What is the Shopify Advanced Plan?
The Shopify Advanced plan is the second level among the three major plans. The others are Basic and Plus. You need this plan if you are not new to setting up online businesses, and if you want to squeeze more juice from the Shopify system, especially for your marketing efforts.
Here, we will first start talking about the features found in the Advanced plan that are not in Basic. Then, we will also touch a little bit on the other features that you will get on both the Basic and Advanced plans.
First off, the cost of the Advanced Plan is $107 per month. This is more than double the price of Basic, which only costs $13 per month.
But let us see why, and then decide if it is worth it.
Staff Accounts
With the Advanced plan, you can have up to a maximum of 15 staff accounts. A staff account is an account within your Shopify store. You can give people admin access, with limitations, so they can work on important things to manage your online shop.
This is great for a busy shop. With 15 staff accounts, this does not include your own access, so you can have a total of 16 people who can work in your shop at the same time.
Here are some of the things that your staff members can do:
- Create marketing campaigns – have a person focus his attention on creating discounts, coupons, and Facebook ad materials to increase your store visibility and sales.
- Process orders – staff members can check the order section and process these orders. This member can close it, or mark it as processed after the item has been packaged and shipped.
- Add products and improve product descriptions – from time to time, you need to improve your product descriptions, especially for the ones that are not selling.
- Write blogs and manage SEO – Shopify has a blog section where you can have one write tips that your customers will find helpful.
- Take care of customer inquiries or complaints – sometimes, you will have inquiries from customers about your shipping rates, discounts, how the discounts work or have some complaints. Have staff be ready to answer these inquiries.
Gift Cards
If you have been to big stores, you would have noticed that they sell cards just about the size of a credit card. These cards are good as cash, but the person who uses it can only buy from that specific store.
These are called gift cards, and they are great for people who are unsure of what gift to buy.
You can do the same in the Shopify Advanced Plan. However, you will not be printing cards. Instead, these cards are online, and your customers can buy them, and then send the card to their loved ones.
Their loved ones now have to go to your store, and then use that card to buy an item from you.
If you want a physical card, you can do it too, but you need to have Shopify POS. Also, you need to go to other Shopify sites called Shopify Hardware.
In this feature, you will be able to design your gift card, and then order it from Shopify. Shopify will print it, and then send the physical cards to you.
Now, you can give these physical cards to your friends or family, or have them buy it from you.
Professional Reports
In business, you need to be able to see numbers and data. This is the only way to make a wise decision as far as money is concerned.
With Shopify Advanced plan, you will have access to great reporting that is packed with important details about how your business is performing.
Here are some of the statistics you will see:
- Dashboard overview – shows you a combination of statistics like sales count, revenue, traffic count, returning customer rate, and more.
- Taxes and Finances – this is where you will see your bills, the sales from your gift cards, total sales, and more.
- Live View – a worldview of how many people are currently browsing your site, and which country they are from.
- Behavior Reports – this is where you will see the top product searches in your store, which products are being searched that are not available on your website, sessions by landing or device, and others.
- Marketing Reports – this is a summary of your conversion rate, where the customer found you like Facebook or search on Google, average order value, and others.
Although most Shopify plans offer the same reports, the Advanced plan will give you more content for behavior, marketing, and sales reports. Also, the Advanced plan will give you access to these reports that are not in the Basic plan.
- Retail sales reports – these are reports of sales per product, per POS location, per staff member who processed it, or per product types.
- Profit reports – these are reports that will show you a good view of which products are producing the highest profits, the products that sell the most by SKU, and the effect of giving discounts to your overall profitability. You will also see reports about the number of refunds you issued, and how these refunds damage your business profits.
- Custom reports – this gives you the ability to create a report that will only show the details that you are interested in. It is great for people who want advanced analytics.
Transaction Fees
The transaction fee for the advanced plan is 1%. For every transaction, Shopify will get 1% of the transaction’s worth.
If a customer bought a $100 worth of items, Shopify keeps $1 of that. You will only get $99, and you have to subtract other fees from that $99, such as your transaction fee for your payment gateway.
To have someone process your online payments also means that there is a cost. PayPal, for example, charges an average of 3% per transaction. This fee is on top of what Shopify is charging you.
To save on this, you can choose to have Shopify process your payments instead. However, this option is only available to selected countries.
You also have to subtract the cost of shipping from that $99, along with other expenses like taxes and handling fees. Make sure that you price your products with these things in mind, so you still keep a decent profit after all expenses are paid.
Other Features and Benefits
If you get the Advanced plan, you will also get everything that is included in the Basic plan.
These are:
- Online store
- Unlimited product uploads
- 24/7 support by phone, email, or live chat; there is also a community forum and a knowledge base
- Different sales channels like Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram, where you can integrate your Shopify store and make sales from there.
- Manual order creation where you can add an order from your admin page instead of a customer going through the checkout process in your store
- Discount and coupon codes
- Free SSL certificate
Summary
The Advanced plan works best for medium-sized businesses that have a constant flow of orders. The best thing that you can get out of this is the number of staff accounts you can add, the reports that will help you make informed decisions, plus the low cost of the transaction fees.