Updated: 12/27/21

Shopify Plus: How much is it & is it worth it? 

Over the last 15+ years, Shopify has become one of the most popular eCommerce platforms on the planet.

And while Shopify has been successful for a number of reasons – and used to make all kinds of different sites – one of the biggest is just that Shopify is a simple, straightforward, user-friendly platform.

Nonetheless, in 2014, Shopify debuted a more robust, enterprise-level option for companies that need even more from their websites.

Since then, Shopify Plus has gained a similar level of success as its predecessor withmore than 1.7 million companies relying on the platform –including household names like Staples, Heinz, Gymshark, and Blenders Eyewear.

Now, that being said, Shopify Plus isn’t for every business out there. It’s designed for merchants who are doing over a million dollars a year and its price tag reflects this. Similar to the increasedcost of upgrading to Magento Enterprise, taking your Shopify store to the next level is going to be pricey. 

So, before you get too far in your decision-making process, let’s answer two very important questions:

How much is Shopify Plus?

And is Shopify Plus worth it?

Let’s start with the first one.

How Much Does Shopify Plus Cost?

A Shopify Plus License is $2,000/month + 0.25% of your monthly revenue after you reach $800,000/month.

The price will vary depending on the online revenue that you do every year, butthe cost of Shopify Plus begins at $2,000 a month.

That’s obviously a lot of money.

But it might cost even more depending on how much online revenue your company does.

The reason is that the price of Shopify Plus includes another 0.25% of your monthly revenue if it exceeds $800,0000/month. 

So, basically, the cost of Shopify Plus is $2,000/month until your company’s monthly revenue exceeds $800,000. At that point, you begin paying the 0.25%. At $800,000, that would be $2,000/month.

Again, this overhead is one of the main reasons Shopify Plus is meant for online companies that are consistently making at least $800,000 every month. At that point, an extra $2,000/month shouldn’t hurt too much.

And if your Shopify store ever reaches $16 million per month in sales, your monthly licensing fee will reach its cap ($40,000).

Other Shopify Levels That Cost Less

If the price of Shopify Plus is currently out of your budget, here are your other options for this platform, including their monthly costs and what kinds of companies Shopify recommends them for:

•        Basic Shopify:$29/month – “Best for new ecommerce businesses with occasional in-person sales.”
•        Shopify:$79/month – “Best for growing businesses selling online or in-store.”
•        Advanced Shopify: $299/month – “Best for scaling businesses that require advanced reporting.”

So, if you’re a growing business that’s not quite at the enterprise level yet, you may want to use Advanced Shopify until your budget can handle $2,000/month.

4 Other Shopify Plus Costs to Consider

Budgeting for the monthly cost of your Shopify Plus license is just the beginning, though. If you want your Shopify store to reach its full potential, you’ll need to budget for four other costs, too.

Here are the big four to keep in mind.

1. Credit Card Processing and Transaction Fees for Shopify

Shopify Plus comes withShopify Payments, which can handle all of your credit card processing needs.

If you use Shopify Payments to handle your transactions, you won’t pay a cent no matter how many sales you make. This is especially incredible considering just how many transactions Shopify Plus can handle – more on that in a moment.

On the other hand, if you decide to go with a third-party payment processor, Shopify will charge you .15% for every transaction. As Shopify explains on their site, that “fee helps [them] maintain our PCI compliance and the integrity of both you and your customers’ data.”

Nonetheless, this is still a pretty good deal compared to the 0.5% business owners have to pay when they use Shopify Advanced to build their sites.

2. Apps for Added Functionality

While Shopify Plus is an incredibly robust eCommerce platform, your company is still unique and probably has its own unique needs. Chances are that no platform would ever be able to support every specific requirement your business has.

That’s whereShopify’s app store comes in.

These apps can help your Shopify site with a wide range of goals, including:

•        Search Engine Optimization
•        Social Media
•        Product Reviews
•        Upselling
•        Loyalty Programs

The prices for these apps range from absolutely nothing all the way up to $500.

I’d say about half of them in any of the aforementioned categories are free, but even the paid versions usually offer some kind of free trial, so you can get a sense of what kind of ROI you can expect before paying for them.

If you’re curious about some of the better options available, we’ve put together a list of the best Shopify apps on the market.

In fact, at IWD we’ve built one of our own: a Shopify store locator app for those companies that have online and IRL locations.

We also have acheckout extension for Shopify that will connect your site to 120+ payment gateways, help improve conversions, and much more.

Both of our Shopify solutions are free, but as I already mentioned, that’s not always the case. So, before you go investing in Shopify Plus, take some time to research what apps and extensions you may need to invest in to build the kind of site you want.

3. Help from a Qualified Shopify Developers, SEOS, UX Experts, and More

Shopify is famous for being user-friendly, but unless all your company needs is a basic eCommerce site with little more than product pages, you’re going to want to work with an experienced Shopify agency.

The right agency will have more than just qualified developers who can build your site, install and configure the plugins and extensions it needs, and create custom solutions.

Unless you already employ the right specialists, you’ll want an agency that also employs experienced professionals who can do things like improve your site’s UX (User Experience), increase your Shopify conversion rate, and execute SEO initiatives that will bring in more traffic.

These requirements all come with costs – whether you pay them to internal members of staff, freelancers, or a Shopify agency.

If you do need to hire out for the work, take a look at our post on “How to Choose the Right Shopify Agency.”

4. Maintenance for Your Shopify Plus Site

Finally, just like a house, building it is only the beginning. You have to take care to maintain and uphold it, too, or that initial investment is going to result in a major loss.

So, be sure to budget formaintaining your Shopify website, as well.

Depending on what your staff can handle on their own, maintaining your Shopify website may entail:

•        Adding and altering Google Tags
•        Fixing 404 pages
•        Addressing issues that are hurting your site speed
•        Conduct A/B testing to assess the best changes to make
•        Change and update code
•        Back up your store
•        Remove outdated inventory

The list of potential maintenance tasks is endless. A precise list for your company will depend on your business, but whatever the case, your budget will have to include funds for the kinds of tasks your site will require every month.

Alright, now that you have a better idea of how much a Shopify Plus site will cost, let’s find out if that price tag is worth it for your business.

Is Shopify Plus Worth the Price? 15 Reasons to Make the Switch

We’ve worked with a lot of business owners who have had to make the same decision.

After we break down the pricing for Shopify, the question then becomes:

“Is Shopify Plus worth it?”

The answer comes down to whether or not the added features Shopify Plus offers are worth the steep increase in price.

Before we jump into those features, I want to point out that many of them can be added to your standard Shopify site without paying $2,000 or more a month. So, if you're thinking about making the switch for specific functionalities, contact ourShopify developers first and they'll tell you if it’s possible to get the site you want without the same kind of investment.

Alright, with all that being said, here are 15 reasons so many companies have decided Shopify Plus is well worth the price.

1. Shopify Plus Can Handle 10,000+ Orders a Minute

The first reason so many successful companies trust Shopify Plus is that this platform can handle an insane number of transactions compared to the standard version.

I'm talking about more than 10,000 transactions A MINUTE!

If you're seeing those kinds of sales, you just can't settle for a lesser platform. Imagine going to all the trouble to earn that kind of business only to find out your site can’t handle it.

This will never be a problem with Shopify Plus.

The platform will also give you 200TB worth of storage and unlimited bandwidth – two more reasons you’ll enjoy peace of mind when you have Shopify Plus backing your site.

2. Your Business Gets Unlimited Staff Accounts

The second reason so many companies love Shopify Plus is that there's no ceiling on the number of staff accounts they can create. 

Once again, for a small company, this might not seem like a big deal.

However, if you're scaling up or it's just been a while since you outgrew your current eCommerce platform, this kind of freedom is going to make a massive difference.

Being able to quickly add professionals to your account whenever you want so they can get to work ASAP is SO much better than going through the grueling process of requesting – and paying for – new accounts again and again.

3. Connect to Shopify Flow

Speaking of your staff, building a successful website – even with the help of Shopify Plus – can be tough with a large team. All those people usually come with an equally large number of tasks, which makes it almost inevitable that some of them will slip through the cracks.

Shopify Flow will help to ensure this doesn’t happen.

This automation tool will make it easy to create, manage, and then automate workflows for the kinds of important tasks a successful eCommerce website depends on.

To give you an idea of what Shopify Flow can do, here are some examples of important tasks Plus users regularly create:

•        Modifying product tags based on customers’ purchases and inventory levels
•        Creating triggered actions when high-risk orders are made
•        Assigning tags to customers when their value increases so you can work to increase loyalty
•        Relisting products when they’re back in stock
•        Sending personalized notifications to customers based on specific account behaviors or orders

Shopify Flow also provides the kind of flexibility that a growing eCommerce enterprise must have to stay productive and manage overhead while continuing to scale.

And, recently, Shopify Plus released pre-built templates that will make it even easier for you and your team to set up automated workflows.

4. Monitor Page Activity Among Team Members

Another issue that can stop otherwise effective teams from creating equally effective websites is when more than one person is trying to work on the same webpage at the same time.

This is when collaboration can create more problems than it solves.

And during COVID-19, when remote work skyrocketed, this kind of problem happened all the time. One team member would work on a page without knowing one of their teammates was making changes at the same time. Inevitably, someone would lose their work when the other one hit save.

With Shopify Plus, you’ll receive alerts whenever one of your teammates is working on the same product page you are. If they make any changes and hit save, once again, you’ll receive a notification.

5. The Launchpad Tool

A big part of optimizing your eCommerce company’s yearly sales is knowing how and when to launch sales and products.

This is a whole lot easier to do when you haveShopify’s Launchpad tool, an app that is only available to users of Shopify Plus.

It’s designed so that you can quickly set up and track sales and product launches whenever you want. Decide when you’d like these events to start and stop, which will affect the price of your products, collections, or sale items.

You can even use Launchpad to coordinate theme changes whenever these events take place, an amazing option for running seasonal sales or launching campaigns with specific branding.

Launchpad will even give you a specific analytics dashboard that you can use to track the performance for these kinds of important events in real-time.

6. Create Customized Checkout Pages

No page on an eCommerce website is as important as your checkout page.

After all, if it doesn’t do its job, what does it matter if the other pages do?

And yet, countless companies entrust this crucial last step of their eCommerce funnel to default options that lead to low conversions and high abandonment rates.

This has always been a weakness of most of the other Shopify plans. Aside from their looks, there’s not a whole lot you can do to improve your checkout page.

As I mentioned earlier, we make a greatone-page checkout suite for Shopify.

But there’s no doubt that one of the biggest reasons so many enterprises find Shopify Plus worth the price is because of how customizable its checkout pages are right out-of-the-box. Decide how many pages you want your checkout process to be, customize each of them, and then conduct A/B testing to make sure your changes are having the desired effects.

7. Offer Custom Pricing (Including Options for Wholesale Customers)

Arguably the best way to increase your conversion rateandAOV (Average Order Value) is to leverage the power ofcustom pricing.

This is especially true for B2B companies that need to service a diverse market of clients.

With Shopify Plus, you’ll enjoy an equally wide range of pricing options for your products. These include:

•        Tiered Pricing
•        Custom Pricing by Buyer
•        Bulk Discounts
•        Shopping Rules
•        Wholesale Product Sales

You can put all of these features behind a password-protected section of your store reserved solely for B2B buyers. So, you can also have a store that’s open to B2C customers without having to launch a second site.

This approach completely eliminates the kind of friction that ruins conversion rates for most B2B companies online because they have to talk to the buyer in order to offer them bulk, discounted, or wholesale pricing.  

And whether they’re B2C or B2B, Shopify Plus makes it almost effortless to offer your customers the kinds ofpersonalized experiences that are proven to drive conversions.

While competitors using other platforms will have to jump through all kinds of hoops to utilize personalization, you can use Shopify Flow to automate customer-targeted homepages, pricing, and coupon displays that all change based on previous customer interactions.

8. Create Unique Shipping Policies

Along with custom pricing, Shopify Plus will let you create shipping policies that make the most sense for your company.

So, you can create preset shipping options for wholesale customers or anyone who spends a certain amount or define shipping options by product.

With the help of Shopify Flow, you can automatically route customer orders to drop shippers and fulfillment centers as necessary.

9. Script Editor Functionality

If you have highly specific demands for your site, here’s yetanotherway Shopify Plus will let you customize your company’s online presence.

WithShopify Script Editor, you – or your developer – can write custom scripts or edit existing ones that are hosted by Shopify to create all kinds of functionality that you may otherwise not be able to achieve with available apps.

Popular examples of this type of functionality include things like:

•        Percentage-based discounts
•        Dynamic pricing based on volume
•        Product bundle offers

If Shopify Plus doesn’t already offer an option for customizing your shopping or checkout experience, there’s a good chance you can get it done with Script Editor.

10. API Access

And let’s add one more option for creating competitive edges for your eCommerce website.

Shopify Plus gives you increased access to the API, which is extremely valuable if your company handles lots of volume and could use some help from an outsideERP system. Shopify allows double the number ofAPI calls it will support for Shopify Plus users compared to standard merchants.

And if you decide to migrate to Shopify Plus, the company can even raise your API limit to help speed up the entire process.

But maybe you’re not migrating.

Maybe your traffic is still manageable at the moment.

In that case, having this kind of API access is still a huge advantage because being able to seamlessly integrate countless systems and tools means your eCommerce website’s potential is virtually limitless.

Shopify Plus will even grant youheadless architecture  if you want to create completely unique storefronts across any device without default frontend systems deciding how your content has to look to users.

11. Act on Detailed, Real-Time Analytics

As you can probably tell by now, Shopify Plus has the potential to bring youa ton of traffic and give you the tools you need to continuously increase your conversion rate.

For most companies, these features justify the price of Shopify Plus all by themselves.

But wait…

There’s more…

Shopify Plus also comes packed with in-depth reporting that ensures you always have easy-to-access numbers in real-time that you can use to improve your store’s performance.

Furthermore, Shopify designed its reporting tools so they can integrate with advanced analytics platforms likeGlew andLooker. Integrating with either will give you even more actionable insights to take your company’s website to the next level.

12. Run Multiple Shopify Stores from One Dashboard

There may be a number of reasons your enterprise needs multiple websites.

For example, you may need different sites for different countries.

You may sell the same products but with different brands – necessitating different sites.

Whatever the reason, running multiple websites is an absolute nightmare when you have to constantly log in and log out of different dashboards to monitor what’s happening.

It getsreally oldreallyfast.

Shopify Plus users don’t have to deal with this excruciatingly annoying problem to track events across completely different sites.

Just use one single dashboard.

Simple.

And yet, Shopify Plus takes things one crucial step forward.

Users can easily clone their eCommerce stores up to nine times without spending more on their plans.

That’s amazing.

No starting from scratch.

No paying the costs for a brand-new site.

Just clone your current version and get it up-and-running in no time.

So, if you’ve been putting off that second site you need in another language because the thought of building it from scratch – rightfully – makes you break out in hives, Shopify Plus comes ready with a simple solution.

13. Training from the Shopify Plus Academy

Alright, we’ve covered a lot of ground so far –a lot.

Maybe even enough that you’re now convinced Shopify Plus is well worth the price.

But still, what about the learning curve?

Will all of these incredible features be more trouble than they’re worth?

If that’s a concern, I have good news.

The last few spots on this list will be dedicated to the three ways Shopify makes it as easy as possible to make the most out of this platform.

Though, quick reminder: hiring an agency makes it completely effortless to take full advantage of Shopify Plus.

Okay, first let’s talk aboutShopify Plus Academy.

In short, it’s amassiveonline library of training videos that will walk you through everything from the many tools available to you to SEO training to live workshops. It even offers business workshops from more than 90 instructors like Tim Ferris and Daymond John.

So, even if you won’t need help using Shopify (because you’ve hired a trustworthy developer), there’s still plenty to learn from Shopify Plus Academy.

14. Guidance from the Merchant Growth Model

Another way Shopify wants to help its Plus users is with itsShopify Plus Merchant Growth Model (MGM).

These are six different business areas that Shopify will walk you through to improve your eCommerce store’s online presence.

Clothing brandTrue Vintage used its Shopify Plus Merchant Growth Model to increase their email marketing revenue to $225,000.

You’ll also receive weekly newsletters to keep you informed about updates to your platform.

AndShopify’s Facebook community is insanely helpful. Thousands of fellow merchants Shopify merchants, partners, and industry professionals are there to answer just about any question you may have about operating your site.

15. An Account Manager Will Always Be Available 

Finally, if those two incredible resources aren’t to your liking, the price of Shopify Plus covers your own personal account manager.

This expert’s one-and-only job is providing you with support whenever you need it.

No waiting in line.

No staying on hold.

If you’re already a good candidate for using Shopify Plus because of your monthly revenue, waiting around for support when you really need it could literally mean losing thousands and thousands of dollars – maybe more.

Now, look, if you’re one of our eCommerce clients, we’ll be there for you around the clock.

But otherwise, it’s still smart to have a Shopify agent in your corner 24/7.

Is Shopify Plus Worth the Price for Your eCommerce Business?

In short…it depends.

As I’ve mentioned, the big variable here is how much your eCommerce platform makes every month.

If $2,000/month is within your budget, you’re probably doing well enough that many of the aforementioned features are essential to your ongoing success.

However, that’s not to say that Shopify Plus is your only option.

I would also highly recommend you consider other premium platforms like Magento andBigCommerce. They offer similar features to Shopify Plus and then some.

And here’s the thing: if your company is at the level where it needs enterprise software, then there’s room to negotiate the price. 

So, if you decide on a platform that you know would fit your company's eCommerce needs, feel free to contact the company and try negotiating the price. Plenty of businesses have succeeded at getting a lower price on Shopify Plus and other premium platforms (obviously, it helps if your eCommerce company is successful).

At the very least, you have nothing to lose (except overhead).

Shopify Plus Alternatives for MSBs

As I mentioned at the beginning, if yours is a small or medium-sized business, Shopify has three great alternatives to Shopify Plus that will be a lot easier on your budget:

•        Basic Shopify:$29/month
•        Shopify: $79/month
•        Advanced Shopify: $299/month

So, there's no reason to rush into Shopify Plus. You can always start with one of these other versions and work your way up.

And, as I mentioned earlier, we may be able to customize more affordable versions of Shopify to add the functionality you need without paying the price for Shopify Plus.

And, of course, there are other completely different eCommerce platforms to choose from, as well. Here are some posts we’ve done on how Shopify compares to some of these other options:

•      Shopify vs. Magento
•      Shopify vs. BigCommerce
•      Shopify vs. Volusion
•      Shopify vs. Etsy
•      Shopify vs. Squarespace
•      Shopify vs. Amazon
•      Shopify vs. WooCommerce  

By all means, do your own research, but if you’d like to make a decision sooner rather than later…

Need Help Deciding if Shopify Plus Is Worth It for Your Business?

Well, we’ve now spent A LOT of time reviewing the price of Shopify Plus and whether or not it’s going to be worth the investment for your specific company.

Still, I know it’s a huge decision. Few things will have as big an effect on the success of your eCommerce store as the platform you choose for it.

That’s why we’d be more than happy to help. If you’d like some free advice about Shopify Plus or other popular eCommerce platforms, feel free tocontact us.

 

=============================================

Subscribe to us: https://bit.ly/2UqyOg2

IWD Agency offers online business solutions that help maximize the retailer’s consumer base with a professional website, online branding, marketing, and optimizing the overall customer retail experience. Discover the true value of your brand with professional solutions offered by experts in the online retail industry. IWD Agency YouTube channel is focused on providing quality content information, news, tips and tricks and much more.

At our YouTube channel, you’ll find all the necessary information that you need to maximize your eCommerce biz. So, make sure you follow our content and don’t forget to share these videos and leave a like if you liked them or if not, comment it down, we always find ways to keep improving us 😊

=============================================

Follow us at:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iwdagency/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iwdagency/

Check out more great eCommerce products, services, and resources from IWD