If you’re trying to choose between Shopify and Shopify Plus for your ecommerce business, there’s a lot to consider. The core Shopify plans offer different features and functionality to help small- and medium-sized businesses succeed. But if you’re an enterprise-level business with millions of dollars in sales, you may need more customization options to see your business reach its full potential that’s where Shopify Plus excels. In this article, we are going to talk about 5 Key differences between Shopify and Shopify Plus. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.
Understanding Shopify and Shopify Plus
Before we can dive into the comparison of Shopify and Shopify Plus, it’s important to understand what the two platforms are.
Shopify is an ecommerce platform for launching, growing, and managing a business. It has several tiered plans with different features and capabilities. Shopify Plus is the top-tier plan, which includes all the features of the previous plans and some desirable extras.
Now, here are the 5 key differences between Shopify and Shopify Plus.
1. Help and Support Options
Shopify is one of the top ecommerce platforms for its customer service. No matter the plan, you can access 24/7 support through phone, email, and live chat. If things are too complicated for these avenues, you can hire a Shopify Expert to get personalized help and support.
Shopify Plus offers this same support, but it takes it a step further with personalized and dedicated support just for your store – the Launch Engineer. This helps with the entire setup and migration process and virtually any other type of support you need.
2. Ecommerce Features
Both Shopify and Shopify Plus offer an array of features to help with your ecommerce store, including multi-channel integration to sell your products directly on Amazon, eBay, and social media, and abandoned cart recovery, which sends automated emails as a reminder to customers to finish the checkout process.
Shopify also has its own payment processor, Shopify Payments, which automatically adjusts currency based on the customer’s location for multi-currency selling.
Shopify Plus has some special features of its own, however, such as Shopify Flow, a feature that helps you track your customer’s purchases and alter your page to match the products they may be interested in. It also includes Launchpad, an automation tool that helps you manage event tasks, such as flash sales and promotions.
3. Wholesale Channel
Many businesses are adding wholesale or B2B channels, and both Shopify and Shopify Plus support wholesale sales.
The Shopify platform offers wholesale options like discount codes or invoicing with a wholesale app, but that may not be enough to support an enterprise-level business. Shopify Plus expands on these offerings with a separate, password-protected storefront that’s an extension of your online store.
With your wholesale channel, you can offer the same products at wholesale prices, exclusive wholesale-only products, or a combination of the two in your dedicated store. The channel also helps you track your wholesale customers and orders under the same centralized dashboard.
You can also customize prices a few ways:
# Percentage-based discounts across collections or the entire store
# Fixed prices for products and variants in price lists
# different prices for different wholesale customers
# Volume-based pricing for products and variants
4. Customization
Shopify has a high degree of customization with 73 themes to create and personalize your ecommerce store. This includes 10 free themes.
You can customize themes using the editor. If you want more granular control and you have an understanding of Liquid, Shopify’s theme coding language, you can make custom edits. Shopify themes are available in multiple languages as well, so you can set up stores to target audiences in specific countries.
But remember, every store on Shopify has these same themes and same customization options, so it’s hard to stand out. Shopify Plus offers customized themes for your store only.
The Launch Manager helps you write code lines to launch your store with a Shopify custom theme. This not only saves time, but it saves money in having to hire a developer. Shopify Plus also allows customization of the checkout page, which is exclusive to this plan, to trigger discounts and reward VIP customers.
5. Analytics
All Shopify plans come with an overview dashboard that offers business insights and analytics. Regardless of your tier, you can see information like your top-performing products, sales, landing pages, referrers, traffic sources, returning customer rate, and more.
The higher the plan you choose, the more detailed your insights will be. Shopify Plus takes analytics to a new level with more in-depth analytics from partners like Glew or Looker. You can produce professional reports with this tool and access real-time information about your store’s performance.
Understanding Shopify Plus Pricing
Shopify offers flat-rate pricing plans with different features and options to suit your business’s size and needs. These plans have the same price regardless of your sales volume, and you can upgrade when you feel the time is right. Each plan offers a 14-day free trial option to test out before upgrading.
The plans begin with Basic Shopify, which includes the basics for launching your store. You get two staff accounts, 24/7 support, multiple sales channels, unlimited products, and more for $29 a month.
The next step up is Shopify, which is intended for growing businesses. For $79 a month, you get your online store, unlimited products, 24/7 support, multiple sales channels, and up to five staff accounts.
Finally, there’s Advanced Shopify, which has advanced features to scale your business. You receive the online store, unlimited products, 24/7 support, multiple sales channels, and up to 15 staff accounts. Many businesses will do just fine with Advanced Shopify.
Then, there’s Shopify Plus, which starts at $2,000 per month or 0.25% of sales volume per month, capped at $40,000 (whichever is greater). You can contact Shopify Plus to get an exact quote for your store.
Ready to Upgrade?
Shopify and Shopify Plus have similar offerings, but Shopify Plus adds to the basic Shopify functionality with better support, more customization, more flexibility, and more control. Though the monthly cost is a little pricey, the features for Shopify Plus more than pay for themselves.
