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If you do not know the difference between Shopify vs Shopify Plus, this review is for you. You will learn the features of these pricing plans, the difference between them and what kind of plan would best fit your business strategy.
The Shopify platform offers four pricing plans:
In each of these plans, you can use a number of features that will facilitate the process of working with an online store. However, it is worth considering some restrictions that reduce them. The main parameters that distinguish them from each other are the workload, capacity, and capabilities of the store. The higher these indices are, the higher the price for the pricing plan is. Shopify vs Shopify Plus pricing plans are intended for use by small and medium business owners who struggle to achieve professional growth, improve service levels, and increase sales. In the following article, some key differences between the two plans are discussed.
Price: from $79
Shopify is the most popular pricing plan
This plan provides access only to the admin panel. To expand your capabilities, you need to install different apps (API). You can create your own app that may solve your problem, or buy it in the Shopify App Store. The options available at this price are listed below.
Support service
If you have any questions or problems with the Shopify platform, you can contact technical support staff for help. They will advise you on a 24/7 basis. You are asked to choose the communication format with our experts; such as an online phone consultation, exchange of letters by e-mail or instant messages in the chat. Direct communication with the experts will save you time searching for the required information. You will receive clear answers to your questions as well.
Staff admin accounts registration
If you have several employees on your team, we recommend creating individual accounts for them. You can limit permission for them, giving access to the admin at Shopify without providing access to confidential information. The availability of individual accounts will also help you track both changes and the latest activities in your store's work. Using the Shopify pricing plan, you can create up to five accounts for your employees.
Protection from fraud
Using the Shopify pricing plan, you can prevent financial fraud against customers, which will also save you money. How does it work? In the built-in fraud analysis, Shopify uses technological algorithms that signal suspicious orders. With the help of the analysis, you can determine:
How to declassify the fraudsters:
Also, in Shopify, you can install the apps that will help you track the fraudsters’ actions. These are Fraud Filter, NoFraud and other apps available.
Manual order function
With the help of this function, you can track the products and manage shipping. The Manual order function is best used in cases where:
Bonuses
Discount codes
Use the discounts on your products to encourage customers to choose your brand. You can create a discount coupon for any amount. The discount codes can be generated for a dollar amount, an interest discount, or a coupon for free shipping. You create them using the DiscountCode resource. You can distribute discount codes to your customers via an email address or URL. After you distribute the code, your customers can use it when placing an order.
Gift cards
With the help of the Shopify POS app, you can provide customers with bonuses for the purchase of your products in the form of gift cards. This is a great opportunity to increase the level of loyalty of your customers. Let them share the "love" for your brand. Moreover, the gift cards will increase the number of the consumers, which is one more advantage of using them. The most effective way is a gift certificate for a birthday or other significant events. This is an excellent solution for the customer, as the gift cards can be used in both online and offline stores.
Analytics
Your sales depend on how well you know your target audience and sales statistics. In the Shopify pricing plan, you can get analytics about the effectiveness of the online store. Shopify managers analyze your data and provide a report. You can add or delete columns in reports, edit them, and filter them to display the information you need. Also, it is possible to install Google Analytics or third-party analytical services for your store.
Notifications setting
If you are set to make a discount for the company's birthday, the question is how the visitor is going to know about that? Only when they visit your site? Then only about 20% of your customers will know about the event. But you can plan the process differently. Shopify ensures that you do not lose touch with your customers. Notify the site visitors about important company events via e-mail. This is a simple and effective way of communication. To send e-mails to your customers, we use the MailChimp service. This is an easy-to-use service.
Be even closer to your customer: send information about discounts in the form of SMS-notifications. The MailChimp developers have integrated a special app into the service, which allows you to send private messages to your customers. To do it, you need to set a shortcode -"88802".
More: https://mailchimp.com/integrations/sms-plugin-for-mailchimp/
Let your customers feel that you care about them. Do not let this factor out of your strategy.
Abandoned Cart Recovery
More than 50% of online store visitors do not make the purchase on their first visit. Many customers visit the page more than 10 times before they place an order. There are many factors why they do so, but the only reason is doubt. The customer adds an order to the store’s cart but does not purchase it. To solve this problem, download the Abandon Aid Abandoned Cart Recovery Service. It sends automatic emails to the customers who leave your store without having completed the purchase process. Do not let your customers forget about you. Let’s go ahead and consider some pros and cons of Shopify vs Shopify plus.
Despite a large number of advantages of the less expensive Shopify plan, it also has some negative features:
Shopify Plus is an advanced Shopify plan. It is also used by SME owners. However, the capacity of this pricing plan is much higher than the less expensive Shopify plan.
Let's look at an example: we have two clients who have the same amount of information and products on their site. One of them receives 10 orders to be processed every day, the other one gets 100. So, we strongly recommend the latter client purchase the Shopify Plus plan because Shopify Plan cannot process such a quantity of information in the short term. The problems with the download will emerge, leading to an increase in the number of customers who leave the site. In other words, it will cause the loss of the customers.
The first thing we want to focus on is that all the features in Shopify vs Shopify Plus are the same. We mean that the features of the Shopify plan are in the Shopify Plus plan. Shopify Plus includes additional features which contribute to increasing the efficiency of your store.
How much does Shopify Plus cost?
Price: from $2000
The cost frightens off many customers. We must emphasize one thing. If you want to make the sales outside your country, you need to set up a multi-language and multi-currency site. Automatic switching to another language in the less expensive Shopify Plan is not possible. However, if you bought the Shopify Plus plan, you can create nine copies of your store for free. To create the clones, you do not need to buy an individual pricing plan. Hence, the cost of Shopify Plus at $2000 is the price for ten stores. Accordingly, the cost of one store would be $200.
Support service
When you buy a Shopify Plus plan, the platform managers will provide you with informational support as well as technical assistance in the development of the store.
Store development manager consultation
If you need any help in marketing for an online store, you can access the advice of a business development manager.
A Merchant Success Manager will help you:
Consultation with the manager on work with the store
The Shopify Plus pricing plan provides many opportunities which the owners of online stores do not know about. Let’s illustrate one more advantage of Shopify Plus. When you purchase this pricing plan, you are assigned the manager to help you launch the store.
Shopify launch manager will help you:
Accounts registration (staff admin accounts)
In the section about the Shopify pricing plan, we described why you should register individual accounts for your employees. In this pricing plan, you can create five cabinets. Thus, in the Shopify Plus Plan, you can register an unlimited number of account users. You should understand that only an account owner can create and delete staff accounts. The users with full admin access can change other employees’ accounts and create POS personnel PIN-codes. The employees cannot edit the store owner’s account.
This feature concerns all Shopify pricing plans.
The capability to make check-out changes
Shopify Plus is the only pricing plan that allows the developers to access the checkout.liquid on the check-out page. This is the language of the design theme that is used in Shopify. Using this component, you can create your own theme. If you use less expensive plans, you can add only the logo and change the page colors. Shopify Plus provides advanced customization, which gives you more control over the branding of the store.
Migration of a large amount of data from other platforms
An interesting component of Shopify is that you can migrate your data from one eCommerce platform to Shopify in any price plan. To do it, you need to integrate special apps into the store. However, if you need to have more than 20,000 items migrated, the data migration in the basic pricing plans may take several days. For most business that just doesn't work. Therefore, in order to solve this problem and to migrate the information quickly, install the Shopify Plus plan. You can contact technical support experts for help with any problems that arise during migration. You can take a different turn and install the Transporter app.
"The Transporter app is part of a set of tools that make it easy to transfer online stores data from other platforms to the Shopify Plus."
For detailed information about the application, refer to help.shopify.com/en/manual/migrating-to-shopify/transporter-app. How to organize this process in the standard pricing plan is described in the article "How to migrate from Magento to Shopify".
Automation with Launchpad
Launchpad is an app for automation and planning of events, holidays, goods receipts. It is available only in the Shopify Plus plan. When you install the pricing plan, the app will automatically become available to you.
In this app, everything is connected with the events. For example, a client is planning a New Year's sale, from December 25 to December 31. We used to manually create a section, and then activate it on the day of the promotion. But now this process can be automated with Launchpad.
This app will help you:
Workflow Automation with the Flow app
With the help of the Flow app, you can manage the actions in Shopify (an order, a new user, etc.). Notifications can be received in messenger, by e-mail, etc. For example: when your products are running low, you will receive a notification "Xiaomi phones are ending". It's time to order new ones. Also, you can identify important customers with the help of tags. If the customer made a purchase for more than $200, then the tag "VIP client" is automatically added to his data. To thank the customer for the purchase, you can send him a message "Thank you for your purchase".
Access to the exclusive APIs
API Gift Card
Each gift card has a unique code that is entered at the time of placing an order. Its balance can be bought back through several checks. If desired, you can assign a gift card to a specific customer. The gift card codes cannot be restored after they are created - only the last four signs can be restored. You can use the GiftCard resource to create, receive, update and delete gift cards for the store. After creating a gift card, you can update only expiration date, a note, and a template suffix.
User API (User resource)
With the help of the User resource, you can get information about the accounts of your Shopify store’s employees. The store owner can add, delete and edit accounts. Employees with full permissions can only edit the permissions of other staff accounts. The employees with individual permissions can only edit their own account. This is necessary when you work with CRM and process a large number of orders. This API will allow you to have up-to-date information about the work of each manager.
What data can be received with User API?
Integration with Avalara AvaTax
Shopify Plus helps distributors maximize the productivity and efficiency of their business. Despite the fact that the platform automates many elements of your business, one has to manually calculate taxes from the percentage of sales. This is a complex process that takes up your time. To solve this problem the Shopify developers connected the software Avalara AvaTax to the system of the Shopify Plus plan. Avalara AvaTax is a software that automates the calculation of taxes and the process of filing a tax return in real-time. This is the most reliable supplier in the field of sales and use of taxes.
https://www.avalara.com/us/en/products/integrations/shopify-plus.html
The automation of the rates with the help of this app will allow you to avoid losing customers.
Wholesale / B2B-functions
When you buy the Shopify Plus plan, you can expand your business and sell goods in bulk. A wholesale store is "built" on the basis of a retail store. What are the steps to be made?
In the admin of the account, click on the + button next to the header of the sales channels. In the Add Sales Channel dialogue box, find an option in the list of available channels and click on Details. Then click on Add Channel. You can set new prices and add the products that will be available only for wholesale. The wholesale store account does not match the account of the retail store. You cannot enter the wholesale store using the name and password of the online retail store.
Are the Shopify Plus features not that good?
When you switch to the Plus plan, you get a number of opportunities that help your business grow and sales increase. However, there are limits to the plan. As in all Shopify pricing plans, you will not be able to make changes to the back-end. To customize the theme, you need to learn Liquid, the language of Shopify encoding. Without understanding this encoding language, you can only change the font, colors, content, and layout of the store.
In this review we provided a description of the Shopify and Shopify Plus plans, and also pointed out the difference between them. After the first reading, they need to be considered and analyzed. However, we wanted to convey the main features that affect the choice between these platforms – i.e. capacity.
We advise business owners to switch to the Shopify Plus, not because of the "bigger and better things" it offers. The effectiveness of the pricing plan is a higher level of capacity and high-quality work with a large amount of information. Therefore, if you receive more than 100 purchases per day, choose the Shopify Plus pricing plan. It is perfect for your business. We summarized all of the above information in the table below, to help you better remember the material.
Hopefully, the information regarding the features in the two plans assists you in choosing the best plan for your business. If you’re still unsure whether to choose Shopify vs Shopify Plus, please contact Makebecool for help.
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Elena, part of MakeBeCool since 2021, brings 4 years of e-commerce and IT project management expertise. A performance-driven professional, she managed multiple site developments for international projects. Outside the tech world, Elena sharpens her skills through reading and courses, enjoying travel, loud music in the car, and cherished moments with family and friends.
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