Whether you are already running a Shopify store and looking to upgrade to a better plan or evaluating an e-commerce platform for your business’s growing needs, you’ve likely come across Shopify Plus. But do you know what exactly sets it apart?
Shopify Plus is Shopify’s enterprise solution designed specifically for high-volume, fast-growing businesses. It offers enhanced automation, stronger uptime, and better scalability compared to the other standard Shopify plans (Grow, Basic, and Advanced).
To help you decide whether Shopify Plus is the right fit for your business, we have created this blog. In the following sections, we will discuss the Shopify Plus pricing plan and its features, use cases, and more in detail.
So, are you ready? Let’s quickly start.
Table of Contents
- What is Shopify Plus?
- Top Shopify Plus Features You Should Know
- Shopify vs Shopify Plus: What Are the Differences?
- How to Start With Shopify Plus?
- What are Shopify Plus Pricing?
- Who Should Use Shopify Plus?
- Top Shopify Plus Benefits for eCommerce Businesses
- Shopify Plus Case Studies: Real Examples of Brands Using Shopify Plus
- Conclusion and Key Takeaways
- FAQs
What is Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus is Shopify’s enterprise-grade e-commerce platform built specifically for merchants who have outgrown the standard Shopify plans and require advanced features, customization, and automation.
Plus was launched back in 2014, and it offers all the features that you get on other Shopify plans, along with additional capabilities such as tools for processing high-volume orders, internationalization, etc.
Unlike the other standard Shopify plans that operate in a self-serve model, Shopify Plus assigns every merchant a dedicated success manager and launch engineer. These experienced professionals guide you through your store’s setup, marketing, and optimization strategies.
At its core, Shopify Plus addresses three critical challenges that growing businesses often face:
- Limited ability to extensively customize checkout experiences.
- Lack of specialized tools and features for B2B selling.
- Managing complexities and operational overheads of multiple storefronts, currencies, and markets from different systems.
Top Shopify Plus Features You Should Know
Here are the most important Shopify Plus features you must be aware of:
- Checkout Customization: Using the Checkout Branding API, Extensions, and Liquid Code, you can easily add custom fields, upselling and shipping logics, and even create separate checkout flows for B2C/B2B customers.
- Shopify Flow Automation: With Shopify Flow, automating inventory alerts, order routing, etc., is easier.
- Launchpad Campaign Tool: Launchpad lets you schedule campaigns in advance and automatically launch flash sales, product drops, and even theme changes.
- Higher API Limits: Shopify Plus supports additional API calls, enabling you to integrate with custom apps. Moreover, you can use the REST and GraphQL resources that are only available on this plan.
- Native B2B Suite: Manage wholesale and retail from one central backend. Also, create company accounts, custom pricing, catalogs, and pricing terms conveniently.
- Shopify Functions: Create and deploy flexible customizations for providing unique e-commerce experiences to users with the help of custom apps built with Shopify Functions.
- Shopify POS Pro: Get support for up to 200 POS Pro locations.
- Unlimited Staff Accounts: Grow your personnel without incurring any extra costs.
- Elite-grade Scalability and Performance: Shopify Plus comes with a 99.9% uptime service level agreement, unlimited bandwidth, and a reliable CDN that is backed by Cloudflare.
- Priority 24//7 Support: Access priority support via phone and chat for any query or concern.
| Explore: Best Shopify Themes Free & Paid. |
Shopify vs Shopify Plus: What Are the Differences?
Let’s look at the differences between difference between Shopify and Shopify plus plans.
| Aspect | Shopify | Shopify Plus |
| Features | Core features include: 1. Sell unlimited products 2. Inventory Management 3. 200+ real-time reports, including custom analytics 4. Up to 2x API rate limits on select APIs 5. Create 1 headless storefront | Core features include everything in Shopify, and: 1. 9 free expansion stores 2. Support for high-volume checkout 3. B2B wholesale suite 4. Bot protection 5. Up to 500% higher API call limits 6. Specialized Plus apps 7. The ability to create up to 25 headless stores |
| Pricing | $39 – $399/month | Starts at $2,300/month for a 1-year term. |
| Transaction Fees | 0.5% – 2% for third-party providers | 0.15% for third-party; waived with Shopify Payments |
| Staff Accounts | Up to 15 | Unlimited |
| Checkout Customization | Basic | Advanced |
| Automation | Limited, but available via Shopify Flow, where you can create basic workflows | Advanced with Shopify Flow, Launchpad, and other tools. |
| Support | 24/7 chat and email | Priority support, with specialized academy resources available and constant guidance from a success manager |
| Best For | Small to mid-sized businesses | High-volume, enterprise brands that are generating more than $1 million in revenue |
How to Start With Shopify Plus?
Here’s how you can start your store on Shopify Plus:
- Contact the Sales Team: Unlike standard plans, you cannot simplify sign-up for Shopify Plus. You must reach out to their support team directly through the Plus pricing page. After that, a sales representative will guide you further and share pricing details.
- Get Your Onboarding Team: Once you sign up, you will be assigned a dedicated success manager and launch engineer. They will walk you through the entire setup process.
- Set Up Your Admin: After onboarding, access your store via the Shopify Plus login. Log in to your Shopify Plus admin, add staff accounts with appropriate permissions, and create a test environment. This is to ensure that you can build and test your store safely before it goes live.
- Migrate Your Data: Migrating data in the correct sequence is important as it ensures orders are linked to the right customers and products. Generally, the recommended sequence is this: products, customers, historical orders, gift cards, and B2B data.
Also, for data transfer, you can use CSV files, third-party apps, or the Shopify API.
| Note: This step is only applicable if you are migrating from another platform or upgrading an existing Shopify store. |
- Create and Organize Content: Create all the essential pages like About Us, FAQ, and Contact. Add blog posts with proper meta titles and descriptions to enhance your Shopify store’s SEO.
Also, use metafields for sharing specialized product information, set up notifications, and upload brand assets such as logos and colors.
- Configure Admin Settings: This step involves setting up Shopify Payments as your primary gateway, checkout customization, shipping, tax rules (including exemptions for certain products if applicable), customer accounts, and store policies.
- Set Up Your Online Store: Select a theme that aligns with your products and brand, configure the navigation menus and links, and enable filtering so customers can easily sort products. Also, set up your online store preferences and integrate Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. This is to effectively track visitor behavior and traffic performance from day one.
- Add Shopify App and Integrations: To automate repetitive tasks, you can download various Shopify apps and integrations, such as:
- Shopify Flow
- Launchpad
- Shopify Functions
- Shopify Collective
- Marketplace Connect
- Google & YouTube
- AdNabu (Product feed management software for syncing Shopify products to Google Shopping, Meta, and other leading marketplaces.)
Moreover, it is during this step that you can also connect your store with your ERP or CRM systems.
- Set Up International Tools: Configure Shopify Markets, multi-currency, and also localize your content for each market.
- Pre-Launch Testing: Ensure that you test every part of your store before going live. Place test orders, set up 301 URL redirects, review users and their permissions, and also back up your store data, as Shopify won’t do that by default.
- Go Live: To launch your store, first deactivate test mode in Shopify Payments so you can accept real payments. Then, you must switch your primary domain, point DNS records to Shopify, submit the sitemap to Google, and remove your store’s password.
And that’s it! With this process, your Shopify Plus store will be fully set up and ready to serve customers.
Use AdNabu's Advanced AI To Optimize
Your Shopify Plus Products For
Google Shopping, Meta, and Other Marketplaces!
Get Product Feeds that Comply With
Platform Requirements and Instantly
Sync Updates all for the Best Advertising Performance!
What are Shopify Plus Pricing?
Shopify Plus plan costs $2,300/month for a 1-year term, and $2,500/month for a 3-year term. In the European Union, countries such as Austria and Spain, the 1-year term costs €2,250 EUR, and the 3-year term costs €2,100 EUR.
For Shopify Plus, the transaction fees are generally waived if you are using Shopify Payments.
If you go with a third-party payment provider, then you must pay their fees as well as a small transaction fee (generally 0.20%) to Shopify for security and compliance.
Additionally, the card processing fees are generally lower than 2.4%-2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, depending on your contract.
Who Should Use Shopify Plus?
You might have already understood that Shopify’s enterprise-grade plan is not suitable for everyone. However, for the right business, it’s a game-changer. Here’s who it’s built for:
- High-volume merchants who generate more than $1 million in annual revenue.
- D2C brands that are actively looking for e-commerce platforms that allow them to customize checkout experiences to convert more users.
- Those B2B and wholesale businesses that want to manage all their operations from a single dashboard.
- Brands that have an aspiration of global expansion and operating in multiple markets with different currencies and languages, i.e, opening localized storefronts at scale.
- In case you have a large team and need unlimited staff accounts, where you can also get granular permission controls.
- If your store faces a lot of downtime whenever there is a traffic surge during holidays, flash sales, product drops, etc.
Top Shopify Plus Benefits for eCommerce Businesses
Here’s why you should consider using Shopify Plus for your fast-growing store:
- Higher Conversions: With advanced automation, extended capabilities for growing your store, and customizable checkouts with custom fields, branded flows, etc., ensure that users never drop, and you get more conversions.
- Lower Costs at Higher Volume: Benefit from lower transaction fees compared to other plans. Easily offset a large portion of your monthly expenses.
- Built for Global Selling: Get support for up to 50 markets and 9 expansion stores from a unified dashboard with localized content, currencies, etc.
- High-Performance at Scale: With the Plus plan’s 99% uptime SLA, you get access to an infrastructure that can easily handle thousands of checkouts per minute without leading to any downtime.
- Support from Certified Experts: You get guidance from dedicated experts who ensure your store is set up correctly, monitored, and regularly optimized for growth at every stage of your business journey.
Shopify Plus Case Studies: Real Examples of Brands Using Shopify Plus
We will now look at some of the D2C juggernauts and best Shopify stores that use Plus for their operations.
- Gymshark: After their Magento site crashed during a Black Friday sale in 2015, resulting in losses of nearly $100,000, Gymshark shifted to Shopify Plus.
Now their store handles peak traffic hours (during sales and promotional events) with ease.
- Kylie Cosmetics: The famous cosmetics brand owned by Kylie Jenner also operates on Shopify Plus. Leveraging the platform’s advanced capabilities, Kylie Cosmetics successfully handled more than 200,000 simultaneous visitors during one of its product launches in 2016.
- Heinz: During the COVID pandemic, Heinz switched to Shopify Plus to streamline their D2C operations. After the transition, they made their first store live within two weeks and quickly expanded to six countries. And the results were impressive: they saw a 450% increase in e-commerce sales and were getting more than £100K in monthly recurring revenue.
- Filtrous: Filtrous previously operated on BigCommerce for its B2B needs. However, they felt restricted by limited customization options, which also affected how they handled customer service.
To address these challenges, they moved to Shopify Plus and launched their wholesale storefront in just 63 days. After the switch, their conversion rate jumped almost 27%, and they were saving almost 10 hours of manual work per week with Plus’s advanced automation capabilities.
- Who Gives a Crap: With growing operations, the brand needed a platform that would scale with their needs and enable seamless global expansion. They started using Shopify Plus, and they launched dedicated stores for the US, UK, and other countries from a central admin. Moreover, they also leveraged the advanced Shopify Flow capabilities to automate inventory planning.
The results: Their conversion rates increased by 15% YoY, and customer lifetime value by 20%.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Shopify Plus is a powerful platform, but its true value lies in choosing it at the right time and using it to its full potential.
The key takeaways from this blog include:
- Shopify Plus is Shopify’s top-tier plan built for high-volume merchants who need advanced customization, automation, and scalability beyond what standard plans offer.
- Its standout features include checkout extensibility, native B2B tools, Shopify Flow, Launchpad, unlimited staff accounts, and infrastructure that handles thousands of checkouts per minute.
- Compared to standard Shopify plans, Plus offers significantly more control, lower transaction fees, dedicated support, and tools that simply aren’t available on lower tiers.
- Getting started involves contacting the sales team, getting an onboarding team, migrating your data, and configuring your store before going live.
- Starting at $2,300/month, the cost is best justified once your store consistently generates $1M+ in annual revenue, where savings on transaction fees alone offset a large portion of the plan cost.
- It’s best suited for high-volume DTC brands, B2B businesses, globally expanding merchants, and stores that regularly face traffic surges.
- Brands like Gymshark, Kylie Cosmetics, and Heinz have used Shopify Plus to handle massive traffic, scale globally, and significantly grow their revenue.
FAQs
- Is Shopify Plus worth it?
Yes, for the right business, Shopify Plus is worth it. If you generate more than $1 million in revenue, then your savings on the transaction fees alone can offset a big portion of the monthly plan cost. On top of that, you get a plethora of advanced features and support from certified professionals that make the ROI very clear.
- How to become a Shopify Plus partner?
The Plus partner program is no longer available as it was sunset back in December 2024.
- Can I use my own custom theme on Shopify Plus?
Yes, you can build and use your own custom themes using Shopify’s Liquid framework.
- Is there a free trial available for Shopify Plus?
Yes, there is, and generally it is for 1-2 months.
- What is the difference between Shopify Plus and Advanced?
Shopify Plus is an advanced e-commerce platform for large-volume brands that find the standard Shopify plans and their capabilities limiting. It starts at $2,300/month and offers extensive automation, customization, and custom development features.
The Advanced plan is the highest standard plan, which starts at $399/month and offers some automation features, and is ideal for brands that need advanced reporting, competitive transaction fees, and some international commerce features – but don’t yet require enterprise-level tools and aren’t ready to bear the high monthly cost of Plus.