Shopify vs Shopify Plus: Which Plan is Right for Your Business? | 2024 Analysis

Shopify and Shopify Plus are two powerful solutions, but understanding their nuances is crucial for making the right choice. While Shopify caters to small to medium-sized businesses with its user-friendly interface and essential features, Shopify Plus offers advanced functionalities tailored for larger enterprises, such as scalability, customization, and dedicated support.

In this article, we’ll conduct a detailed comparison of Shopify and Shopify Plus, exploring their key differences in pricing, features, scalability, and support. By the end, you’ll have the insights needed to determine which platform aligns best with your business goals and requirements, ensuring a solid foundation for your e-commerce journey.

• 10+ differences between Shopify vs Shopify Plus
• Shopify vs Shopify Plus – Overview
• How to upgrade to Shopify Plus

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Shopify vs Shopify Plus – 10+ Key Differences & Detailed Features Comparision

#1. More powerful customization features

On both Shopify vs Shopify Plus, 140+ themes are available in its Theme Store. Bear in mind that, besides 12 free themes, the rest of the themes’ prices range from $170-$380. Don’t forget to check out the top-recommended Shopify themes here if picking a suitable one is too difficult for you!

As a matter of fact, big sellers also benefit from top-quality Shopify features in terms of theme and design flexibility. However, with the assistance of Shopify Plus, the Launch Manager is in charge of writing code and making custom edits for you. In this case, enterprise-level businesses can save hundreds of bucks and a great deal of time.

What’s more, Shopify Plus allows website owners to save up to 100 themes in the library. Simply download the theme you like and try it directly from your Admin Dashboard. No need to go back and forth between the Theme Store and your library.

#2. Auto-set multi-currency for global enterprise

Understanding the demand to attract international customers of Shopify merchants, since 2019, Shopify has launched the ability to sell in multiple currencies with Shopify Payments. This means your online store can change the currency displayed for your items depending on where the customer is. Additionally, customers can get refunds in local currency.

This brilliant idea opens the door for merchants who intend to sell globally since it facilitates customers’ payment process. Fortunately, the list of supported currencies is more than 130, so almost everyone can access your products without any barriers.

While your customers have to select the proper currency manually on Shopify, Shopify Plus automatically selects the appropriate currency for buyers based on their IP addresses.

What’s more, Shopify Plus advantages allow you to customize the rounding rules on your store after the system converts the origin price into a target currency. Besides, your customers can freely make the payment with local payment methods instead of creating an account on a new one. This is a plus point of Shopify Plus if you are considering entering the international market.

#3. More powerful Omnichannel Commerce

Omnichannel plays a great role in providing customers with a seamless experience on your website, social media accounts, brick-and-mortar stores, and more. By diversifying the storefront, we will have more opportunities to approach our target customers, leading to a strong relationship between the brand and the customers.

With Shopify Plus Omnichannel, we gained access to more than 100 social media channels together with over 80 online marketplaces, allowing us to enhance the visibility of your products in front of more potential customers. From our experience, you can win even more clients by automating messages and emails, thanks to Shopify Flow.

#4. Dedicated sales tax solutions

Shopify Plus lifts the burden of manually handling tax issues, thanks to Avalara AvaTax. This service will automatically calculate and file tax for you.

Avalara AvaTax is a paid service that is only available for Shopify Plus plans. After registering for Shopify Plus, we can purchase Avalara AvaTax. Once you activate Avalara, you can find it in Shopify organization admin to start charging taxes. Avalara AvaTax is compatible with both Shopify POS on Android and iOS devices.

Avalara AvaTax is helpful in:

• Collect accurate and up-to-date tax codes from more than 12,000 jurisdictions
• Modifying a set of tax rules to satisfy your business’s demand.
• Producing accurate reports of your business’s taxes

Despite some minor disadvantages, we still consider Avalara AvaTax as a cost-effective method.

#5. Optimized wholesale functions

Wholesale largely contributes to the increase of your sales and the expansion of your business. Luckily, Shopify enables you to sell your products wholesale. It offers a variety of ways to wholesale your products, from using discount codes to opening another store.

We have the same solutions of wholesale applied for Shopify Plus. However, we can benefit more from this version as it can help you to build up a wholesale channel separate from your Direct to Customer (DTC) sales. Since this channel is based on your existing store, we display the same products at exclusive discounts to wholesale customers. We can also sell wholesale-only products on this channel.

Besides customizing the pricing of wholesale products, Shopify Plus brands can even create percentage discounts. Plus, you can distribute customers into smaller groups and set a specific price for each one.

Another advantage of the Shopify Plus wholesale function is that we have the freedom to create separate pages to display the FAQs, policies, and terms when it comes to wholesale. This helps your customers browse the information they are looking for without accessing another website.

Specularly, we were able to control wholesale orders before invoicing as well as automate wholesale customer signups. Hence, we didn’t need to spend much time concerning order management and the credentials of customers. This saved us a lot of time and allowed us to focus on other marketing campaigns that drive the business forward.

Highlighted Shopify Plus features:

• Manage B2B and B2C orders from one single control panel.
• If you already have a Shopify store, Shopify Plus can synchronize entities like inventory, orders, and customers between two stores.
• Set price and quantity increments flexibly depending on different products or variants.
• Integrate your business to 3PL, OMS, ERP, and CRM.

#6. More API integrations to further enhance your store

Any merchants can expand their stores on Shopify vs Shopify Plus by employing API to integrate with several apps.

API plays an integral role in interoperating with other systems and platforms to add innovative features to Shopify and Shopify Plus. All Shopify APIs are rate-limited to remain stable and fair for every merchant. There are slight differences between Shopify vs Shopify Plus in integration.

With the doubled API call limit, Shopify allows you to integrate some third-party platforms seamlessly you’re already using, such as Product information management (PIM), Enterprise resource planning (ERP), Inventory, and order management (IMS and OMS)…

Shopify API is not limited to Shopify Plus, and it is available to all merchants on lower-tier Shopify plans. However, as you opt for Plus, you get access to additional and exclusive Shopify Plus API:

• REST
  • GiftCard
  • Multipass
  • User
• GraphQL
  • publishablePublish
  • publishableUnpublish

#7. More automation features with Shopify Launchpad  

Launchpad is an automation tool that allows you to handle tons of event tasks to launch your business impressively. We try to utilize the Launchpad to schedule, coordinate, and execute events such as sales, product drops and restocks of inventories. And guess what? It works like a charm.

Here are the full list of highlighted features that Launchpad offers:

• Change the product pricing at the start and end of an event.
• Make selected products available to your sales channels to release them at a chosen time and date.
• Increase inventory levels at the start of an event.
• Schedule creative and theme customizations to better highlight the products involved in the event.
• Schedule line items and shipping scripts to change prices and grant discounts at checkout.
• Password protects your online store for a set duration of time before the start of an event to build hype and anticipation.
• Gather data about the success of the event.

#8. More custom reports for better analyticity

Shopify serves its own dedicated analytic dashboard. The live reports will illustrate a broad picture of your up-to-date business’s sales and customer data. The higher fee you pay, the more detailed reports will be provided. Take a brief look at the table below to know how many reports you have with your current plan.

#9. Headless commerce

If you are a big fan of the digital world, you may probably hear about “Headless commerce”, a rising star that is promised to develop at a rapid growth in the years to come.

Keeping up with this latest trend, Shopify Plus headless eCommerce comes with numerous features that you would be interested in:

• Enjoy a high level of customizability
• Integrate your store with business and content management systems like ERP, PIM, CRM, and CMS
• Enhance the quality of your website’s visual with the GraphQL Storefront API.
• Give you the freedom to bring your own tech stack to your website.
• Get support from experienced Shopify Plus Partner

#10. Customizable checkout pages with Script Editor

Another superiority of making the difference between Shopify Plus vs Shopify is that it allows us to utilize Script Editor to customize your checkout page, which is not available on other Shopify plans.

Defined as small pieces of code, Shopify Scripts lets us create personalized experiences for your customers in their cart and customize Shopify checkout page.

There exist 3 sorts of scripts you can generate, which are Line item scripts, Shipping scripts, and Payment scripts. You can:

• Change the discount for specific products by both percentage and fixed discounts;
• Run promotions;
• Offer prices based on the volume;
• Alter, hide, reorder shipping options and price and payment gateway methods.

The personalized checkout page will bring a more satisfactory experience to your customers on your site.

Shopify Plus customers can also deploy bot challenges on the checkout page.

Once you activate this, customers will be required to prove that they are human before they purchase their orders. Bot challenges are essential when you stage an online event to avoid robots or opponents’ clicks.

#11. Dedicated support via Launch Manager

What we received from Shopify Plus is unwavering personal support called Launch Manager, who will get your business ready within 90 days or less. Then Merchant Success Manager will take center stage in fully exploiting your potential with expert strategy and support.

Apparently, they make a substantial contribution to your Shopify success rate with detailed guidance on how to optimize Shopify Plus, strategic coaching, and prediction coupled with analysis of industry trends.

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Shopify vs Shopify Plus Pricing

The first part of our comparison between Shopify Plus vs Shopify is pricing packages. Please bear in mind that once you purchase either 3 standard Shopify plans or Shopify Plus plan, you can immediately activate Shop Pay to speed up your customer’s checkout process.

To help you best understand the difference between Shopify vs Shopify Plus pricing, we have actually built a store on both platforms five months ago and present them in the following paragraphs:

Shopify pricing

One of the most essential Shopify costs you need to take into consideration is Shopify pricing packages. As a Shopify user, we have a couple of options to choose from for the best suitability.

Basically, there are four main pricing plans from Shopify that you can take a look at:

Shopify Starter plan

With only $5/month, you can start promoting and selling your product links on social media, SMS, and email without owning a full online store. Shopify Starter enables you to access a dashboard to keep track of your business performance chronologically. If you are looking for ways to Shopify upgrade, you can choose superior plans like Basic Shopify, Shopify or Shopify plan.

Basic Shopify plan:

Starting at $39/month, this is a perfect solution for eCommerce newbies and small store owners. It has all the basic features like unlimited product upload, report, blog and marketing automation. Especially, Shopify lets you use the Basic Shopify plan for $1/month in 3 months if you buy this plan after the trial period.

Shopify plan

Coming at $105/month, Shopify plan is what you should opt for when it comes to growing your business. It brings you all the solid features from Basic Shopify plus more advanced reports and lower fees regarding third-party transactions and shipping.

Advanced Shopify plan

With $399/month, this is the ultimate plan made for huge stores, also what we went for. With Advanced Shopify, you can launch your big business smoothly and save your budget. In particular, we only have to pay the lowest fees for transactions via third-party services and shipping.

To our mind, the more you pay, the more helpful features and benefits you will get in Shopify, namely professional reports, a point-of-sale system, or third-party calculated shipping rates. These features surely will facilitate your business management.

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For more information about how much money you should prepare to open and maintain a Shopify store, please visit our evaluation of Shopify pricing here.

Shopify Plus pricing

While you can have a crystal clear view of how much is a Shopify store with 3 standard plans, with Shopify Plus cost, direct negotiation is required.
You can compromise the cost of Shopify Plus by tapping the “Get Pricing” button and fill in the contact form to get the exact quotation.

The question “How much is Shopify Plus?” is hard to get the precise answer. As we have asked, retailers will pay at least $2000 per month based on their sales volume. When you achieve $800,000/month in sales, their charging system will turn into a Shopify revenue model. You’ll pay 0.25% as Shopify Plus fees, but not more than $40,000 of your monthly revenue.

The Shopify Plus transaction fees can be negotiated in accordance with your sales volume and the reliability of your store.

With Shopify Payments, in the United States, you’ll pay 2.15% + $0.30 for each transaction on a domestic Visa and MC. For AMEX and international cards, you will have to pay an extra fee of 1%. Other 3rd party payment gateways, such as PayPal, 2Checkout, Skrill, will charge you 0,15% of an extra fee.

Please note that this Shopify Plus price varies by country. And that’s for Shopify Plus pricing calculator.

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Shopify vs Shopify Plus – Summary

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And for now, you already have the answer for “is Shopify Plus worth it“.

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Shopify vs Shopify Plus – Overview

Before going any further into the comparison details, first, we need to understand what is Shopify vs Shopify Plus. What makes them different?

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a front-runner in the eCommerce market. This all-in-one solution is famous for a wealth of top-notch eCommerce features, well-designed themes, and great support. Currently hosting over 4 million websites, Shopify is one of the best eCommerce platforms for businesses of all sizes.

What is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus inherits all the best features that Shopify offers. However, the main difference between Shopify and Shopify Plus lies in the target customers it aims at. Shopify is a wise choice for small, medium, and large businesses in light of its affordable cost and efficiency. Whereas, Shopify Plus is the icing on the cake for enterprise-level businesses as they need a more high-powered platform to cater to their enormous business. 

How to Upgrade to Shopify Plus?

There exist two methods to upgrade from Shopify to Shopify Plus seamlessly.

The first one is to migrate with an automated solution.

LitExtension – the World #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert, is always yourself to help you upgrade Shopify website with all of its important data. You can effortlessly perform the transfer from Shopify to Shopify Plus on your own by setting up the migration on cm.litextension.com.

With All-in-One service is right at your fingertips, your migration process from Shopify store to Shopify Plus becomes easier than ever. Your Personal Assistant (PA) from the LitExtension team will be in charge and keep you up-to-date with the process.

The other way is to contact Shopify. The team will get your store up and running within 90 days.

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Shopify vs Shopify Plus – FAQs

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Conclusion

We’ve come a long way to review Shopify vs Shopify Plus. Now is the time for the final verdict!

From our point of view, it’s apparent that 3 core plans of Shopify are certainly an appropriate choice to kickstart your online business if you’re catering to small, medium, and large businesses. The reason is that it’s quite easy to approach, and it offers every necessary thing for your business to thrive at reasonable prices. Besides, you can try out Shopify for 3 days free of charge to see what this platform has to offer.

At the same time, Shopify Plus is the cream of the crop in terms of its professional support, high customizability, and powerful functionalities. With its implementation of the latest technology like Headless commerce, we can hardly skip through Shopify Plus on the scoresheet.

Even though the price is much higher than Shopify’s core plans, we still consider Shopify Plus as a cost-efficient selection since it minimizes the time, labor force, and workload. With all of these features above, Shopify Plus arms your enterprise-grade business with the optimal factors to develop sustainably.

If you are planning to upgrade from Shopify to Shopify Plus, LitExtension – #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert is always here to give you a hand. With our help, re-platforming is a piece of cake. We offer an advanced automated migration service that transfers all your data to another platform quickly, with a high level of security and accuracy.

To experience yourself, free Demo Migration is available. Spend a couple of minutes to check how the process works. Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

You can also check out our LitExtension blog and join our Facebook Community to get more eCommerce tips and news.