One of the most frequently asked questions we hear from our clients is “Why should I go with Shopify Plus over the standard Shopify Core?”.

Given how feature rich Shopify Core is, the decision isn’t often that clear cut, so here are our top eight reasons why you would choose to move up to Shopify Plus.

1 – It can be cheaper!

Yes, despite Shopify Plus costing more per month, the costs of processing transactions drops significantly as you move on to it – meaning that when your revenue hits a certain point, your overall costs actually become cheaper. With Shopify Core maxing out at $299/month, and Shopify Plus starting at $2,000 per month this may seem odd, but we typically see Shopify Plus becoming cheaper when your turnover hits the £4m/year region.

2 – International ecommerce

Although Shopify Core can do international ecommerce, it can’t do it natively. Most solutions involve displaying prices in an approximate local currency but still charging your customer in your store’s home currency. Not the neatest of solutions, and not great for customer conversion or loyalty.

Shopify Plus, however, has fully fledged multi-currency support giving you the ability to trade in the following currencies – Australian dollar (AUD), Canadian dollar (CAD), Euro (EUR), Hong Kong dollar (HKD), Japanese yen (JPY), New Zealand dollar (NZD), Pound sterling (British pound) (GBP), Singapore dollar (SGD) and United States dollar (USD).

3 – Shopify checkout customisation

Shopify’s checkout standardisation is great for conversion, but there are times when you will want to change this and tailor it to your business – and you can only do this on Shopify Plus.

Why would you want to do this? There are loads of examples, but here are just a few:

  • Capture additional marketing permissions
  • Use social logins
  • Add additional address fields
  • Enable address autocompletion or postcode lookup on Shopify
  • Integrate with third-party couriers

4 – Better promotional tools

Shopify is well known for its ease of use and promotional tools, and this gets even better with Shopify Plus.
Shopify Plus comes with exclusive access to Shopify Launchpad, allowing merchants to automate and plan anything from a flash sale and bulk pricing changes to a new range launch. Say good-bye to asking the team to stay late or come in early, for any big launch.

5 – Faster support

Shopify is known for exceptional levels of support, but when your ecommerce business has got to the stage where that support needs to be almost instantaneous, then you need Shopify Plus.

All Shopify Plus customers get exclusive access to a launch manager for when you’re first moving onto Shopify Plus, a merchant success manager to help you grow and scale your business plus priority support for when the poo inevitably hits the fan – because it will no matter how much you hope it won’t 🙂

6 – Ecommerce automation

We know it’s a bit of a buzzword at the moment, but if you are looking to scale an ecommerce business without scaling your team at the same rate then automation can be exceptionally helpful.
Shopify Plus comes with Shopify Flow – an amazing tool for streamlining manual tasks.

Want to tag customers based on their buying behaviour? Reward customers based on their purchasing history? Cancel high-risk orders and raise a ticket in your customer service tool? Email a customer to say thank you when they spend over a certain amount? Flow has you covered.

7 – Better discount promotions

Discounting on Shopify is good, but discounts on Shopify Plus are much, much better.

With access to scripting, you can pretty much create any discount you want such as complex 3 for 2 offers across multiple product types. Say goodbye to the restrictions of Shopify Core.

8 – Faster and exclusive API calls

With Shopify Plus you get much greater access to the Shopify APIs – more endpoints (Non-techie translation: you can do more stuff) and you get a higher call rate limit (Non-techie translation: you can do stuff faster).

Considering a move to Shopify Plus? As the team behind one of the UK’s first, and fastest growing Shopify Plus stores, we’ve been working with Shopify Plus since the beginning – maybe we should have a chat?