Top 10 Reasons to Choose Shopify Plus

The last few years have seen an incredible rise in merchants in the eCommerce market. Ever since the inevitable pandemic, more and more merchants have permanently shifted business to the online marketplace. Today, we speak about a specific niche of this eCommerce market- Shopify Plus. These are enterprise-level merchants who generally have a global presence and annual multi-million-dollar revenues.

Because customers are the currency of enterprise commerce, successful companies should develop platforms that work towards multiple customer transactions and engagement. Acquiring, managing, and cultivating a customer base is crucial to an enterprise's competitive strategy, just like it takes money to make money.

Top 10 Reasons to Choose Shopify Plus 

Speaking of platforms, we bring you to the Plus platform specifically built to cater to enterprise-level eCommerce merchant's needs. Here we speak of all the advantages you get on the platform:

1. Handling high-volume Volume Orders

When the world is waiting for Black Friday and Cyber Monday bargains, Shopify ensures that all of your eCommerce needs are met by handling surges in traffic without causing you to crash. Shopify doesn't just cater for high traffic times either; they completely remove any concern regarding sufficient uptime to ensure a deep sense of security and peace of mind! Shopify Plus supports over 11,000 transactions every minute and maintains an impressive uptime of 99.99%. There's no limit to the number of products or bandwidth your store will need to deal with the demand.

2. 0% Transaction Fees

There are no transaction fees if you use Shopify Payments (Shopify's payment gateway powered by Stripe). The US credit card fee as of 2022 is 2.4% + 30c for online transactions and 2.4% + 0c for point-of-sale ones. Using an external payment gateway costs 0.5% in transaction fees plus whatever the payment gateway charges you. Using the Shopify Payments gateway on Shopify Plus helps save that money. Also, Shopify Payments provides a 4x faster checkout than standard experiences and a 91% conversion rate on mobile devices, as per Shopify. Presently, there are over 100 million global ShopPay users.

3. 24/7 Customer Support

Merchants know that 24/7 service must be available when you launch your online store. These Plus merchants have access to 24/7 merchant support, called the merchant success programme, and ongoing access to customer service representatives and the knowledge base, API documentation, and help with customizable Shopify themes. Merchants can also access support via e-mail, live chat, telephone, and social media. The merchant starts building their website on Shopify Plus after being introduced to a Launch team that helps you get your store online faster by assisting with migration tools and strategy, custom integrations, and solutions to meet their requirements.

4. Shopify Flow

Are you tired of repeating the same process in sales over and over again? From simple operations to multi-step workflows that connect with your apps, Flow allows you to automate repetitive tasks so you can focus on your business—tailored solutions. Limitless potential. From marking the last few items in stock as 'Last Chance' before they sell out to fraud detection. Shopify Flow comes into play for all your daily activities.

5. Shopify Scripts

Another feature that Shopify Plus customers can take advantage of is scripts. Shopify scripts are small pieces of code that let you create personalized experiences for your customers in their carts and at checkout. You can use scripts to create discounts applied to a cart based on the items in that cart and other cart properties. You can also use scripts to customize your customers' shipping and payment options. Scripts give stores a way to write custom Ruby that is run on Shopify's servers and affects each customer's cart at a fundamental and unique level.

6. Launchpad

Are our sales events becoming daunting for you to complete at the last minute? Shopify Plus’s Launchpad is a scheduling tool inside your Shopify admin, allowing you to schedule product visibility, Shopify Scripts, themes, discounts, and more with a defined start and end time. You can now prepare your Shopify store for any event well in advance without all the headaches.

7. Unmatched Scalability

The Plus platform is ideal for retail brands who want to scale up and break into international markets. The platform removes the barriers to international commerce, so merchants can deliver the experience their customers expect in any language or currency. Shopify understands that enterprise-level commerce requires a robust infrastructure capable of serving exponentially more customers, along with more complex operations, integrations, and support. That's why Shopify Plus has been designed for high-growth businesses about to scale. There is no need to bother about server requirements anymore, as Shopify automatically does that.

8. Complete Customization Options

The Plus platform allows customization of everything that matters to today's online shoppers—automating full-scale campaigns, creating personalized buyer journeys, offering intuitive payments, and direct social selling. Customizing with Shopify Plus allows you to push to the limit and be confident that all payment information is safe. It makes customers feel like the site will take care of them.

9. Unlimited Staff Accounts

The e-commerce platform is for you if you are a large organization with many staff. Shopify's core plan limits the number of staff accounts, which makes management difficult if you are a large enterprise. There are an unlimited number of staff accounts. On the other hand, the Plus platform allows you to add unlimited staff accounts and enables additional permission settings. You still have complete control of your staff admin role on Shopify Plus.

10. Absolute Security

The average cost of a malware attack is $2.6 million, and cybersecurity is a huge deal. It's not just about the cost to your systems—a cyberwar attack can also mean losing the trust of your customers. According to TrustedSite.com's 2020 research, 92% of consumers have concerns about purchasing from unfamiliar websites, and more than half have abandoned shopping carts because they didn't trust the site with their credit card information. Shopify is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant. This compliance extends by default to all stores powered by Shopify Plus. PCI Level 1 is given to businesses that process over 6 million card transactions annually across all channels.

Case Study

Staples was in a time of new beginnings. In 2017, as part of its acquisition by a private equity firm, the famed office supply chain was split into three arms. Among them was Staples Canada, which would be independently managed and operated by its American parent.

The Challenge:

Staples' tech leadership identified the features and considerations its new platform must have. They included:

Flexibility: Staples could only deploy significant changes or new promotions once a day—at night when the entire site had to update—no more. This challenge was soon resolved with their Shopify Plus replaformation.

Site stability: Busy shopping seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday—especially for staples and back to school—needed times when the company was no longer consumed by managing capacity or the threat of servers going down.

Upmarket infrastructure: Staples required access to an app ecosystem that could effectively manage a host of systems and features that an enterprise of its size requires, such as order management, search, reviews, e-mail, store locators, and a custom checkout. 

Replatform time: Staples couldn't wait forever. It wished to be up and running in less than 12 months.

Cost: Its new Shopify Plus site had to support one of the nation's largest retailers. But it shouldn't also come with a price tag companies of its size are used to paying. Staples preferred to redirect many of the resources it had been spending on its eCommerce platform into ways it could improve the customer experience.

With the Plus platform, Staples found:

Less than 12 months after it began, by early summer 2019, Staples' new site was live. The next most significant test was to prove that the platform would be as flexible as promised. As the holidays approached, Lee (Senior Director, Staples Canada) found a new reality regarding scheduling promotions and sales.

Learn how Shopify Plus has transformed businesses here.

Where once Staples could only schedule new site promotions the night before during Black Friday Cyber Monday, it was now free to update or cycle through sales campaigns as many times per day, in real-time, as his team wished.

Lee found Staples could move faster still. One morning in March 2020., as the first wave of COVID-19 repercussions hit the global retail economy, Apple announced that all its stores worldwide would close. At 9:30 a.m., Lee discussed the news internally with his team. Within an hour, Staples' primary hero website campaign featured a promotion on MacBooks.

Not long after, Staples leaned into the flexibility of Shopify Plus to change its banners, pages, purchase flows, and customer e-mail communications to launch click-and-collect for shoppers to buy online and grab items by the curb outside the Staples closest to them. In less than 72 hours, Staples rolled out the programme across all its Canadian stores.

The Result:

According to the company, Staples' Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales set a record. Its other significant sales events, such as back to school and Christmas, were all up from the previous year.

The company's most tremendous demand came as COVID-19 forced a new reality onto shoppers—over 30 days spanning Mar.-Apr. In 2020, Staples' traffic, transactions, and site revenue on Shopify Plus increased by more than 100% over the previous month.

"We've experienced Black Friday-like levels on the website daily for the past 30 days," Lee says. "We've never had a consecutive run for that extended period ever. We're extremely proud that our platform has scaled to unprecedented demand seamlessly. Uptime on the site has been at virtually 100% with no performance degradation at a time when our customers need it most."

In short, Staples's move to the Plus platform brought them:

The ability to run 4X more online sales promotions per day

All-time sales records during Black Friday and Cyber Monday on Shopify Plus 

No performance issues during COVID-19 as "Black Friday-like" sales levels arrived for 30 days straight

Conclusion

The pointers mentioned above just scratch the surface of a Plus plan. Among the many other features are ease of use, a massive app ecosystem, and a 'headless setup, allowing third-party applications to be built into the front end. In contrast, the back end works separately and yet seamlessly. Shopify even has a point-of-sale service that allows you to make sales on location and manage all your online and physical operations under a unified platform.

Contact a Shopify Plus expert or Shopify Plus developer like MS Web Designer to learn more about how the Plus platform works, or find us at hi@mswebinternational.com. Being a Plus merchant has its prerequisites, so speak with us before you move forward with an upgrade. Hire our experts to leverage the true potential that you deserve—more customers and more sales!