Top 13 Questions About Shopify Plus Answered

There are a ton of questions about Shopify Plus. What is it and how is it different than “regular” Shopify? Who is it for? Below are answers to the top questions that we get again and again about Shopify Plus.

What is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus is Shopify’s enterprise offering. It combines the ease, security, and agility of their small business platform (“regular” Shopify), a solution that has helped hundreds of thousand of merchants, with the scale and customizability that an enterprise level merchant would need. Traditionally enterprise merchants spent a ton of money on building and running an in-house enterprise ecommerce platform. With these custom homegrown solutions, enterprises traditionally don’t have much agility in their platforms. Their main concerns are scale, security, and just keeping the platform up and running, which requires huge human resource and technology costs. Shopify Plus solves all of these problems.

Is Shopify Plus any good?

In short, yes. Shopify (regular or plus) is one of the best (if not the best) ecommerce platforms out there and it is always improving. It is stable, secure, and low cost when compared to other traditional enterprise ecommerce platforms.

If you don’t want to take our word for it, just ask one of the other half million merchants that have used their platform. Shopify is the largest ecommerce platform in the world by number of merchants and is trusted by small brands and ecommerce giants alike.

How much does Shopify Plus charge per transaction?

Shopify Plus does not charge transaction fees if you are using Shopify Payments (their own payment processor). There is a fee of 0.15% transaction fee if you are using an external payment processor.

If you use Shopify Plus and Shopify Payments, you will be getting the best per transaction rate that we’ve seen on the market.

How much does Shopify Plus cost per month?

Currently the cost of Shopify Plus platform for most stores is $2,000 per month. This covers up to $8,000,000 in yearly sales. If you go above this level of revenue, the platform fee is then 0.25% of eligible monthly transactions. For more info on Shopify Plus pricing, check out our full guide titled Shopify Plus Pricing: A Complete Breakdown of Costs, Fees, and Value.

What are the differences between Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise?

On the surface, Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise have many comparable features. They are close competitors.

The main advantage that you get with Shopify Plus is that they are the market leader. Shopify Plus pioneered this space of enterprise level cloud-hosted ecommerce and are therefore more mature. There are some things we like about BigCommerce, but for the most part, they are following what Shopify Plus is doing, so Shopify Plus always seems to be ahead in terms of the feature sets.

Additionally, we think Shopify Plus has BigCommerce Enterprise beat in the following categories:

Design

Shopify has better base themes and design tools available. With Shopify Plus you can easily select a theme that is incredibly easy to build and great looking right out of the gate.

API

The backend of Shopify Plus is better and more mature with an API that allows developers to build on top of what already exists on the platform. This is a big deal for enterprise level stores that need to integrate with a slew of external systems and build custom functionality.

Developer Community

Shopify Plus has a vibrant developer community. There are always new and high-quality apps and plugins coming out in order to help you make the most out of your store.

Admin

Shopify Plus has a much more intuitive admin. We hear this across the board from people that have experience with both.

Should dropshippers use Shopify Plus?

A better question to ask is “when should dropshippers use Shopify Plus?” It doesn’t matter what you sell or how you ship it. Whether or not you should use Shopify Plus depends on your volume of sales and the complexity of your business. If you doing over $300,000 per month in revenue and have a high level of complexity in your business, then Shopify Plus is a no brainer. You will likely actually save money in making the switch.

What are some of the main benefits of using Shopify Plus?

1) Cost Savings

If you are a high volume store, you will actually save money by switching to Shopify Plus and using Shopify Payments. Not only will you save on platform costs, but you are likely to save on human resources costs as well, as you will no longer have to employ a full team of developers just to keep your store up and running.

2) Less Headaches

Scale and security are the main concerns of enterprise ecommerce stores. Whenever big promotions or sales come around like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, ecommerce managers and business owners alike are in a state of heightened stress. They are typically scared to death that their platform is going to go down during these high volume sales days.

Shopify Plus relieves this pressure. It gives peace of mind. Scale and security are taken care of so that ecommerce managers and business owners can instead focus on creating a better store experience and better products for their customers.

3) Market Leader

As mentioned above, Shopify Plus is the market leader. They are constantly improving upon their platform and rolling out new features. Whatever the latest and greatest trend in ecommerce is, you’re sure to be able to accomplish it on Shopify Plus. With other less flexible and agile platforms, that usually isn’t the case.

For more benefits of Shopify, check out our unbiased Shopify Plus review.

What are the pros and cons of using Magento vs. Shopify Plus?

With Shopify Plus, you are assured scale and security. With Magento, you are assured complete customizability. This is the trade-off.

Magento is typically self-hosted, so you are in charge of your own scalability and security. But with that, you are building a completely custom platform from the ground up, so you can build in whatever functionality that you can think up in your wildest dreams.

Shopify Plus, on the other hand, is cloud-hosted and they take care of all of your scale and security concerns. There is a very high level of customizability, but with that security comes some limitations.

In our experience, the scale and security benefits far outweigh the small limits in customizability. In fact, limitations inside of the platform can be a good thing. It helps to streamline your business and follow best practices. There is simply no need to reinvent the wheel when you’re building your new online store. It takes a lot of time and money and most often, that shiny new wheel just doesn’t work as well anyway.

How does Shopify Plus compare with a regular Shopify plan?

With Shopify Plus, you get just that…Shopify plus added benefits. You get dedicated platform resources for scalability (rather than shared resources). You get dedicated people resources to help you launch your store and to help you make the most of it. You get increased customizability (on the front end and the backend) and a slew of other enterprise features to help you grow your business.

How do I integrate an externally hosted application onto Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus’ app store had a ton of prebuilt integrations with commonly used external applications. But if the one that you need to integrate with isn’t one of them, that’s no problem. They have a great API which gives access to almost all areas of Shopify to create the custom integration that you need.

What are some of the most important features of Shopify Plus for business owners?

Naturally the most important features will depend on your unique business. But across the board, these features of Shopify plus appeal to all business owners.

1) It decreases cost. It not only saves you money spent on HR costs, but also platform and technology costs.

2) It makes store management easy. And in doing this, it frees up your valuable time to focus on your product and your customer, rather than store operations. This should drive more revenue too.

3) It allows you to scale with peace of mind. Shopify Plus handles scalability entirely. They process billions in transactions successfully, so we’d bet you can trust them with your business too.

4) It is a great marketing platform. Shopify Plus is at the front end of any marketing trend out there, with apps from trusted developers ready to go to easily integrate these new trends into your own store experience.

Does Shopify Plus have good documentation?

Simply put, yes, they do. Not only do they have the best documentation that we’ve seen, but they have a very strong developer community. If you have a question, it’s likely already to be answered in their forums. But if it’s not, the best news is that if you post your question, you will likely get a great reply quickly from someone who has faced you same question before and solved it and is willing to help. That is rare in most platforms.

Is Shopify Plus right for my business?

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to determine whether or not Shopify Plus is right for you.

Are you growing fast?

If you are experiencing hyper growth and on a path to do 300K in revenue or more per month, Shopify Plus might be right for you. You will save money on transaction fees alone, even once the Shopify Plus fee is factored in.

Are you an established high revenue brand on a homegrown ecommerce solution?

Switching to Shopify Plus will save you not only money, but a lot of headaches as well.

Are there complexities and customizations inside your business that a typical Shopify plan or other platforms can’t handle?

You might be right for Shopify Plus

Are you spending a lot of money on your current platform in licensing fees, HR costs, and/or technology expenses?

You will save money with Shopify Plus.

Has your store failed in the recent past due to scalability issues, losing you money and creating headaches for you and your team?

Shopify Plus is likely right for you.

Still not convinced that Shopify can carry a major enterprise brand?

Here are just a few well known enterprise retailers that have already made the move to Shopify Plus.

• Nestle
• Radio Shack
• Nine West