Shopify Plus is one of the best platforms for high-impact, fast-growing e-commerce brands. In recent years, many brands have switched to Shopify Plus. These include Red Bull, Budweiser and Nestle.
The main reason is that Shopify Plus has become one of the best solutions for high volume stores. This allows you to manage an ecommerce website at a significant advantage and focus on growing your business rather than solving minor problems on your website.
Despite its growing popularity, many people don’t understand some of the best features of these solutions. And this often raises three general questions:
- Do e-commerce stores really need Shopify Plus?
- How much will the solution cost?
- Is this worth the investment?
To answer this question, you need to look at the features, prices and when to switch to Shopify Plus. Once you have this information, you can make informed decisions about the options. Of course, the first question should be:
What is Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus is an e-commerce platform designed for businesses that have a larger volume than other customers. This is perfect for companies that can be considered a brand at the corporate level.
It offers many features that are not in the Shopify master plan. In addition to the basic functionality you get when you work with Shopify, you can also get things like:
- More customization options to make your brand website more unique and brand specific.
- Great automation features that let you focus on serving customers instead of managing your business.
- Enhanced multi-channel and multi-channel functions to increase your company’s sales potential.
- Faster website speed which can help you rank higher on Google and other search engines and increase customer service expectations.
- Improve your ability to handle significant volumes of traffic and sales. Ideal for popular businesses who want to sell more to customers without losing website effectiveness.
These features make Shopify Plus one of the most flexible and stable platforms on the market. Hence, it is a great choice for retailers and brands who want to visit their websites to add more sales and revenue. In addition, brands can provide better service to website users.
So, if your marketing is paying off and your business is getting more traffic than before and leading to higher sales, you may need to upgrade to Shopify Plus. Those who can’t regret that decision.
Is it better than other ecommerce platforms out there?
The advantages of Shopify Plus have not always made it an ideal solution and better than other platforms on the market (WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc.). However, it does offer better benefits for certain retailers and brands that need features that other platforms can’t provide without a significant investment.
To get the same returns on other platforms, sometimes a much higher investment has to be made, and success is no longer guaranteed there than on Shopify Plus.
What are the main benefits you will need?
There are many Shopify Plus features that you should seriously consider when deciding whether to use them or not. Here are some of the key features that make it a worthwhile investment.
1. Can handle more traffic
The first is that it can handle more traffic than most platforms. This is important because without the capacity for large amounts of traffic, you can appear very unprofessional to customers. In the worst case scenario, you can lose income.
Research has shown that for every second it takes to load your website, you lose about 7% of your sales. If you run a large campaign, it can be devastating. If you have too much traffic, you can completely lose your website. If all of your marketing is successful, expect lots of traffic to your website.
The biggest problem is that traffic isn’t just evenly distributed throughout the day. You may experience a traffic spike. And then you can get into trouble.
However, Shopify Plus has proven that it can handle large amounts of traffic. When Kylie Cosmetics held a pop-up event in New York, more than 200,000 people visited their website in no time.
Another example is the Death Wish Coffee website. They have a Super Bowl ad. After people saw him, they took $ 2,083 a minute from him. Without a viable ecommerce package, your website can collapse.
An example of the difference, of course, comes from England. A television show called Dragons Den (known in the US as The Sharks Tank) has many companies struggling to invest from business tycoons. Many business owners who have appeared at the show said the sites crashed within hours of appearing at the event due to significant traffic.
Another common area where Shopify Plus has tremendous capacity is in special transaction periods. One such period is the Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend. In 2017, Shopify’s servers were flooded with requests. However no website has crashed.
2. Be prepared for a global expansion plan
The managing director in e-commerce knows that he can’t sell in just one area. Instead, they know they need to grow and try to sell around the world. With modern day-to-day logistics, this is not as difficult as you think. There are many couriers around the world who can ship at a very low cost and at a reasonable speed so that the customer is not disappointed.
Of course, this is more of an effort than just getting your marketing content out to the international community for a large global audience.
The best international companies have multiple storefronts, each designed for a different country, region or territory. You have the right language, currency and payment options for your customer.
Shopify Plus allows you to have additional stores cloned but significantly altered to make them more suitable for specific audiences in different areas. Because of this, you can automatically sell in eleven different regions from one account at no additional cost.
Therefore, clients can be directed to the correct storefront depending on the location of the IP address and browser. An example is relocating the UK location and the pound currency while the user is in Great Britain.
Another thing to do is to be able to manage a list of specific areas. For example, offering Thanksgiving sales to people in the US that are not copied elsewhere in other regions.
With Shopify Plus, you can do this through a backend dedicated to that storefront. You can also manage content, inventory and special orders for that region. So, if you have a wider supply network, you can better manage your inventory.
You can also create content specific to that region.
There are options that can only be done at the main Shopify store. However, you will be much more successful when using a Shopify Plus account because it has better features and is more built-in that makes it easier and less time-consuming to manage.
3. Complete business personalization
Many platforms don’t offer great customization. Hence, you get the same website style that only has your own colors, text and images. Sometimes you can make changes to the theme you are using. However, a theme is just a variation on the basic look and feel of a website.
Shopify Plus is basically more than that. There are editable CSS files and scripts that allow your development team to have complete control over the appearance of your website.
One of the most fantastic aspects of personalization is the handling of the payment processing that you can do. This enhances the basic payment experience, which is already great for conversions. It also looks aesthetically pleasing. However, improvements can be made.
For example, you can:
Review how secure your payment transaction is. This is the main concern of the buyer and causes the car to be abandoned.
Promises fast delivery and a convenient and easy return process.
Provide feedback from satisfied previous customers to build trust.
Offer support and contact options on the payment page.
There are other options you may want to use.
4. Automation
If you want to add value to your business and do it without too much work, you need to consider automation. Automation has been shown to speed up business processes, increase yields and increase sales.
One of the main reasons for this is that if you don’t automate, you often forget to get work done.
Since you’re building a big business, this can be a lifesaver. You have a lot to do for your typical day. There is product storage, packaging and shipping, website maintenance, marketing, and other time-consuming activities.
With automation, you can reduce the need to perform these many tasks. Allows you to perform fewer roles more efficiently. This allows for massive expansion and growth for your business. It can also improve the work ethic by eliminating the need for you and your employees to perform repetitive tasks on a daily basis.
There are many different automations that can be done with Shopify Plus. This includes the following:
Identify all orders deemed risky and cancel if necessary.
You can order new supplies when they reach a certain level. If an item is in stock, it can be hidden from your website so customers can’t order it.
Contact the customer and ask when the customer has returned a certain number of items.
There is also a tool for launching Shopify Plus. This way you can fit your marketing campaign into automation. It allows you to plan many important marketing tasks related to the sale and launch of a specific product.
5. Multi channel and multi channel function
As previously mentioned, if you want to become a large and successful eRetailer, you need to consider selling other channels. This is where Shopify Plus can help. It’s not just about creating an e-commerce store for your brand. You can use it to set up seamless local social sales across several major networks on the web including: Instagram, Facebook and others.
And it all has to do with the back of your store and the front.
For example, you can allow customers to sync their Facebook Messenger directly with your store. Hence, customers can receive shopping cart updates, promotions and even reminders directly from the Facebook Messenger app.
Shopify allows you to sell via other channels too. It is used by some brands to open pop-up shops and provide personal sales for a limited period of time when using the POS-Shopify POS system to take orders / sell products.
6. Special online wholesale
If you sell your own product, you can wholesale to other brands. This can be a significant source of income for many brands. However, you need to have some way of differentiating regular customers from commercial customers. If it’s small, you can often handle it manually. However, as the business grew it became a headache.
This is where Shopify Plus can help. You can use the program to integrate B2B and B2C operations. You can use any of the 10 additional storefronts as a branded B2B portal for wholesale customers. This allows the merchant to request an account and, once accepted, simply head over to the wholesale website and make a purchase if necessary.
You can still control various aspects of your retail business. Including:
- The quantity to which they will be discounted and how much discount they will receive.
- Price level.
- Pricing for B2B customers.
- When there are minimum and maximum quantities for an order.
How much does Shopify Plus cost?
One of the biggest confusion with Shopify Plus is how much it costs. There are no prices listed on the Shopify website. We recommend that you contact the sales team for prices. The reason is that price is influenced by two factors: usage and sales volume. Therefore, the price of one company differs significantly from that of another.
And can be different each month.
So you need to think about how much your brand costs. Here are some costs you may want to consider (please note that these prices are subject to change).
Construction costs: Shopify developers are harder to find than WordPress developers, for example. Therefore, sometimes they cost a little more. You can use a pre-made template if you wish. Hence, the costs can be relatively low. However, most retailers want something unique to their brand.
This is why they often hire quality design agencies to help them out. This can be very expensive. Some design agencies can cost up to $ 250,000, but you can get anywhere from around $ 1,000 for small business websites. It also depends on how much work you want to do with the product, content, etc.
License fee: This is more standard. Monthly fees start at $ 2,000. Prices go up per month after you sell over $ 800,000 per month. It doesn’t cost more than $ 40,000, but you have to sell over $ 16 million a month.
Transaction Fees: If you use Shopify Payments, the transaction fee is 1.6% plus $ 0.35. If you use a third-party payment processor, there is a 0.15% fee for each transaction. When you’re at $ 800,000; This means you can be billed $ 1,200 a month for transactions with third parties.
Is this investment worth it?
The financial costs sound high and for some brands this is not a number to consider. However, there are important notes that must be considered. First, Shopify Plus is the solution for those who attract heavy traffic and sales. Not a small company.
And compared to some comparative business solutions, pricing is very profitable. Especially when compared to what’s standard for your package.
Therefore, it is more about when you are ready for Shopify Plus than it is about a reasonable and affordable solution for your business. You may need Shopify Plus if you experience any of the following symptoms:
Website traffic continues to damage your website. Hence, you have received many complaints that you cannot access your website and place an order. You may be able to see this if you aren’t getting many sales or if your current hosting provider is telling you that your website is down.
You should also budget at least $ 1 million in annual sales and expect further growth. Additionally, you need to look at international expansion in at least four or five areas.
Last word: is Shopify Plus for you?
There are many reasons why you might think Shopify Plus isn’t for you. However, there are many reasons why this is the case. In the end, this is a sentence; and which you must take for yourself. However, use the information in this article to help you make an informed decision about the value it can offer you.