Shopify Plus

You have heard of Shopify Plus but you don't know exactly what it is? What are the differences with "normal" Shopify? Is Shopify better for you? And if so how much does it cost? Come discover with us why we are convinced that Shopify Plus today is certainly the most powerful e-commerce platform in the world.  Here are all the answers to better understand Shopify Plus in our complete and free "Shopify Plus" file below.

What is Shopify Plus? 

Shopify Plus is an e-commerce SaaS solution, software as a service (in the cloud), which is aimed at merchants who need to process order volumes greater than 5 to 6 million euros per year.

It's a Shopify plan available only from the Shopify Plus team and at their discretion, which provides many Shopify enhancements to keep you growing. 

Shopify Plus is aimed at all sectors of online sales, whether clothing, bags, Luxury, sport, accessories, food (Food & Beverages), Home, retailer... 

The type of product or their number is not an issue for Shopify Plus.

If you already have an E-commerce site, for example under Magento, Salesforces commerce cloud or other, Shopify Plus is therefore intended to replace it to offer you more features and services in the development of your e-commerce strategy.

What is the difference between Shopify and Shopify Plus? 

Shopify VS Shopify Plus could be the title of this paragraph. This is a question that we are very regularly asked and it is normal! From a distance, the difference doesn't seem that big. 

So before talking about the differences, let's talk about the commonalities: Shopify and Shopify Plus are the same e-commerce solution. The same in the sense that you will not be out of place and where things work exactly the same way under Shopify or Shopify Plus. 

Shopify Plus is a game-changer on several levels because it is specifically aimed at merchants with between 5 to 6 million euros in turnover up to several hundred million euros in turnover per year. 

Some sites Shopify Plus in the United States even exceeded the billion euros in turnover. It is therefore a solution adapted to sites with a high volume of orders.

Who is Shopify Plus for? 

Is Shopify Plus for you? That's a great question! As you have seen, there is already a criterion of turnover or volume of orders for the investment in Shopify Plus to be interesting.

But apart from this criterion, what are the elements to take into account to know if Shopify Plus is for you or not? 

Do you prefer your teams to focus on sales or technical issues?

If you prefer your e-commerce teams to be focused on marketing, sales, and merchandising, then Shopify Plus is for you. If, on the other hand, technical subjects are important to you and you want to master, develop or modify each technical element one by one, then Shopify Plus may not be for you. 

Do you want to gain agility or manage sprints and bugtracking? 

Switch to Shopify Plus it's saying goodbye to your agency's bug tracking, endless technical meetings, code errors and production releases once every quarter. 

With Shopify Plus, you can add a functional application in a few hours, ideal for gaining agility and deploying improvements quickly for your customers.

Shopify Plus empowers merchants instead of dragging them into endless technical issues. 

The benefits of Shopify Plus 

Shopify Plus therefore includes all the basics of a Shopify Advanced site but adds certain features appreciated by the biggest merchants. 

💎 Unique apps 

Already quite complete in its "normal" version, Shopify offers even more applications for Shopify Plus sites. Indeed, some of them are 100% reserved for Shopify Plus sites and allow you to improve your productivity, automate certain tasks, connect new platforms, etc.

Unfortunately, there is no "Shopify Plus App" category yet on the Shopify appstore to quickly identify Shopify Plus-only apps. Hopefully this will change in the future with maybe even a dedicated Shopify Plus app store.

💲 The billing system

But apart from the apps dedicated to Shopify Plus, what changes the most between Shopify and Shopify Plus is certainly the invoicing system. Shopify indeed requires a subscription and takes a commission on each sale.

The percentage varies depending on the package you have chosen. 

With Shopify Plus, the system remains similar but adapts to large volumes of turnover to remain competitive. 

Below 0,000 in revenue, Shopify license is 00 per month and 0.15% transaction fee if you don't go through Shopify payment. Shopify Payments is unfortunately not yet available in France so for the moment, these 0.15% are to be taken into account. 

For a monthly turnover of 700,000 € for example, or 8.4 million euros in annual turnover, your site Shopify Plus will therefore cost you €36,600 all-inclusive (excluding paid applications). 

Your Shopify Plus site, the ultimate in modern e-commerce, will therefore cost you 0.44% of your license turnover. It's really hard to find a more economical solution in my opinion.

🔟 Ten sites in the same package.

But who says e-merchant with high traffic and high turnover also often says international vision. Shopify Plus has understood this and therefore offers you to manage up to 10 sites in the same Shopify Plus plan. 

Ideal if you are an international brand and want to consolidate your budgets or are looking to expand into new markets. 

But it is also a good opportunity to launch new sites in new markets without any additional licensing costs. 

🏢 Shopify Plus and B2B

With Shopify Plus, each of your sites can also have a B2B offer via a dedicated "mini site". This saves on the price of B2B apps as they become unnecessary with Shopify Plus. 

It is possible to create price rules for discounts based on customer tags or discounts based on purchase volumes.

You have complete control over all operations and of course this B2B site is entirely optional. 

🚀 An unbridled API 

Who says large sales volumes says massive use of APIS. They very often make it possible to exchange information between the different systems that make up your company's IS (information system). 

With Shopify Plus, the limits of APIs are unbridled and allow you to do a lot more automation between different systems. enough to optimize your shop even more.

👍 Shopify Plus Support 

But when you make several tens or several hundreds of millions of euros in turnover, you also appreciate having support and customer service. 

That's good because Shopify Plus offers even better than that: a success manager. Their role is to support you in using Shopify Plus and help you get the most out of Shopify Plus features. And the good news is that Shopify Plus started recruiting successful French-speaking managers! 

We all know that it's a real plus for e-commerce teams to have a contact who speaks French. This facilitates communication and limits wasted time. 

🖥️ Powerful servers

But Shopify Plus is also super-powerful servers to guarantee the availability of your e-commerce site at all times. Already, by eliminating technical updates, security patches, infrastructure and hosting problems, you will save considerable time in managing your merchant site.

But with capacities of more than 10,000 checkouts per minute, or almost 170 orders per second, 99.98% availability, unlimited bandwidth, a global cloud to collect traffic from any country and Level 1 PCI certification. DSS, Shopify plus is an extremely powerful and robust tool.

♾️ De l'omnicanal first 

But today, is simply offering "the best E-commerce CMS in the world" enough? Not necessarily. This is why Shopify Plus is also equipped with a native Omnichannel brick to allow a native connection between physical points of sale and your E-commerce site thanks to Shopify POS. 

By combining Shopify POS, point of sale, and Shopify Plus, it's literally possible to Omnichannel your entire business in just a few clicks. 

This incredible feat is within your reach with Shopify Plus.

Should I upgrade to Shopify Plus?

Switching to Shopify Plus is therefore a question that may arise for many merchants. But for whom and when? let's see it together

Already, if your turnover is less than 5 million euros per year, switching to Shopify Plus is a priori of little interest to you. 

Indeed, if you are below this CA, the Shopify Advanced version seems sufficient and will certainly cost you less. 

If you swear by open source then you should not migrate to Shopify Plus. 

Then, if you are on a Magento, Salesforce commerce cloud or Prestashop platform, then migrating to Shopify Plus can represent a great opportunity to gain in productivity and efficiency and even short-term financial gain.

The easiest way is therefore to achieve a TCO (total cost of ownership) out of two or three to include all the costs of the two platforms to compare.

So let's make together the list of Shopify Plus costs Firstly.

How much does Shopify Plus cost?

How much does Shopify Plus cost is certainly the question we receive most often at Pikka. 

The answer is quite simple! 

Shopify costs 0.25% of the monthly turnover of your E-commerce site + 0.15% commission on payments. Or 0.4% of your turnover.

If you make 10,000,0000 in revenue (10 million), then the cost of Shopify Plus is ,000. 

If you make 50,000,0000 in revenue (50 million), then the cost of Shopify Plus is 0,000.

This includes all the points managed by Shopify such as unlimited bandwidth, servers, technological developments, updates etc…

It is even possible in theory to pay less, just 0.25% of turnover using Shopify Payments but unfortunately, Shopify Payments is currently not available in France.

Shopify Plus Two-Year TCO Example 

So let's calculate the TCO of Shopify Plus over two years for a company generating 25 million e-commerce sales per year.

Licence Shopify Plus par an : 62500 €

Commission fees on payments per year: €37,500 

Creation of the Shopify Plus site and migration (one time): around €100,000

TCO over two years = License x2 + Commission fees x2 + creation cost x1 = 62500*2+37500*2+100000 = €300,000 TCO .

As a reminder, if you want to make the comparison with another e-commerce solution like Magento or Salesforce commerce nails the cost of maintenance and agencies must be added in addition to the other solutions.

With Shopify Plus, 99% of the maintenance simply disappears.

It's up to you to do the math, but here are some average TCO figures under Magento and Salesforce for an equivalent e-commerce 

Magento TCO over two years: around €600,000 

TCO Salesforce commerce cloud: more than a million euros.

Who are the competitors of Shopify Plus? 

As we saw just above, Shopify Plus is a front-end competitor to Salesforce Commerce cloud and Magento enterprise edition. 

In some titles, Shopify Plus is also a competitor of Proximis because they address the same target.

Shopify Plus is therefore not a "no code" tool or a competitor of Wix. They are aimed at the largest e-commerce merchants in the world to offer them a powerful and unified approach to their e-commerce.

How do I upgrade to Shopify Plus?

Interested in Shopify Plus? So there are not 36 solutions, you have to fill out the Shopify plus request form here and wait to be contacted by the Shopify Plus team who will validate the project.

Once the project has been validated, you can migrate to Shopify Plus and take advantage of all the new features! 

Note that a Shopify migration project Plus usually takes between two and four months and costs on average between €75,000 and €150,000. 

Of course, the easiest way is to ask us for a more precise quote to define with you the most suitable schedule and budget! 

FAQ Shopify Plus

Are there any migration fees to switch to Shopify Plus? 

If you already have an online store on Shopify then migrating to Shopify won't cost you a penny and it can be done quickly. The first step is to make a request through the Shopify Plus migration form. This is the essential step to upgrade to Shopify Plus. It is not possible to request it from your interface or to subscribe to it directly online. It is essential to go through a Shopify Plus expert who will validate the request and who will take care of the process internally at Shopify.

Once the request is validated, the rest will only take a few days for Shopify to transfer you to Shopify Plus without any apparent impact on your store. 

No outages, migrations, transfers or other service interruptions. 

Of course, once the transfer is made to Shopify Plus, you will receive an email confirming the smooth running of the operation. 

If you're not on Shopify yet then migrating to Shopify Plus is a bit different. You have to get closer to your favorite Shopify agency (the Pikka Agency therefore) so that we can open a Shopify Plus store development and carry out a real migration project from your CMS to Shopify.

Once the data has been transferred, the site configured and the graphic charter created, we can activate the Shopify Plus site and transfer the DNS.

You will be able to enjoy your new Shopify Plus store independently. Note that this migration project from another CMS to Shopify Plus is a real project and can represent time and a certain budget, generally several tens of thousands of euros. We therefore recommend that you ask us for an estimate upstream to validate the technical feasibility of the project, introduce you to Shopify Plus as well as the different migration stages. 

Who uses Shopify Plus in France and around the world?

Many brands use Shopify Plus in France and around the world! Today, more than 10,000 e-commerce sites run with Shopify Plus and growth in France is close to 100% every year! 

In France 

In France, in the most famous brands that use Shopify Plus, we can note Ysé, Kookai, Mustela, Monnier Freres, Asphalte, Le tanner and of course brands like Jimmy Fairly, Typology, Le petit lunetier etc... 

This list is obviously not exhaustive and is growing day by day! 

In the world 

 

Worldwide also Shopify Plus is becoming more and more popular. Major reference brands like Pepsico, Staples, Gymshark, Allbirds use it every day to generate millions of euros in turnover.