify Advanced, which offers excellent ecommerce functionality for an affordable price.

To use Shopify Plus effectively, the Shopify team can also support you with strategies for building new features, headless commerce, customizing storefronts, personalizing the user journey, etc.