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As your eCommerce business grows, you’ll likely want to scale your tech solutions in order to offer an improved experience to your customers and drive new business. One of the most common examples of this that we see is upgrading to Shopify Plus. After all, if you’re running a successful business on Shopify, this is a decision that is sure to present itself at some point.
Most of us wonder starry eyed at all of the things we’ll be able to do with the new features unlocked to us, the advanced customisation options, and simply the affirmation that you’ve reached a key milestone in your business journey. However, upgrading to Shopify Plus brings with it a mass of financial implications to your business - implications that you will have to weigh up before blindly taking the leap.
We all know that Shopify Plus is Shopify’s enterprise eCommerce solution. Built with high-volume merchants and larger businesses in mind, the service offers a ton of benefits to retailers beyond their standard plans. These features are designed to allow businesses to expand their operations, and support rapid growth. However, as you would expect, Shopify Plus therefore brings with it a much higher price tag than the other Shopify plans.
Shopify Plus offers a range of powerful benefits designed for high-growth and enterprise-level businesses.
Shopify Plus provides unmatched scalability, ensuring your eCommerce store can handle high traffic and order volumes with 99.99% uptime, even during peak sales periods.
Shopify Plus also unlocks advanced customisation and automation tools, including Shopify Scripts for creating bespoke discounts and promotions, Shopify Flow for automating tasks like customer segmentation and fraud detection, and Checkout Extensibility, which allows for a fully customisable checkout experience. Additionally, Plus merchants gain access to exclusive apps, dedicated support, and expanded API capabilities, making it easier to scale operations and optimise every aspect of the eCommerce experience.
Even if you have a ton of cash to throw around, and the cost of Shopify Plus is not an issue to you, it doesn’t always mean it’s a necessity to make the move.
Unlike other eCommerce platforms with similar pricing structures to Shopify - BigCommerce for example - Shopify does not mandate that you upgrade to the next platform once you have made a certain amount of sales. This means that you could, in theory, be running a Shopify store that generates many million pounds in revenue each month on Shopify’s most basic plan, with a price point of only £19 per month. That’s an extreme example, but paints the picture well - if you’re making enough money each month, you don’t need to go to Shopify Plus just because you can.
There are a number of factors involved in making the transition to Shopify Plus that you will have to consider from a financial perspective, so let’s break them down one by one.
The most obvious financial implication of moving to Shopify Plus is going to be the increase in upfront cost. Shopify Plus is priced at $2300(~£1800) per month for merchants on a 3 year plan, or at a flat 0.25% rate of your store’s revenue in months you make more than $800,000. This is, at minimum, £1500 more per month than Shopify’s second most expensive plan and therefore presents a much larger month to month cost.
Think of it this way, would you rather upgrade to Shopify Plus, or hire a new member of staff to work on your business full time?
This is actually a point in favour of making the change. In fact, it’s one of the main drivers that push merchants towards Shopify Plus - the supposed decrease in processing fees.
Whenever your store makes a sale, Shopify takes a percentage of the sale as a fee for processing the transaction. With Shopify Plus, not only do you have more options for processing payments than other Shopify Plans, but this percentage is decreased.
There are a number of options available to you in this regard, each of which are marked up on top of the card network rates you’re charged (e.g. those of Visa, Mastercard, American Express, etc.) and will vary, no matter which payment gateway you use.
With Shopify Plus, you’ll have the option of using either your own payment gateway, or a third party such as Stripe or Paypal, and the Shopify Plus exclusive - Shopify Payments.
If you don’t use Shopify Payments as your payment gateway, you’ll also be charged a transaction fee by Shopify. For Shopify Plus merchants, this transaction fee is 0.15%.
This 0.15% is key, as even if you don’t choose to use Shopify Payments, other Shopify plans charge you between 0.5% & 2% on all transactions. This is to say that there is a possibility that upgrading to Shopify Plus actually saves you money overall. You have to be making quite a lot of sales on a monthly basis, but after a certain point, the money saved through processing fees will counter out the additional money spent on your subscription each month.
Brands on the cusp of moving to Shopify Plus tend to be mid-to-enterprise level businesses. So outside of the increase in cost of your base eCommerce platform, the process of moving to Shopify Plus will likely bring with it the additional investment of upgrading your tech stack so that you can better serve customers overall.
Whilst many of these third-party tools can unlock new features to your business, they of course come with a cost, with most enterprise level brands spending in excess of £10,000 per month on their tech stack outside of Shopify.
Similarly, it is becoming increasingly common for businesses to move to Shopify plus from other eCommerce platforms. Whilst these businesses immediately benefit from Shopify’s in-built marketing tools, the reduced technical debt, and a lower total cost of ownership, the initial cost can put them off. This is because they have to simultaneously pay for two eCommerce platforms at the same time, and the development costs can be quite steep.
Most agencies, consultancies, and brands would agree that upgrading to Shopify Plus should only be a consideration once your business is making over £1,000,000 annually, or when the subscription cost is 2-3% of your monthly revenue.
Moving to Shopify Plus is a huge business decision, and should only be done from a financial perspective once you are certain that it is the best step for your business as a whole. Whether it be saving you money, time, or allowing you to further enhance your business offering.
If you have decided that moving to Shopify Plus is right for your business, it’s best to do so with the help of an experienced Shopify plus agency like us. So, if you need that extra support contact us.
