What Is Shopify Plus
Designed for larger businesses, Shopify Plus is the more advanced, feature-heavy version of basic Shopify. It empowers e-merchants to take their online stores to the next level by generating more leads and driving more conversions.
The platform allows sellers of high-end products to manage their stores, thanks to extensive applications and options perfectly suited to their needs. In short, Shopify Plus appears to be the ideal tool for major brands and startups, considering its strong growth and very rapid expansion of its structure.
Many household names are Shopify Plus customers, including Heinz, Gymshark, and the international sports and apparel conglomerate Decathlon. And as an Official Shopify Plus Expert Partner, Create Circus is among the few Shopify agencies qualified to provide the performance and business development companies like this have come to embody.
This article breaks down the particularities of this platform through three dimensions: the overall technical advantages offered by this solution, the effectiveness of its assistance, and its real cost for users.
What Is Shopify Plus: The Overall Benefits
Servers
Shopify Plus is, first and foremost, a guarantee of technical reliability. It is primarily the solidity of its servers that allow e-merchants to benefit from the solution’s potential fully. These servers can thus support very dense traffic and many short or long-term transactions while maintaining a high connection speed, which is essential for customer comfort.
To give you more precise quantitative indications, Shopify servers run 99.99% of the time without interruption and can support up to 4 million visits per second and up to 10,000 payments per minute.
Security and payment systems
The payment process, or checkout, is fully customizable: it is possible to integrate CSS customization codes within the payment system itself. Other e-commerce solutions only offer CSS code integration limited to payment pages and not to the system itself.
Shopify Pay, the complementary payment tool, since its redesign in 2017, has let you considerably speed up the payment process by facilitating the saving of information left by the customer. The latter will see the loading time of his checkout pages considerably decrease during the second visit to the online store. With Shopify Plus, merchants can get a more secure SSL certificate than standard Shopify sites. This SSL certificate is, as on the traditional version, free.
Built-in apps
About 40 migration tools ensuring the migration of a site to Shopify are currently listed. Shopify’s APIs, or programming interfaces, and SDKs, or programming support tools, ensure seamless migration and integration of all types of programs to the merchant’s Shopify platform. This migration takes place over approximately 90 in 120 days on average, and the entire action plan, including calendar, deliverables, allocation of resources to migrate, and more, can be coordinated thanks to a precise workload plan provided by the launch manager.
Assistance and Support Technique
Merchant Success Manager
Shopify Plus notably offers a Merchant Success Manager, a personalized support tool that puts a merchant in direct contact with a Shopify consultant. The latter is responsible for advising and monitoring the merchant and his project throughout the platform’s operation. It should be noted that the launch of a website under Shopify Plus is evaluated at a duration of 3 to 6 months, while this duration varies between 8 and 12 months for competitors.
Alongside the Merchant Success Manager, a Launch Manager will ensure the website’s migration to Shopify beforehand, if necessary, to avoid any compatibility problems.
Shopify Plus Partner Program
The Shopify Plus Partner Program designates a directory of all of Shopify’s exclusive partners, including expert agencies, marketing experts, designers, or developers, whose contact details will be available to the user. The latter can then contact these partners to benefit from even more extensive support in the personalization of their website or technical advice in the event of the Shopify teams’ inability to answer these questions.
Assistance technique
Shopify Plus merchants have a much more responsive and faster technical support service than the standard version of Shopify. This technical support is, of course, not limited to the presence of a Merchant Success Manager and is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
What is Shopify Plus: Costs
The cost of Shopify Plus is highly variable and depends on several factors, including application integration, additional services, and how the user wishes to use it. Thus, although the floor price is set at $2000/month and its ceiling price at $40,000/month, it isn’t easy to find a price list reflecting the actual price of the platform for this or such service. It should also be specified.
In reality, the final cost of a subscription varies according to the company’s turnover made from its online store. The evaluation of this cost, therefore, only requires a quick mathematical calculation.
First of all, the total cost of using Shopify Plus is based on four main factors:
- General costs for using Shopify Plus, including fees for basic platform functions, server hosting, and technical support.
- Fees for using payment gateways, as each integrated payment gateway incurs expenses of different amounts.
- Application usage fees.
- Maintenance costs.
The general usage fee is 0.25% of monthly sales. Please note: this rate only concerns merchants who do not use Shopify Payments, Shopify’s official payment gateway. A merchant using Shopify Payments will see their monthly fees drop to 0.15%.
The calculation is very simple:
Take the fictional case of Matt. Matt manages a site selling toys, making $10,000 in monthly sales. Its turnover is calculated as follows: 10,000 x 0.0025 = $25.
The minimum cost of Shopify Plus is $2000, as no Shopify version costs $25/month, and Matt must pay this amount.
The amount of turnover from which the merchant will have to pay more than $2,000 monthly is actually around $800,000/month:
800,000 x 0.0025 = $2000.
Therefore, any merchant whose turnover will be more than $800,000/month will see their total cost of using Shopify Plus rise to an amount greater than $2,000 monthly.
Why Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus is a much more powerful version than the standard three Shopify plans. The solidity of its servers, the flexibility of its payment system, and its multiple integrated functionalities, including migration, reporting, and more, are all arguments to put forward to medium and large-sized companies aiming for strong commercial growth in the short or middle term. In addition, the quality of technical support and customer service give Shopify a considerable advantage over its competitors, thanks to the responsiveness and very narrow skills of its teams.
Did you know that Create Circus is an official Shopify Plus Expert Partner?