Shopify Plus is the company's response to enterprise-level eCommerce businesses. The plans offered by Shopify are intended for small to medium-sized businesses, whereas Shopify Plus is intended for managing high-growth, high-volume online shops and brands. By delivering a flexible, quick-to-deploy platform, Shopify Plus may offer larger businesses the structure they require to grow more quickly and in size. The Webinopoly Shopify experts go over the benefits of Shopify Plus and whether your business requires it. While a business reaches the enterprise level, it frequently encounters difficulties when attempting to modify and update its infrastructure. Maintaining outdated technology is too time-consuming, which makes it harder to focus on new strategies. The value of Shopify Plus is found right here. With this cloud-based, fully hosted software, your brand finally has a method to defy the rules of commerce.

Benefits of Shopify Plus

The simple, "time-saving" design and "app" approach of the platform

One of the main drivers of their development has been the fact that Shopify Plus was the first widely used SaaS platform solution for SMB and mid-market merchants, eliminating costs related with platform maintenance, upgrades, security patching, etc. This has always been a significant pain point with on-premise platforms like Magento, WooCommerce, SAP Hybris, and others. To cut down on operational and maintenance costs as much as possible, Shopify Plus was developed.

The benefits of Shopify being "managed" and "stripped-down" for internal teams may be quite substantial because, in addition to having lesser technology overheads, admin activities are also created to be effective and time-saving. By significantly reducing the amount of time teams must spend on management and merchandising tasks, Launchpad and Flow, two solutions developed by Shopify, free up resources to concentrate on marketing and growth.

This benefit and Shopify's key selling points are both a result of the platform's rigid, streamlined architecture and uneditable foundation. This relates to the app approach as well, where technology partners are only allowed to connect to the Shopify platform and merely push and pull data via specific APIs rather than installing modules on the server and adding additional (often conflicting) code to the platform, risking conflicts, necessitating upgrades, etc. Additionally, this makes it possible for each shop's basic structure to essentially remain the same, lowering the maintenance costs and risk for both the platform and merchants.

Scalability: Shopify Plus offers countless potentials and capabilities for your brand. Thanks to virtually uninterrupted uptime and unrestricted bandwidth, your website may expand without worrying about technical constraints. Thus, hiring an expert shopify plus agency is crucial to realise your brand’s full potential.

If building websites isn't your strongest strength, you're probably hiring someone else to do it for you. This is a waste of time and resources that may be used to enhance the offering, the approach to marketing, and the clientele. Many SaaS systems, like Shopify Plus, have an upfront cost. Once you sign up, the monthly cost of Shopify Plus stays at roughly $2,000 per month. Your monthly expenses stay stable and foreseeable, despite the fact that this price may rise depending on a number of variables.

Reliability: Even if millions of people visit your website, it's critical to ensure that your business continues to run correctly and efficiently. Customers may have a speedy, secure, and efficient experience on your website thanks to Shopify Plus.

Built-in Tools: Shopify Plus gives you access to a huge selection of built-in tools and connectors. Strong APIs, more than 1,500 readily available applications, and other integrated features are just a few of the many capabilities that Shopify Plus offers to enable you to change your business.

You get unmatched customer service and account management with Shopify Plus. Your account is developed, deployed, and any bugs or technical issues you have along the way are all handled by a professional Launch Manager who is assigned to you right away. You work closely with your dedicated Merchant Success Manager, who promotes the expansion of your business.

The total cost of ownership is rather low :The low cost of ownership of Shopify Plus, which is typically at least 50% lower than that of Magento and at least 200% lower than that of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, is one of the most frequently mentioned characteristics of this platform (over a three year period). Although it's important to avoid doing so, a lot of people feel that it's important.

Shopify has done an excellent job of keeping costs to the merchant low by maintaining licencing prices at very competitive levels and not requiring the merchant to pay for maintenance retainers, upgrades, etc. Low start-up and recurring costs are also a result of how simple they kept the platform and its underpinnings. These costs for the typical build, as well as higher development fees (as well as maintenance retainers) and licence prices, would likely come from comparing these numbers to Magento Commerce or Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

The platform was being moved more quickly and accurately:

In my opinion, Shopify Plus is the most adaptable mainstream eCommerce platform on the market, making it simpler and more efficient to add new features, modify the front end, and even control back end operations than with other platforms. By lowering (and frequently eliminating) the need for bespoke development, the app ecosystem aids in the acceleration and improvement of processes. This approach is still sound as long as you exercise caution and keep performance and scalability in mind, even though installing a large number of programmes isn't advised (depending on the app or third party being used).

Partners in the technology and app ecosystem:

A few years ago, I believed that because Shopify Plus couldn't compete in the integration environment, they would have difficulty competing with Magento in the mid-market. However, that has changed substantially since then. The robust app and integration ecosystem of Shopify Plus is currently unmatched by any other platform.

The growing network of dedicated development partners:

When it comes to integration partners, Shopify Plus has a sizable advantage over some of its closest competitors because to the fact that hundreds of agencies use the platform and, frequently, none else. Although it's important to evaluate an agency based on project teams, knowledge of developing Shopify, etc.

The design and UX solutions of Shopify companies are frequently stronger as a result of Shopify being a logical next step for creative firms, the front-end naturally being the emphasis for the types of merchants Shopify pulls, and it being easier for designers to adapt to developing the theme.

Despite the fact that Shopify Plus agencies don't always assign the same level of BA work to projects and there are differences in how projects are managed, there is a case to be made that this isn't needed as much on 95% of builds and it helps to keep things lean (which is definitely not the case with the more enterprise platforms) (in comparison to Magento in particular).

The usefulness for administrators and salespeople:

The most user-friendly platform offered to admin users is Shopify, whose back-end is clear and simple to use. From using Shopify flow for automation to changing the menu to using visual merchandising, everything is straightforward and simple to use. Even when you first use the apps, they are designed identically and adhere to the same standards.

Drawbacks of Shopify Plus

Multi-store design that is inadequate:

One of the most frequently criticised functional limitations of Shopify Plus is the lack of a multi-store architecture, which inhibits merchants from managing multi-brand setups and foreign settings as simply as they can with other platforms (particularly Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud). Some tasks, like collection merchandising, app management, promotions management, etc., still require a lot of manual labour and time, which can be frustrating if you're coming from a platform that natively supports global management of these tasks. However, there are workarounds (often combining scripts, use of the ERP, and apps that can push changes across multiple stores). We use a PIM with a couple of our customers, which is unquestionably beneficial, but many processes are still manual across the many shops.

An issue with increasingly complex storage is technical debt:

Even while Shopify Plus and SaaS systems aren't frequently associated with technical debt, it might be a concern for complex businesses. More than the platform itself, usage of tags, scripts, and applications is more likely to become twisted and impact store management. I've observed cases where companies combined user tagging with complex tiered pricing, reasoning based on product availability, and other elements in the past. Building a shipping rule becomes significantly more challenging as a result because all of these elements must be taken into account. This is merely an illustration, but you should be aware of it and make sure that everything is properly constructed if you frequently employ tags, scripts, programmes, and custom apps.

General control of the world's ecology:

Even though Shopify Plus introduced a multi-currency option last year, it is still recognised for not offering the greatest service for international retailers. For those willing to make compromises in exchange for the tremendous benefits that Shopify Plus may offer, there are some good solutions and opportunities, but there are also substantial issues that might be distressing. One of the biggest problems that Shopify Plus hasn't addressed, in my opinion, is the economics of applications, where many app developers insist on charging a licencing fee for each shop (so a retailer with 7 local stores, would pay 7x the cost).

An app company may not be compatible with multi-currency because there are numerous instances of product suggestions and search firms that are unable to give appropriate prices on multi-currency implementations even today.

Shopify Payments might either be the best or the worst thing for Shopify customers, since it has a tonne of great benefits and a tonne of restrictions. The main ones for international focus on coverage and eligibility (requiring a local bank account and a firm registered in each country) (with lots of countries still not available). Operations and financial costs for retailers are impacted by this.

It's vital to note that while each of these may be at least partially handled, for the vast majority of foreign Shopify Plus users, these are the areas that are most critical and need to be carefully considered.

Shopify Payments (for impacted businesses) (for impacted retailers):

Shopify payments, which are frequently regarded as a nice feature for Shopify and Shopify Plus clients, have the advantages of being able to quickly add additional payment options, making setup very simple, and seamlessly integrating payments into the platform. There are negatives, though. The following are the main issues I see with Shopify Payments:

This is important, and they are strict about it, but depending on the products you sell and the chemicals you employ, you might not be allowed to use Shopify Payments. I would definitely suggest looking into this before committing to Shopify Plus as a platform.

According to the prohibited corporation, this is very typical and applies to businesses like casino and financial services providers.

Use of Shopify Payments is contingent upon having a local bank account and a registered business in a given territory. If you don't, you are ineligible to use the service. Users who simply don't have an EU store or a ROW store are also impacted by this.

Since Shopify Payments only keeps tokens for a short period of time, many businesses use a second payment gateway for subscriptions and pre-orders where a second or numerous repeated payments are necessary.

Unable to manage SEO:

The locked-down SEO tools of Shopify are a source of concern for many people, and I'd even hazard to say that many users disregard Shopify as a result of these problems. Among the limitations of SEO are: Due to the inability to accommodate foreign businesses as sub-folders, domain migrations as part of a transfer to Shopify Plus are frequently required. Stores from other countries must be on a subdomain. Using an external merchandising solution is ruled out because there is no way to display the product grid on the server owing to inability to reach the server. This is just one example of a similar issue, but it might limit the adoption of JS or other technologies (the same applies for product reviews).

Limited Backend Customization: All backend integrations must be compatible with their API, but frontend freedom is unrestricted. This puts some brands at risk that require a specific inventory or fulfilment service.

Restrictions on Content Management: Publishing is not Shopify's major area of expertise. Despite the creation of a comprehensive website, businesses looking for a content management system with a wide range of capabilities may feel that Shopify Plus falls short. Switching from WordPress may feel odd because Shopify is made primarily for e-commerce.

Lock-in of the platform: Switching to a different provider is not too difficult if your shop is self-hosted. You cannot access the FTP or database on a hosted platform, which is one disadvantage.

Expertise: Shopify Plus does require some knowledge, which may require additional training.

Payment Gateways: Since they enable you to collect payments from clients, payment gateways are crucial for any online store. Payments made through Shopify are subject to their terms and restrictions and are not available everywhere. Shopify also charges costs for chargebacks, which might abruptly stop your money while they investigate the errors.