Founded in 2006, Shopify is already a big name in e-commerce. In just ten years, it has grown from a company of five to over 1750 employees. 325,000 businesses use Shopify for their online stores. It has dealt about $24 billion in sales. Shopify Plus is a platform to enterprise version of Shopify, intended to take the hassle out of running an online business.
It handles your online business, so that you can take care of other important stuff. With Shopify Plus, you'll have 0% transaction fees, unlimited bandwidth, and your very own merchant sales manager. Lets go in detail Shopify Plus Review 2017.
Shopify Plus is a hosted, cloud-based enterprise e-commerce platform designed for high-volume online retailers who need to keep up with their customers' demands. Shopify Plus provides scalability and not on the technical needs of running it. Shopify Plus's current clients include Red Bull, Budweiser, and general electric.
You might consider one of Shopify's basic offerings, if you land yourself in the first category, Check out the full review of Shopify below.
Fully Hosted SaaS Ecommerce Shopify Plus Platform Overview
Most websites are run by software installed on a server that you own. The built is constructed from the ground level. You are responsible for keeping the website up and running in addition to all the customer-facing parts of the website. But, in case of Shopify Plus you need not worry about it at all.
Shopify Plus is a next-generation, fully hosted, SaaS ecommerce platform. Not like traditional self-hosted platforms like Magento Enterprise or SAP Hybris have hosted solutions. Its' likely that Shopify Plus is more reliable because the solution is constantly monitored and upgraded to ensure maximum efficiency and robustness.
For a monthly fee, it comes as a package along with people who keep the computers
running efficiently, the security updated to keep your data safe, and helps in maintenance of and updating the software. Such type of service is called subscription service as you pay a monthly fee.
Setting up the online store, marketing, advertising, customer support, inventory control and everything else associated with retail. To update the content of the web pages in your e-commerce store you need to be involved on online basis with everything that the customer sees, and to monitor how your business is doing.
Enterprise e-commerce
Enterprise e-commerce refers to those retailers whose sales are more than around $500,000 per year. Some e-commerce software companies place this dollar value even higher.
Level designation is the key to the enterprise which is high-volume traffic and has anticipated rapid growth. These retailers need an e-commerce solution that will grow rapidly with them and can handle the frequent spikes in their business.
Advantages
So here are the advantages using Shopify Plus.
Development & Maintenance Costs
It's simple: any development and maintenance costs are optional. The technical side of running your online store is done by the Shopify Plus team which includes the security, maintenance, updates, system efficiency, and storage of your information.
If you want to hire someone to setup or transition, it requires extra optional development costs for your online store in Shopify Plus for you. We have a number of articles that help you identify - Shopify Plus experts who are accredited by the company who can do this for you.
Pricing
There is no fixed price for Shopify Plus. Rather, pricing is negotiable but it depends on the size of your company, current sales, annual revenue, etc. The prices differ from company-to-company and it might help to know that the cheapest possible cost for Shopify Plus which is $2000/month.
That is a lot of money to budget, but for many enterprise-level companies it makes sense. The pricing is cheaper than hosting, fees and web developer retainer. It is much more predictable and constant than hiring a developer to fix all the bugs and the feature requests and to change the implementation.
Shopify offers a free 14-day trial for which you don't need to give them your credit card number.
Features
Including Shopify's own payment gateway with basic features. There are multiple available sales channels, Shopify Plus offers some best capabilities.
- Shopify Plus has unlimited selling capacity that does not penalize successful enterprises. With Shopify Plus's, you'll have unlimited bandwidth and unlimited sales and can list an unlimited number of products, all with 0% transaction fees. Your site won't crash when you get more traffic than you expected.
- Storage, at 13+ PB of storage and over 29,000 CPU cores, seems limitless as well.
- Shopify Plus uses Google's enhanced e-commerce analytics engine, so you can understand your customers and their buying trends.
- Shopify Plus's servers experience 99.99% uptime.
- Most sites are up and running within months. If you aren't yet using a Shopify platform, Using the "Traffic control app," you can transfer your store without losing your traffic which Shopify states will not compromise your SEO.
- You can sell on major social networks and marketplaces in addition to your own site.
- More on this in the customer service section of this review.
Customer Service and Technical Support
Shopify Plus really exceeds at excellent customer service. Shopify Plus clients get priority service instead of Shopify clients, though, the Shopify customer service is available 24/7.
Own merchant success manager is provided for every Shopify Plus enterprise. The Shopify representative designs various modifications and manages advocates on your behalf to get the features you want. It also sets up regional stores, and works on custom integrations for e.g. establishing a sales channels with Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. They are your direct line to Shopify support.
If your personal merchant success manager (MSM) is unavailable due to some personal or business reasons, then you will be able to contact another merchant success manager. Are you too shy to speak to any random person? If yes, then don't worry, there are e-commerce forums and technical advice in the help centre. And, there is no doubt that there is always someone available by live chat or email.
To contact Shopify, you can shoot them an electronic generated mail or give them a call anytime. With my personal experience, I would like to tell you that calling gets a faster response, but you may have to wait a few minutes on hold.
- Email from their web portal
- Phone (US): 1-888-746-7439
In addition to this, you will be getting access to a specific trained development team working on a single platform. That is in contrast to many web development firms who work across different platforms, languages and clients are switching gears; they have a development queue; and support tickets are not typically a priority.
It's a huge advantage when you are looking for feature clarification, fast bug fixes or account support.
Shopify Plus is super scalable
Whether it's a massive flash sale, black Friday, or just a normal high volume of shoppers, the Plus plan is built to handle the heavy traffic that only some sort of businesses experience. The Shopify Plus platform handles thousands and thousands of transactions per minute so that your site stays up and running and customers always have a happy and fast browsing experience.
As you are aware that there is no limit to sales volume, thus, the number of products, bandwidth, and no transaction fees can keep you from growing on Plus without any worries, if your ecommerce software can handle it or if you're going to be taxed for your success.
Marketing and inventory are the key issue of scaling traffic, that is not dependable if your servers are holding and working up. Is it for real that the visitors are converting themselves as predicted? What kind of conversion testing are we running? Do we have the inventory? Do we selection available? What kind of messaging requires on homepage and does that make any sense? Are all higher value questions than "can people access the site and checkout"?
Shopify Plus is extremely customizable and integrated
Each merchant is unique and Shopify Plus allows merchants to have complete access and control over the looking and a different feeling of their website, permitting them to design and define the content, layout and branding in any way they feel good about. In addition, Shopify Plus can enhance and increase a store's capabilities by providing them thousands of apps built professionally, at exclusive prices in the Shopify app store.
Apps like Klaviyo and Rare.io allow Plus merchants to integrate targeted email marketing campaigns. Businesses are also able to connect their store with already existing IT platforms to create a seamless, integrated solution by using the Shopify Plus API which includes any ERP and CRM, with accounting systems, Plus other software you might be using.
And if that isn't enough, Shopify Plus has a hand full of some expert designers, developers and of course, partners. They can create custom experiences. Also, they help ins some personalized features that are available on the Shopify Plus platform. So, whether a business needs an award-winning design along with a few custom features.
Or just a far-reaching social media plan. In fact, Shopify Plus provides an enterprise merchants with all the support they require.
Shopify Plus has an app store with a well-chosen selection of over 1000 apps to choose from. To install other apps, may need the help of a developer. Some apps and extensions are very easy and simple to install yourself. Shopify Plus has released scripts, which help you in customizing according to their needs.
So, if you can dream it up and find a developer, you can have the functionality you want.
Marketing Implementation
The process of implementing & gathering feedback is known as agile marketing which takes place quickly and efficiently. It's how the most innovative and successful digital companies do marketing.
The right toolset is required for agile marketing. For an e-commerce platform which means permitting for fast implementation that too without any developers help.
Advantage of enterprise ecommerce platforms like Shopify Plus and good competitors like big commerce. They have all the tools companies need to quickly implement all aspects of good digital marketing.
As an SEO consultant, the most painful experiences are to give advice and suggestions and then see them sit in the development queue to die while still being held accountable for organic traffic growth.
And my paid media consultant and conversion rate optimization friends will no doubt confirm this experience. If you require a product feed for any google product via the listing ads or a script deployed for heatmap testing or maybe just getting marketing tools deployed on platform not built for marketers is painful. To be fair to developers, it's usually not fun for them either. They would rather be working on much more exciting and interesting projects rather than uploading bundle of meta data.
As we all are aware by now, that Shopify Plus is a hosted platform and it's built with marketers in mind. It has all the standard tools that marketers look for. On my last Shopify Plus project, I was able to implement key recommendations within an hour of approval. And unlike many hosted platforms where all changes are global (hence not available), language called Liquid, Shopify has an internal development which allows user to be straightforward and enables front-end changes at the store level.
Recommeded & Helpful :
Shopify Useful Resources Shopify Blog Shopify Plus Shopify MagentoShopify Plus is multi-channel
For business owner Neil Waller, co-founder of watch brand Shore Projects. The key to his growing business is the Shopify Plus multi-channel sales functionality. "As a start-up to our business the transition were stick. A POS system can set up links up to our online store which landed in an impressively slick operation."
In other words, it allows businesses to be sold online, in any store with Shopify's POS system. Additionally, Shopify Plus allows enterprise merchants to easily sell across social media networks such as Facebook and Pinterest ensuring maximum reach for their products. The most amazing fact is, it accepts more than 70 distinct ways for payment, which includes PayPal and Bitcoin. Thus, allowing the stores to sell in multiple regions and different languages.
This ability to meet customers whenever and wherever they are critical for any business looking to expand their clientele and find new customers.
Apps and integrations
- Easily sell your products on major social networks. Further sales can be encouraged by this multichannel ability.
- Through social media API's to promote your products.
- Integrated apps and API's. A wide range of add-on extensions.
- Access to a number of applications, whether it's loyalty programs like Yotpo, there will be apps to choose from to improve your store. These applications help make your site as personable as you want it to be.
As we've mentioned, to add functionality to Shopify you often need to use apps. We have various levels of quality and cost because they are constructed and supported by third parties. Once you have started installing a few apps your implementation can be a bit messy and you may find you need not have access to adjust some apps.
2. Choosing the template carefully
Some functionality is built in to the templates, so make sure you consider this when choosing which template to be used at the starting point. A Shopify expert, to add functionality to a template, should be capable of writing a code but this is a lot more expensive.
Once you pay a 0.5-2% transaction fee in addition to your normal gateway fee unless you're on Shopify Plus. When compared with the cost of running your own Woo commerce or Magento site, you may find that's still a bargain, but some retailers will be concerned about paying this amount, in addition to their payment gateway.
Shopify doesn't supports having lots of different types of data, very well. The blog layouts are quite limited so if you wanted to do something unusual, you'd have to set it up on another blogging platform like square space or Tumblr and then run it on blog.yoursite.com.
Shipping price rules are based on the order's total price and/or total weight 9 and also depends in which country). This can turn out to be a disadvantage to some retailers.
The checkout can be styled with CSS, but additional fields can't be edited and there is a limit to control over. For some retailers, it can be very frustrating and that want to add advanced features such as postcode lookup.
As with any third-party product. Also, depending on them completely may cause harm and any big changes will severely affect your business. There are ample number of advantages just available on Shopify. You can easily create your business in this manner, at a very fast rate and more easily without costing much effort. There is always a chance of platform risk in any project with 120,000 retailers on the platform, you're in good company.
SaaS Ecommerce Competitors
There are so many SaaS e-commerce platforms, but only some of them offer a well-regarded enterprise level service. Below are the major two Shopify Plus competitors.
While I have experience with both Magento and Big commerce, I don't have experience with their enterprise level versions. But here is their information for reference.
Shopify Plus vs. Magento EnterpriseThe oldest and most renowned ecommerce platforms is Magento. An open source software that is most common between the developers and a range of ecommerce stores is their main product which is self-hosted. It also offers a Magento Enterprise, which is basically the Magento software deployed on a custom hosting solution with account support all bundled together. It's priced out at $18,000 and up per year, which is right in line with Shopify Plus pricing.
Shopify Plus vs. Big commerce EnterpriseBig commerce is Shopify's main competitor in the hosted online store space. They are smaller, but growing rapidly. They differ from Shopify with a core centralized on online stores (vs. Shopify's offline initiatives) and integrating lots of features directly into your dashboard (vs. adding them with Apps). Large scale enterprise pricing also starts around $1000/ month, but can also go up depending on needs.
Recommeded & Helpful :
Shopify Useful Resources Shopify Blog Shopify MagentoHere I my Exclusive Chat With Shopify Support Team I must say the are very fast in response :
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Conclusion: Should You Use Shopify Plus For Your Business ? Answer is YES
We suggest you to go through the points mentioned below about Shopify Plus, if you want to start-up an online store and:
- It has a large and growing retail store (bricks-and-mortar or online)
- It has sales of at least $500,000 per year
- It anticipates or plans that your sales volume will continue to grow, with potentially no limit in sight
- It has periodic spikes in your sales, perhaps up to thousands of orders per minute
- Wants to focus on the designing and marketing, and retail, which is not your technical online environment.
- Wants a unique, customized store-front, adapted for any mobile platform, automatically.
- Who want a dedicated customer support with a long-term relationship along with your e-commerce service provider.
- Anticipates expanding globally, in different regions and languages
- In order to reach more customers, multi-channel selling can help you.
Why would you use Shopify Plus?
Shopify launched Shopify Plus in February 2014 to satisfy its larger clients who were outgrowing its original e-commerce platform. Shopify did manage to handle some large volume business, but it wasn't designated to do so.
If you're already a Shopify client and you're confused to switch on Shopify Plus, here are the four-major extra Plus points that Shopify Plus has:
- You will have your own brand and domain name with the checkout
- For support & customized, a dedicated account manager when you are at very high levels of traffic.
- customized integration with inventory and management platforms
- the ability to create clones of your stores for different target countries
If you already have an online store elsewhere and want to move to an enterprise-level platform, Shopify Plus provides a turn-key solution you can move right in to. Although it's relatively new, Shopify Plus already has some heavy clients and is usually mentioned in the top three of any enterprise e-commerce platforms.
User reviews of this software have given an overwhelming response and have been really positive about it.