Shopify vs Shopify Plus: Is It Time To Upgrade?

Shopify is one of the best ecommerce website builders, providing stand out sales features for businesses of all sizes.

• I’d recommend Shopify for: small to medium sized businesses that are looking for a platform with strong sales features to support their growth.
• I’d recommend Shopify Plus for: large global ecommerce enterprises looking for solutions to their complex business structures.

Shopify’s three core plans are designed to scale with your business and provide increasing features to reflect evolving business needs. They also all often offer a discounted first month to new customers, which is a great option for new or existing businesses looking to test the waters.

Meanwhile, Shopify Plus includes all of the great sales and analytics features of the three core plans, but made more advanced with a focus on large enterprises – we’re talking the likes of Flying Tiger and Sony. It also offers a host of new tools, support, and customization made to support these businesses and their complex needs.

Shopify Plus, on the surface, provides a greater experience and may seem like the best option, but with this comes a steep increase in cost. Whether this premium plan will be good value for money for your business depends on your needs and how much use you will make out of the tools it has to offer.

As a general rule, I only recommend Shopify Plus for large businesses selling in multiple markets and earning over $1 million annually. If you’re building your store or currently run a small to medium sized business, stick with the core plans for now.

Plan Cost

Shopify pricing jumps considerably between plans. If you want to pay monthly, Shopify Plus isn’t for you because it only allows for annual bulk payments. As well as this, Shopify Plus won’t allow you to trial its services at a free or discounted rate like the other plans, whereas on the core plans, you can try it free for three days and get your first month for $1.

If you’re paying annually, which works out cheapest, you’ll be looking at $348 for Shopify Basic, $948 for Shopify, $3,588 for Shopify Advanced, and a much steeper $2,500 for Shopify Plus. By agreeing to a three year plan with Plus, you can save $200 per month.

But the Shopify Plus plan is slightly more complex. If your business starts to earn over $800,000 per month, your charges will switch from the fixed rate to a revenue model, which means you’ll be charged 0.4% of your monthly income up to the limit of $40,000 per month.

To get an accurate understanding of pricing for your business, you can get in touch with Shopify Plus for a consultation.

Processing and Transaction Fees

Processing and transaction fees vary depending on your plan and whether you decide to use Shopify’s native payment gateway Shopify Payments. When using Shopify Payments, processing fees start at 2.9% +30¢ per transaction on the Basic plan and lower to 2.5%+30¢ with Shopify Advanced. These rates get even lower using Shopify Payments on Shopify Plus, but again, exact pricing is not provided until direct consultation.

You’ll also be charged no transaction fees on any paid Shopify plan when using its native payment gateway, which means that, all in all, you’ll be saving considerably on each customer purchase.

If you decide to use a third party payment gateway, Shopify also supports this, but your total fees would be considerably higher because you have to pay the Shopify transaction fee in addition to the standard processing fee by your chosen gateway.

To put this into perspective, the average processing fees are usually between 1.5% to 3.5%, so if you were on Shopify Basic, you could be paying up to 5.5% per transaction, whereas with Shopify Plus, you would be paying up to 3.65%.

All Shopify plans will provide you access to Shopify’s library of downloadable themes. There’s 213 in total; 13 are free and the rest range in price between $140 to $450.

All plans have access to Shopify’s editor once downloading a theme, which will allow you to apply basic stylistic adjustments and, once you add your products, divide them into category pages of your choosing.

This editing style is relatively limited, but further modifications are available through using Shopify’s theme language, Liquid – if you know how to code. Liquid will allow you to make tweaks to your store, from hiding sold out products to showing product recommendations on your product page.

Liquid is relatively easy to learn if you’re a coding newbie; Shopify has detailed support in its help center and there’s lots of tutorials on YouTube if you’re a visual learner.

Shopify is reliant on third party apps that can be downloaded through its native app store to improve store functionality. 

Public Shopify apps built with Shopify Functions can be installed and used on any paid plan, but those with a Shopify Plus plan have the ability to build custom apps that contain Shopify Function APIs. The great thing about these custom apps is that they are unique and cannot be downloaded by other stores.

Shopify Plus offers next level customization options with headless commerce, which involves separating the front end (presentation layer) from the back end (functional layer) of your storefront. This allows you full control to isolate and tweak small areas of either end without altering the whole unit. This is useful for selling on different digital platforms, creating unique experiences for your site visitors.

You can create a headless storefront on any paid Shopify plan, but access to some APIs are limited, so this feature can only be used to its full potential with Shopify Plus. Also, Shopify Plus allows you to have up to 25 headless storefronts that can be managed through one backend, which is great for businesses with multiple web pages.

Checkout Extensibility is another great customization feature only available on Shopify Plus that allows users to apply customizations to their checkout. This has just replaced checkout.liquid in August 2024, and it allows you to edit your checkout, thank you, and order status pages without coding.

Monos, a Canadian travel luggage company, is a great example of Checkout Extensibility in action. With four successful, global online stores, it had struggled to adjust its checkouts across stores without costly fees and issues with coding. Since upgrading to Checkout Extensibility, Monos has:

• Saved 10 hours per month in development time across their stores.
• Provided a seamless and fast checkout experience.
• Customized checkouts across stores while integrating Shop Pay, which has converted 50% better than guest checkout.

Shopify offers tons of outstanding sales features on all of its plans, such as abandoned cart recovery. Below I’ll compare some important features available to both platforms, then run through Launchpad, a Shopify Plus exclusive app.

Omnichannel Selling

Multi-channel integration is available on all Shopify plans and allows you to sell in lots of different places. This is a useful feature for Shopify merchants that sell on Facebook or make extra money on Instagram, for example, because it integrates your product seamlessly into these platforms.

Shopify Plus extends these selling options further with its Omnichannel selling tool, which lets you sell on over 100 social media platforms and over 80 marketplaces. These sales can all be tracked through your dashboard which helps to keep track of everything in one place.

Localized Global Selling

Localizing your store for a global market essentially means that when you’re selling internationally, these customers will experience your store as though it’s local to them. Shopify has tools available on all plans that allow you to change currencies, payment methods, and languages to incite trust in your customers and boost conversions. The main difference between plans is the amount of markets you’re able to use these tools in.

On both the Shopify Basic and Shopify Advanced plans, you can sell in a maximum of three markets. For Shopify Advanced, three are included in your plan, but you have the option to pay a monthly fee of $59 for each new market you sell in, up to 50 markets. And with Shopify Plus, all 50 markets are included in your plan.

Checkout Capacity

Checkout capacity varies massively between Shopify accounts. With both Shopify Basic and Shopify plans, you’ll have the standard capacity, which is around 4,000 checkouts per minute. Once this threshold has been reached, your buyers will be put into a queue before checking out. On the Shopify Advanced plan, you’ll get 10X the standard capacity, and Shopify Plus allows 40X.

4,000 checkouts per minute should be enough for most stores, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind if you’re selling through social media platforms and aiming for viral products, since you’ll want your store to be able to keep up with busy periods or sales.

Launchpad App

Launchpad is an app exclusively for Shopify Plus members, allowing you to schedule events. These events can be anything from a temporary website theme – maybe for a seasonal event or sale – to adding limited-edition inventory items to even attaching lines of script to pages for a period of time.

Automating like this is really useful for busy online stores because it removes room for human error and saves time that can be focused on running other aspects of the business.

Stores on all Shopify plans will be provided with its own dedicated analytics dashboard. From here you can see an overview of your online store’s sales and custom reports. There’s even a live view, showing you minute-by-minute data.

This will give the majority of ecommerce businesses all the insight they need. 

However, surprise surprise, Shopify Plus goes one step further.

Shopify Plus provides an app, ShopifyQL Notebooks, to bring you custom reports on your business that include expert data and visual insights. With this app, businesses can write custom queries about the data they receive so that they can thoroughly understand their data, which is a useful option for ecommerce giants that need to make quick, impactful business decisions.

Whatever Shopify plan you’re on, you’ll have access to a 24/7 live chat to help with all account queries that may crop up, as well as access to an online help center. The big difference is that Shopify Plus customers get priority live chat, as well as access to a 24/7 phone line. Again, this reflects the growing needs of larger businesses that have complex issues that are best understood over the phone.

On top of this, all Shopify plans provide access to Shopify Academy, an online education center teaching users how to use the platform. Shopify Plus users have access to all of these, in addition to exclusive Academy courses, which cover making the most of Shopify Plus features, ecommerce best practices, and utilizing API integrations on your account.

The Shopify Partners Program is the real standout for Shopify Plus users when it comes to support. This is a hub of skilled experts in marketing, design, and coding that are paid by Shopify to be on call to help you with issues and build services designed to scale your business.

Choosing the right plan for you isn’t clear cut, it will involve thinking about your unique business situation and requirements. Here are some areas to consider before upgrading to the Shopify Plus plan:

• Your business size: Shopify itself recommends upgrading to Shopify Plus once you reach sales of over $80,000 per month. If you upgrade prematurely, the cost of the plan will outweigh the savings on transaction fees and you might not have grown enough to make the most of the sales features.
• Your technical expertise: With the freedom of editing comes a lot of responsibility and risk; inputting the wrong code or not understanding APIs before delving into editing can lead to big problems. To make the most of Shopify Plus’ advanced customization features, you will have to have a high level of technical knowledge or have a team in place to handle this side of things.
• Your location: Shopify Plus pricing lowers the most when using it in conjunction with Shopify Payments. This unfortunately isn’t available in all countries, so make sure you check the supported countries for Shopify Payments, or you may encounter more fees than you initially expected.
• Your business’ global reach: If your business only aims to sell within one to three markets, chances are you won’t need to upgrade to Shopify Plus; lots of its stand out features are designed for businesses selling in up to 50 markets simultaneously. By going with the Shopify Advanced plan, you’ll have the freedom to expand your markets one country at a time as you grow.
• Your current plan limits: If you’re already on a Shopify plan, think about the limits that your current plan puts on global selling, customization, inventory locations, and staff accounts. If you’re finding your business growth limited because you’re hitting the top end of these limits, then it’s probably time for you to upgrade! But be sure to consider the costs first, to ensure it’s a sustainable move.

When it comes to Shopify vs Shopify Plus, you’re looking at two platforms with the same foundations. Shopify Plus just has more bells and whistles designed for the needs of large global companies.

This is why we’d recommend Shopify for small to medium sized ecommerce businesses who need a powerful platform that can grow with them, and Shopify Plus for enterprise-level businesses who already need to sell thousands of products every single day.

If you’re not quite ready for Shopify Plus just yet, don’t worry – it’s a great business goal to aim for! With the three core Shopify plans, you’ll have the tools to hopefully scale your business to that level one day!