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What is Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus is like a supercharged version of regular Shopify plans. Firstly launched in 2014, Shopify Plus was built to cater to the special needs of bigger businesses and e-commerce stores.
With Shopify Plus, businesses will be equipped with more powerful tools and features to handle a larger audience and orders. This supercharged version also offers a higher level of customization, suitable for big e-commerce stores that register a huge number of traffic and orders or international businesses and enterprises with multiple stores in different markets.
Who should use Shopify Plus?
The regular Shopify is best for small to medium-sized businesses, while for larger businesses or international enterprises, Shopify Plus should be the more suitable option.
Shopify Plus is recommended for:
- Businesses that have crossed a sales volume of more than 100,000 or an annual GMV of over $5M
- Businesses with multiple online stores or stores across different countries
- Businesses that intend to expand to new markets and grow into larger scale
What are the benefits of Shopify Plus compared to regular Shopify plans?
Made for businesses of larger scale, Shopify Plus is packed with multiple features that are not available in other regular Shopify plans. These unique features are developed with the aim of supporting your business’s scalability, fostering automation workflow, and enhancing customization.
1. Scalability
Scalability can be understood as the ability to grow and expand operations with efficiency, optimized costs, and minimum complexity. It allows your operations to run smoothly even after the expansion. Whether your business is growing in size or expanding out to new markets, you must make sure that the current system is ready for scaling.
Here’s what Shopify Plus can do for you in terms of scalability:
- Your stores can handle a growing number of orders or traffic.
- You and your team are well-equipped to handle an increasing workload without increasing costs and resources proportionately.
- Your stores are ready for future expansion or to adapt to new changes or updates.
In order to do all of these, it requires a reliable infrastructure. Here’s what Shopify’s engineering team has successfully done to ensure a smooth-running system that can support your business even in the busiest time.
- Shopify’s system is tested to be able to handle 70% more customer orders compared to 2021’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday seasons.
- It is also tested to process 52K RPM, meaning 52K requests per minute and 39K CPM (Checkout per minute)
- In addition to that, in Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2021, Shopify was able to handle 23K CPM with no impact reported by buyers or merchants.
2. Globalization
In addition to facilitating your business scalability in technical and engineering terms, Shopify Plus also provides the necessary tools and features that help optimize your store for localization and expand your business globally.
Let’s just dive into the specific Shopify Plus features that empower you to do such things.
Open up to 9 expansion stores on every license
With Shopify Plus, you can expand your business with up to 9 expansion stores, on just one license, which can save you a great amount of money. In addition to that, you can also manage all the stores from Organization Setting:
- Bills where you can view and review all current bills and past bills for all the stores across your organization as well as update your billing information.
- Stores where you can create new stores and review all your stores
- Users where you can add new members, assign roles, or remove staff. It should be noted that Shopify Plus allows you to add unlimited staff accounts, which is great for organizations with large groups of staff.
- Analytics where you gain an overview of important metrics like total orders and total sales of all your stores.
Apply the same template themes for all stores across countries
Most of the time, businesses would like to duplicate the stores with the same template theme across all their stores. This practice is also recommended as using the same templates and themes allows you to maintain a consistent brand identity globally.
With Shopify Plus, the whole process of applying the same setup can be done effortlessly and conveniently without the need for any code changes.
Create market-specific product catalogs and content
To address the widely different needs in different markets, it is important to develop a specific catalog and content for each market.
With Shopify Plus, you are provided with complete market-level control and allowed to develop region-specific catalogs accordingly. At the same time, you can still maintain an overview of the current operations across all stores.
For instance, you can display specific products or content relevant to customers in the United States while showing different offerings to customers in Japan.
Provide localized experience by market
Besides making changes to the catalogs and content, in order to adapt to a new market, you will also need to adjust the buying journey to fit the customer preferences there. Here’s how Shopify Plus can help leverage your store’s localized customer experience:
- Select different payment methods for each store
- Opt for the top last mile partners by country and regional aggregators
Manage operations and experience for each market
Apart from the top-level, shared operation, Shopify Plus also allows you to adjust the experience on the market level.
- Customise inventory feed for individual markets: Smartly allocate stocks as well as provide up-to-date inventory status for customers on different markets.
- Provide store-level permissions and controls, for independent operations: Make sure that each store can operate independently with a higher level of security and autonomy.
- Manage sales and discounts independently: Execute your sales or discount strategy on the market level and manage the results accordingly.
3. Automation
Managing multiple stores and large-scale business is a daunting task. But with the help of automation features, you will be able to simplify the process, reduce manual work, and save time for more productive and important tasks.
Understanding these challenges, Shopify Plus introduces various automation solutions for e-commerce businesses that will help you run your business process in an efficient and effortless way.
Shopify Flow
Shopify Flow is an app developed exclusively for Shopify Plus users. What this app offer is the ability to build an automatically-run working flow that allows you to automate your task and ideas in your store across your apps with only a few clicks.
With Shopify Flow’s intuitive application, you can create automation flow only without needing to code. For example, you can automate tasks like reordering, restocking, or managing customer claims – everything can be done more quickly and conveniently with Shopify Flow.
Even when you don’t know how to build your own flow, or how to apply automation to your workflow, you can look up hundreds of examples and templates available for common use cases.
Launchpad
Launchpad is a simple, easy-to-use application that makes it easy for you to schedule specific promotions, discounts, or product releases in advance.
For example, in order to prepare for the Black Friday sales, you can set up your store for the event long before the launch date. With this feature, you can designate a specific start date, select a custom theme, choose the products, specify the discount quantity, and select the specific discount option for the event.
Once the set-up is complete, your sales campaigns, product releases, or content updates will be launched automatically at the set release date.
4. Customization
Along with the growth of your business, there will appear more specific needs for unique custom solutions. While regular Shopify plans only have a few limited customization options, Shopify Plus can present you with multiple opportunities to customize your store to meet your specific needs.
Shopify Functions
Shopify Functions is a powerful tool built specifically for merchants with a need to customize their stores. This feature allows developers to create powerful customizations, execute swiftly, and scale large sales events.
Not only open for developers, but Shopify Functions is also accessible for regular merchants without coding knowledge via the app interface. The main functions of this app are:
- Customize discounts
- Customize shipping
- Customize payment methods
Developers can customize Shopify stores by writing codes in any language that compiles to WebAssembly and building a user interface with AppBridge or React.
Merchants and store managers without coding expertise can also do the same via Shopify Functions app. This app provides an intuitive, in-context interface that allows merchants to configure their own Functions and address specific use cases easily.
Checkout Extensibility
Checkout pages are normally the weakest link in your brand identity profile. In most cases, checkout pages are just whatever your selected platform designs them to be.
But with Shopify Plus, you can customize all UI elements and add useful features to your checkout pages, for example, your loyal programs, recommended products, and more.
One-page Checkout
With regular Shopify plans, all stores will follow a similar three-page checkout process. But as we all know, the longer the checkout process, the higher the abandon cart rate.
In the Shopify Plus version, you can cut down the checkout journey to one single page.
Other Exclusive Applications
In addition to the previous benefits and features, Shopify Plus also provides a handful of exclusive apps that help store function in a more advanced and smarter way.
- B2B: B2B is a useful feature that is exclusively available for Shopify Plus users only. Made for B2B, this feature offers all the settings that you need to work with B2B orders.
- ShopifyQL NoteBooks: This app allows you to explore your store’s data and visualize them. By digging into your data, you will earn important insights into the performance of your stores and optimize them for better future results.
- Bulk Account Inviter: With this app, you can send invitations to register accounts on your website to all customers in your data. It is one way to build loyal customers and increase the retention rate of your stores.
- Avalara AvaTax: Avalara AvaTax offers a quick solution to tax calculation and tax filing. It gives you an easy way out of the tiring and confusing world of taxes.
- Shopify Plus Academy: A free learning resource for Shopify users on how to operate and grow online businesses.
Conclusion
In general, Shopify Plus offers comprehensive product solutions for businesses of larger scales. With all the functions and features it provides, you can easily adapt to larger numbers of orders and customers, expand your business to other countries, automate tasks and workflows, as well as customize your store extensively. If you are looking for a fast and reliable platform to facilitate your future expansion and growth, Shopify is the best option for you.
