Shopify Plus is Shopify’s top-tier price plan. Designed for online stores with complex needs, it offers more inventory locations, staff accounts, and markets than Shopify’s regular price plans – and that’s just for starters.

But what, exactly, does Shopify Plus do? How much does it cost? And is it worth the money?

Read on for answers to all those questions (and more)…

What is Shopify Plus?

Shopify Plus is an advanced e-commerce platform built for medium-to-large brands and retailers handling high and/or rapidly growing sales volumes.

As well as higher usage limits (like the number of user accounts and markets you can add), Shopify Plus offers a bunch of premium features above and beyond Shopify’s standard plans, such as:

• Checkout customization
• Advanced e-commerce analytics
• Priority customer support

Of course, all of those features come at a cost…

How Much Does Shopify Plus Cost?

Shopify Plus pricing starts at $2,300 per month for a three-year minimum term or $2,500 for a one-year contract.

However, Shopify recognizes that this model doesn’t work for every store, so it also offers variable, revenue-based platform fees for businesses with higher sales volumes and/or more complex requirements.

For a customized quote, get in touch with Shopify’s sales team.

Top-Level Differences Between Shopify and Shopify Plus

Before you can figure out whether Shopify Plus is worth it for your store, you need to understand how it compares to Shopify's standard plans.

To help you out, we’ve broken down the top-level differences between Shopify Plus and Shopify Advanced – the highest-tier “regular” plan – in the following table, then added further details below:

(All fees are correct at time of writing for US-based merchants – for more detail, check out Shopify’s pricing page.)

More Suitable for High-Volume Merchants

By definition, anyone prepared to pay $2,300+ per month for an e-commerce platform must be generating a ton of sales and revenue.

Shopify Plus caters to these businesses by offering 99.99% uptime, with the ability to handle 10,000+ transactions a minute during peak periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Because the last thing you want is to spend big money promoting your latest sale or product launch, only for your site to crash under the weight of all that traffic.

More Scalable

Shopify’s standard plans are already highly scalable, with the ability to expand your store’s functionality through thousands of e-commerce apps – but Shopify Plus takes things to the next level (and beyond).

For instance, you can:

• Sell to customers in 50 markets
• Add up to 1,000 domains or subdomains
• Boost sales via exclusive channels like wholesale and B2B
• Create logins for unlimited team members
• Expand to 1,000+ physical POS locations

Plus you can save a ton of time with custom automated workflows, helping your team do more in less time.

More Customizable

Again, the sheer wealth of third-party apps means Shopify is already pretty customizable, but Shopify Plus fills in all the blanks.

Perhaps the biggest benefit is the ability for Shopify Plus users to customize the checkout process, opening up a bunch of new opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. We’ve seen countless merchants who wish they could leverage this functionality on Shopify’s regular plans.

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Shopify Plus also allows you to dynamically modify things like…

• Product prices
• Shipping methods
• Payment options

…helping you create a more personalized shopping experience. Which, in turn, can lead to higher conversion rates.

In-Depth Features and Benefits of Shopify Plus

We’ve explored the top-level differences between Shopify’s regular plans and Shopify Plus. Now let’s deep-dive into the specific features and benefits Shopify Plus users can enjoy:

Customize Your Store's Checkout

As we’ve already mentioned, Shopify Plus unlocks the ability to customize the checkout process by editing the following pages:

• Thank you
• Order status
• Information
• Shipping
• Payments

This offers wide-ranging benefits.

For instance, you can customize these pages to match your store’s branding, creating a more seamless customer journey – which can reduce the risk of cart abandonments. Or how about promoting upsells by adding product recommendations to your payments page?

Add Unlimited Staff Accounts

Standard Shopify plans only allow you to add up to 15 staff accounts.

That’s fine for smaller businesses. But if you’ve got dozens (or hundreds) of employees across multiple locations, it’s totally unworkable.

With Shopify Plus, you can create unlimited staff accounts, so you can grow your headcount without having to pay higher platform fees.

Set Staff Permissions

Adding unlimited staff members to Shopify creates a potential headache: if everyone can make changes to your online store, there’s a serious risk they’ll start poking around where they’re not wanted.

Fortunately, Shopify Plus allows you to set user permissions, allowing business leaders to control who can do what in your Shopify admin. For instance, you can limit access to specific reports and apps.

That way, there’s less chance of leaking sensitive information or screwing up your store’s functionality.

Unify Online and Offline Sales With Shopify POS Pro

Got one or more physical stores alongside your website? Shopify helps bring the two together through its integrated point of sale system, POS Pro.

POS Pro centralizes your operations, allowing you to track and manage online and in-store sales via a single dashboard.

Shopify Plus supports 1,000+ POS Pro locations for in-person sales, with the first 20 locations included as standard in all Shopify Plus plans.

Learn How to Double (2X) Your Shopify Sales with Product Labels

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Enjoy Lower Transaction Fees

When it comes to transaction fees, Shopify promises that Plus subscribers get the “lowest rates of any plan”.

These rates vary by location. But, to give an example, transaction fees for third-party payment processors are typically around 0.15% – 0.3% with Shopify Plus – that’s up to 75% cheaper than Shopify Advanced.

Given that some Shopify Plus merchants are generating millions of dollars worth of sales a month, these reduced rates can make a huge difference to their bottom line. Which likely makes the higher platform fees easier to swallow.

Dedicated Support and Merchant Success Program

Shopify Plus users also get exclusive access to the platform’s Merchant Success Program, which offers a wealth of support resources, including:

• Merchant success managers, who provide tech support and assist with store optimization and marketing.
• Launch teams to get your online store up and running fast on the Shopify platform.
• Solutions engineers for support with integrating specific tools.
• Courses and webinars in the Shopify Plus Academy to help level up your store’s marketing, design, operations, and more.

This goes way beyond the level of support available to merchants on standard Shopify plans.

Access Additional Support Resources

As well as all the dedicated assistance we listed in the previous section, Shopify Plus users can access additional support through the exclusive Shopify Plus Community – a network of fellow high-growth brands sharing their favorite strategies, hacks, and resources.

They can also reach out to one of the hundreds of dedicated Shopify Plus Partners, who specialize in solutions for fast-growing e-commerce businesses using Shopify Plus.

You can browse the Shopify Plus Partners directory for (paid) support across dozens of categories, including…

• Building or redesigning your store
• Setting up custom apps and integrations
• Search engine optimization and advertising

…and much more besides.

Unlock Advanced Analytics

Even Shopify Lite and Basic customers get access to most of the platform’s reports and analytics features, covering things like:

• Customer acquisition
• Store finances
• Customer behavior
• Inventory
• Fraud

But if you upgrade to Shopify Advanced or Shopify Plus, you can also:

• Create your own reports displaying the specific data you need based on Shopify’s customizable columns and filters.
• Save your custom reports for later use.
• Access predicted spending data for different customer cohorts, based on 24 months of store data for each cohort.

This is a big benefit – because the more data you have, the easier it becomes to make smart strategic decisions.

Leverage Higher API Limits and Exclusive Integrations

Shopify API integrations offer a ton of benefits, allowing merchants to customize their store, increase operational efficiencies, and improve the customer experience.

With Shopify Plus, you get increased API limits – so you can run custom integrations and backend processing faster and more efficiently. Plus you get access to the following exclusive APIs:

Save Time & Boost Sales With Exclusive Apps & Sales Channels

Shopify Plus merchants can leverage a handful of exclusive apps and channels to help them tap into new markets, generate more sales, and make better use of their store data. Let’s take a look at them…

Launchpad

Shopify Plus merchants can access a whole world of advanced, time-saving automations through the exclusive Launchpad app.

(Don’t worry too much about the low review score – most of the complaints are from users who want access to Launchpad’s functionality on lower-tier Shopify plans.)

With Launchpad, you can schedule, coordinate, and execute events – like sales, product launches, and restocks – then track the progress in real time through the app’s analytics dashboard.

Shopify Flow

You can use the Shopify Flow app to create automated workflows using triggers, conditions, and actions. For example:

• Trigger: A customer buys something from your online store.
• Condition: Shopify “checks” whether the order amount is over $100.
• Action: If the total amount exceeds $100, a tag is automatically added to the customer’s account.

Bear in mind that Shopify Flow is a free app available to all Shopify merchants – but Shopify Plus subscribers get higher usage limits and can use tasks created by custom partner apps.

B2B

As the name suggests, B2B offers a variety of business-to-business selling tools that can be accessed through your Shopify admin, including location-specific rules around:

• Product pricing
• Quantity limits
• Payment terms
• Currencies

You can also access B2B-specific themes such as Trade, which is optimized for wholesale selling…

…or even build your own custom B2B storefront.

(Note: Some of this functionality was previously available through the Shopify Wholesale sales channel, which was phased out and replaced by B2B in April 2024.)

Manage Multiple Brands, Regions or Languages With Expansion Stores

Another feature exclusively available to Shopify Plus merchants is the ability to build expansion stores. These are additional storefronts that allow retailers to manage multiple…

• Brands
• Languages
• Regions

…from a single Shopify Plus account.

As standard, Shopify Plus supports up to nine expansion stores. So even if you don’t make use of them at first, they’ll be there if/when you’re ready to roll out a new brand or expand into a new territory.

Add Up To 100 Shopify Themes

With Shopify Plus, you can add up to 100 themes to your account – five times more than with a standard Shopify plan.

Adding new themes allows you to:

• Try out new themes
• Retain seasonal variations of your published theme
• Test changes to a copy of your published theme

So the ability to add more themes is pretty helpful for larger businesses and/or those managing multiple brands and channels (like expansion stores and B2B) from the same Shopify account.

Reach Customers Worldwide

Regular Shopify users can target international customers in up to three markets.

As you’d expect, Shopify Plus massively increases this limit to 50 markets for localized global selling.

Bear in mind that retail stores and Shopify B2B also count as markets. So if you’re doing one (or both) of them too, it’s useful to still have dozens of “empty” market slots left for when you want to expand into new countries.

When To Consider Upgrading To Shopify Plus

If any Shopify merchant was offered all the above features at no extra cost, they’d say “yes” immediately. But that doesn’t mean they’d be happy to pay for them.

Fact is, Shopify Plus is overkill for a lot of stores. In our view, you should only consider upgrading if you check one or more of the following boxes:

When You Hit ~$1M in Annual Sales

Typically, brands upgrade to Shopify Plus when they hit approximately US$80,000 per month in online sales (or around $1 million annually).

When You're Struggling To Handle Your Current Sales Volume

If you’re on a regular Shopify plan and your store’s backend is struggling with all the sales you’re generating, Shopify Plus could be a good fit. Its stronger infrastructure means it’s better able to handle high volumes of traffic and transactions – especially useful during peak sales periods.

When You're Expanding Globally

Sure, you can target up to three markets (including your “home” market) with a standard Shopify plan. But if you have serious ambitions about expanding internationally, Shopify Plus – which allows you to sell in up to 50 markets – will be a big help.

When B2B Is a Key Part of Your Business

Shopify’s B2B functionality is only available to Shopify Plus merchants. So if business-to-business selling is a major part of your strategy (or you want it to become one in future), consider Shopify Plus.

So, Is Shopify Plus Worth It?

The “worth” of Shopify Plus is subjective.

If you’re running a small or midsize store selling products to customers in one or two countries, it’s tough to justify the almost tenfold price increase from Shopify Advanced to Shopify Plus.

But if you fulfil some or all of the criteria in the previous section, Shopify Plus is well worth considering. At that level of sales, the reduced transaction fees alone will cancel out a decent chunk of the higher subscription price. All the other stuff – exclusive apps and sales channels; dedicated customer support; higher API limits – is the icing on the cake.

FAQs

Is Shopify Plus more expensive than standard Shopify?

Yes! Shopify Plus pricing starts at $2,300 per month on a three-year plan. That’s a big leap from the top-tier “standard” plan, Shopify Advanced, which starts at $299 per month with a one-year minimum term.

Is Shopify Plus suitable for small businesses?

Shopify Plus offers a ton of perks that any small business would love to have, like lower transaction fees and access to exclusive apps and sales channels. But, realistically, the platform fee of $2,300+ per month is too high for most small businesses to justify.

Is Shopify Plus suitable for B2B businesses?

Yes, Shopify Plus is a great fit for B2B businesses. With Shopify Plus, you can leverage various features to support B2B sales, including:

• Location-specific rules around product pricing, quantity limits, payment terms, and currencies
• Specific B2B themes optimized for wholesale selling

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