What Is Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus is the account type that you want if you are a big business. This is usually known as an Enterprise account where you can get all the possible benefits of a unique website. Think of Amazon, AliExpress, or great brands like Nike, Adidas, or Walmart.
All these businesses have an Enterprise account with their respective providers. You do not have to be as big as them, but you need an enterprise account if you want the same features that they have on their online stores.
With an Enterprise account, you will be working as a unique brand and not just an ordinary online entrepreneur. This is why brands like Apple or Samsung have such great-looking online stores, they have Enterprise level account types from their providers.
Here, we will take a look at Shopify Plus, and the later understand why big brands like Nestle, Rebecca Minkoff, and KYLIE use Shopify to power their online stores with it.
Who Shopify Plus For?
The Plus account is for people who want their businesses to grow more and focus on marketing efforts instead of taking the time building and making a functional website. Statistically, those that have a Plus account can experience a boost in sales by as much as 126% year after year.
This account is great if you want to be in the $500,000 range of sales revenue per year. Some even make $500 million per year, and they belong to the list of Fortune 500 companies.
With a Plus account, you will be able to automate your campaigns and keep up with high-demand volume. You cannot do this without an Enterprise account, because huge traffic loads can crash your website.
With a Plus account, you can create a highly-customized website that does not look like other Shopify stores that used a theme template. Here, your online store will look really unique according to your design, and you can also create your own admin and backend systems to make your employees work more efficiently.
Sell Everywhere
With a Plus account, you can sell in more than 20 sales channels. You can integrate your account with Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, eBay, Amazon, and more.
What is the benefit of this?
The main benefit of this is social media presence. If your products are found everywhere, you can reach out to people who have a preferred website to make their purchases.
For example, eBay fans will see your products on eBay itself, and then they can complete the purchases on eBay, and not your store.
Basically, your store will function as the place where you upload all your products and product descriptions, and then eBay or Amazon will simply show what is on your website, on your Amazon or eBay account.
This is great because you do not have to upload your products on your online store and then do it again on eBay, and then do it again on Amazon, and then another time on your Facebook shop.
Once the integration is complete, you do not need to pay an employee for hours spent uploading the same product in different sales channels.
You can sell on these channels on desktop and mobile, and you can also set them to offer your products in different languages and currencies.
Also, you can choose from more than 100 payment gateways, so people from around the world would have an opportunity to select their preferred method to pay online.
Speed and Dependability
With a huge volume of sales, websites normally crash. If you have like 10,000 visitors per minute, it is probably high-time to have your own dedicated servers.
And we are not yet talking about processing the orders. With Shopify Plus, you can expect smooth transactions to go through by as much as 10,000 plus orders PER MINUTE. Your online store will not crash, and the load times will not get affected.
An Enterprise account is built for massive transactions and speed. Shopify guarantees that despite this volume, you can expect 99.98% uptime.
With this, you also get unlimited bandwidth and transactions. You do not have to worry about how your website is performing. What you have to worry about is how to fulfil the orders, and how you can market more effectively to drive people on your website.
B2B Wholesale and Offline Sales
With a Plus account, you will be able to offer wholesale, offline, and B2B sales.
Wholesale does not have to be a tough experience. Here, you can offer high-volume transactions with discounts to customers who want to buy your products in bulk. You can create password-protected accounts for these customers, and only they will be able to access the contents of your site.
You can automate the wholesale process, too. Here, customers will have the ability to buy, track their packages, and then re-order if needed. You can create customized pricing for one person, or for specific groups of people, and your website will show different prices to different customer types.
You can also set fixed or percentage discounts or discounts based on how many products they are buying.
With a Plus account, you can also create a POS or point of sale where you can sell offline. This is useful if you are the kind of business that goes to events or tradeshows. You can sell face to face, and then charge your customers using your Shopify POS.
Marketing Campaigns on Autopilot
Marketing is a task that requires a lot of tracking and physical work. However, Shopify Plus allows you to automate your marketing activities.
The tool to do this is called Launchpad.
With Launchpad, you can launch your product releases and even launch flash sales to attract more customers. You do not need a lot of employees to plan, organize, and launch these events.
With Launchpad, you can schedule and monitor these activities in one place.
These flash sale campaigns can also happen not just in your store, but in several of your sales channels. You can create discounts for some products or for entire categories.
With Launchpad, you can increase your average order value, see the performance of your campaign in a single dashboard, and schedule a start and stop time for the campaign.
You can do all this one day, and then just set the campaign to start two weeks later.
If you have seen flash sales on eBay, the same principle works with Launchpad. This is a great tool to use on holiday shopping rush, and you can compete with major retail brands or online marketplaces because you do not have to program each product for a discount.
Summary
The Shopify Plus account has no fixed price. There are so many features that you can get here, and these features have a cost.
To get an idea of how much you will spend, you must contact Shopify and discuss your plan. You can choose to launch a gated wholesale website, or you can choose to launch a massive retail online store that also has a presence in many online marketplaces.
The Plus account is great for businesses that are already making thousands of sales a month, but not for those that are only starting out. The plus Shopify account will certainly cost you thousands of dollars in fees per month, so it is worth it only if you have massive sales.