Shopify Plus is Shopify's top-tier version designed to meet the functional needs and scalability of larger businesses. Shopify Plus features a base licensing charge of $2,000 per month, which increases to a Gross Merchandising Value percentage of 0.25% after your gross monthly revenue exceeds $800,000. When comparing licensing alone or as part of a larger TCO analysis, this charge remains relatively competitive as against most other mid-market and enterprise-level platforms.

Other Shopify Tiers

Shopify Lite - Shopify Lite is a lite version for people that sell through other channels but don't currently need an online store. These other channels could include a blog, POS, Facebook, and so on. Payment rates are higher but look smaller because it charges only $9/month.

Basic Shopify  — At $29/month, Basic Shopify is ideal for new startups because it includes a lot of the essential features, but with higher payment rates. Some functionality is missing, such as gift cards, and you can only have two users.

Shopify — It is similar to basic Shopify, but with competitive pricing and features, including gift cards, report builder, and more POS tools. With Shopify at $79/month, you can have up to 5 users.

Shopify Advanced - Shopify Advanced is a feature-rich version of Shopify's strong SaaS-based platform, however, it has fewer features and benefits compared to Shopify Plus, with the gap also increasing all the time. The monthly fee for Shopify advanced is $299/month.

Top 10 reasons for Shopify Plus

Based on our experience with Shopify, these are the top reasons individuals choose to upgrade to Shopify Plus:

Higher Number of Staff Access

The amount of staff users you may have on your store on non-Plus Shopify versions is limited — which might be a huge deal, especially during development. A  typical Shopify Plus project involves access from about five people from the client's team, numerous people from the development agency, an SEO resource, any third parties handling any integration, and any other consultants, among other things. It's easy to see how rapidly this adds up.

On the lower Shopify plans, you're limited to 1, 2, and 5 accounts, which isn't nearly enough for a Shopify Plus build. Shopify Advanced is good because it limits you to 15 staff accounts, but when you upgrade to Shopify Plus, this number increases to infinite. 

Platform Account Support Manager

Shopify Plus merchants are assigned a Merchant Success Manager as part of their Shopify Plus license, who is responsible for assisting the merchant in using Shopify Plus and getting the most out of the platform.

Although most merchants rely on their consultants rather than assigned Shopify Plus managers, they can help answer concerns about the platform and raise issues with people higher up in Shopify.

New Feature Sets

Shopify is constantly releasing new features, with Unite announcing more features and advancements yearly.

The Need for Clone Store

Clone stores are arguably the most typical reason merchants consider Shopify Plus, whether it's for international stores or different channels - a separate wholesale store, or a staging store, for instance. Shopify Plus includes ten clone stores, allowing for a fair level of scale — after that, you simply pay a higher monthly charge for additional stores.

Although the clone stores function in isolation, for businesses using the Shopify Bonus platform, this is typically a major plus because it enables proper localized international stores, among other things. Most merchants also have a staging or test site set up to allow for bigger store changes and test deployments, and so on.

Multiple Currency Option

The multi-currency feature is also available with Shopify Plus. Despite its simplicity, this functionality can be useful for merchants, since it gives room for quick support for a variety of popular currencies, including local payments, via Shopify Payments.

The following currencies are supported by the multi-currency option, although pricing is dependent on a preset exchange rate, so you can't manage local price lists with this feature. Localizing currency based on a user's IP is the most common use of Shopify multi-currency, but you may also force a currency based on a URL.

These are the major currencies are supported by Shopify multi-currency:

• Euro
• Hong Kong $
• Japanese yen
• Swedish krona
• Australian $
• Canadian $
• Danish Krona
• United States $
• New Zealand $
• British £
• Singapore $

This is especially useful for retailers who want to test the concept of new markets or simply enable international traffic, but it isn't a scalable option for internationalization. You should also double-check to ensure that the app you're using is suitable.

Shopify Script

Shopify script allows Shopify Plus only users to build rules for offering promotions, shipping logic, discounts, and payments to individual customers or based on different criteria. Complex promotions, bundling, wholesale-only shipping options, tiered pricing and large order reductions, shipping discounts, and more are all instances where this feature has proven crucial for Shopify Plus users.

Scripts can be updated directly in Shopify (through the Script Editor) and are, in general, fairly easy to create and administer.

Launchpad for Shopify Plus

Shopify launchpad is a Shopify tool that allows only Shopify Plus users to schedule different administrative tasks in advance. This is a critical feature for many merchants, and it's an added value for merchants switching to the platform because it's so stable and reliable.

Wholesale Channel

Shopify Plus users can also use the Shopify wholesale channel, which includes several tools for building up a simple and easy-to-manage wholesale offering. Shopify Plus wholesale channel's primary features are as follows:

• Customer-specific payment options

• Draft payments + credit limits

• Ability to set purchasing limits etc

• Support for tiered pricing

• Customer-specific pricing

• Customer-specific product availability

• Restricted access, stripped-back wholesale store

• Easy to assign access to specific customers and groups of customers

Despite its simplicity, Shopify's wholesale channel is an excellent tool for handling low-volume and simple wholesale offerings. It's really simple to set up, and the ongoing management is also straightforward.

Checkout Customization

Although the Shopify checkout is well-known for being locked-down and inflexible which is not a bad idea, Shopify Plus users have access to the checkout, which allows them to customize more than users on other Shopify plans.

This gives room for scripting, custom messaging, and broader styling among other things, and can be quite handy for users that need to throw in extra functionality, such as custom fields or options.

Shopify Flow

Shopify flow, which enables rule-based automation of many types of operations or services, comes in handy for Shopify Plus users. It allows merchants to build an action based on a trigger and then variables, which could be anything from canceling an order to disabling a product to checking order dimensions to assigning a customer to a VIP group to even generating wholesale accounts.

Shopify Flow is very useful in automating manual activities, and Shopify Plus merchants will find it to be a useful feature. Some of the things you can do with it include:

• Changes to ordering options based on product availability

• Assigning customers to the wholesale channel

• Assigning tags to orders for custom order flows

• Fraud flagging on orders

• Changes to the theme based on customer tags

You can use Shopify Flow with third-party applications, such as Chargezen, Klaviyo, Yotpo, and Loyalty Lion. This is only going to get better, and it's a great value-add for Plus subscribers.

Although fraud scoring is available on all Shopify plans, controlling how orders are processed needs Shopify Flow, which is available only to Shopify Plus customers. Flagging orders based on fraud scores of order data is a common use case for Shopify Flow.

Final Thoughts

There's to the above list, but the important thing to note is that most of the value-added features are for Shopify Plus users only. For most retailers, these features alone are enough to warrant the $2,000 licensing charge - it's worth checking into this or trying to acquire additional information from Shopify on what's coming next and timetables before making this decision.