Updated: 12/21/23

Over the last 15+ years,Shopify has become one of themost popular eCommerce platforms on the planet.

And asShopify experts, we’ve enjoyed building, upgrading, and marketing websites built on this platform.

In 2014, Shopify debuted a more robust, enterprise-level option for companies that need even more from their websites.

Since then, Shopify Plus has gained a similar level of success as its predecessor with more than 1.7 million companies relying on the platform –including household names like Staples, Heinz, Gymshark, and Blenders Eyewear.

So, before you get too far in your decision-making process, let’s answer two very important questions:

How much is Shopify Plus and is it worth it?

Let’s start with the first one.

A Shopify Plus License is $2,000/month + 0.25% of your monthly revenue after you reach $800,000/month.

The price will vary depending on the online revenue that you do every year, butthe cost of Shopify Plus begins at $2,000 a month.

That’s obviously a lot of money.

But it might cost even more depending on your company’s online revenue.

That’s because the price includes another 0.25% of your monthly revenue if it exceeds $800,0000/month.

So, basically, the cost of Shopify Plus is $2,000/month until your company’s monthly revenue exceeds $800,000. At that point, you begin paying the 0.25%. At $800,000, that would be $2,000/month.

Again, this overhead is one of the main reasons Shopify Plus is meant for online companies that are consistently making at least $800,000 every month. At that point, an extra $2,000/month shouldn’t hurt too much.

And if your store ever reaches $16 million per month in sales, your monthly licensing fee will reach its cap ($40,000).

If the price of Shopify Plus is currently out of your budget, here are your other options for this platform, including their monthly costs and what kinds of companies Shopify recommends them for:

• Basic Shopify:$29/month – “Best for new ecommerce businesses with occasional in-person sales.”
• Shopify:$79/month – “Best for growing businesses selling online or in-store.”
• Advanced Shopify: $299/month – “Best for scaling businesses that require advanced reporting.”

So, if you’re a growing business that’s not quite at the enterprise level yet, you may want to use Advanced Shopify until your budget can handle $2,000/month.

Budgeting for the monthly cost of your Shopify Plus license is just the beginning, though. If you want your store to reach its full potential, you’ll need to budget for four other costs, too.

Here are the big four to keep in mind.

Shopify Plus comes withShopify Payments, which can handle all of your credit card processing needs.

If you use Shopify Payments to handle your transactions, you won’t pay a cent no matter how many sales you make. This is especially incredible considering just how many transactions this platform can handle – more on that in a moment.

On the other hand, if you decide to go with a third-party payment processor, you’ll pay .15% for every transaction. As Shopify explains on their site, that “fee helps [them] maintain our PCI compliance and the integrity of both you and your customers’ data.”

Nonetheless, this is still a pretty good deal compared to the 0.5% business owners have to pay when they use Shopify Advanced to build their sites.

While Shopify Plus is an incredibly robust eCommerce platform, your company is still unique and probably has its own unique needs. Chances are that no platform would ever be able to support every specific requirement your business has.

That’s whereShopify’s app store comes in.

These apps can help your site with a wide range of goals, including:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media
• Product Reviews
• Upselling
• Loyalty Programs

The prices for these apps range from absolutely nothing all the way up to $500.

I’d say about half of them in any of the aforementioned categories are free, but even the paid versions usually offer some kind of free trial, so you can get a sense of what kind of ROI you can expect before paying for them.

If you’re curious about some of the better options available, we’ve put together a list of thebest Shopify apps on the market.

In fact, at IWD we’ve built one of our own: aShopify store locator app for those companies that have online and IRL locations.

We also have acheckout extension for Shopify that will connect your site to 120+ payment gateways, help improve conversions, and much more.

Shopify is famous for being user-friendly, but unless all your company needs is a basic eCommerce site with little more thanproduct pages, you’re going to want to work with an experienced agency.

The right agency will have more than just qualified developers who can build your site, install and configure the plugins and extensions it needs, and create custom solutions.

Unless you already employ the right specialists, you’ll want an agency that also employs experienced professionals who can do things like improve your site’s UX (User Experience),increase your Shopify conversion rate, anddo Shopify SEO that will bring in more traffic.

Finally, just like a house, building it is only the beginning. You have to take care to maintain and uphold it, too, or that initial investment is going to result in a major loss.

So, be sure to budget for maintaining your Shopify website, as well.

Depending on what your staff can handle on their own, maintaining your Shopify website may entail:

• Adding and altering Google Tags
• Fixing 404 pages
• Addressing issues that are hurting your site speed
• Conduct A/B testing to assess the best changes to make
• Change and update code
• Back up your store
• Remove outdated inventory

The list of potential maintenance tasks is endless. A precise list for your company will depend on your business, but whatever the case, your budget will have to include funds for the kinds of tasks your site will require every month.

Alright, now that you have a better idea of how much a Shopify Plus site will cost, let’s find out if that price tag is worth it for your business.

With all that said, is Shopify Plus worth it?

The answer comes down to whether or not the added features Shopify Plus offers are worth the steep increase in price.

So, now let’s cover the 15 main reasons so many companies have decided Shopify Plus is well worth the price.

The first reason so many successful companies trust Shopify Plus is that this platform can handle an insane number of transactions compared to the standard version.

I'm talking about more than 10,000 transactions A MINUTE!

If you're seeing those kinds of sales, you just can't settle for a lesser platform. Imagine going to all the trouble to earn that kind of business only to find out your site can’t handle it.

This will never be a problem with Shopify Plus.

The platform will also give you 200TB worth of storage and unlimited bandwidth – two more reasons you’ll enjoy peace of mind when you trust this platform with your site.

The second reason so many companies love Shopify Plus is that there's no ceiling on the number of staff accounts they can create.

Once again, for a small company, this might not seem like a big deal.

However, if you're scaling up or it's just been a while since you outgrew your current eCommerce platform, this kind of freedom is going to make a massive difference.

Being able to quickly add professionals to your account whenever you want so they can get to work ASAP is SO much better than going through the grueling process of requesting – and paying for – new accounts again and again.

Speaking of your staff, building a successful website can be tough with a large team. All those people usually come with an equally large number of tasks, which makes it almost inevitable that some of them will slip through the cracks.

Shopify Flow will help to ensure this doesn’t happen.

This automation tool will make it easy to create, manage, and then automate workflows for the kinds of important tasks a successful eCommerce website depends on.

To give you an idea of what Flow can do, here are some examples of important tasks Plus users regularly create:

• Modifying product tags based on customers’ purchases and inventory level
• Creating triggered actions when high-risk orders are made

• Assigning tags to customers when their value increases so you can work to increase loyalty

• Relisting products when they’re back in stock

• Sending personalized notifications to customers based on specific account behaviors or orders

Flow also provides the kind of flexibility that a growing eCommerce enterprise must have to stay productive and manage overhead while continuing to scale.

And, recently, Shopify released pre-built templates that will make it even easier for you and your team to set up automated workflows.

Another issue that can stop otherwise effective teams from creating equally effective websites is when more than one person is trying to work on the same webpage at the same time.

This is when collaboration can create more problems than it solves.

And duringCOVID-19, when remote work skyrocketed, this kind of problem happened all the time. One team member would work on a page without knowing one of their teammates was making changes at the same time. Inevitably, someone would lose their work when the other one hit save.

With Shopify Plus, you’ll receive alerts whenever one of your teammates is working on the same product page you are. If they make any changes and hit save, once again, you’ll receive a notification.

A big part of optimizing your eCommerce company’s yearly sales is knowing how and when to launch sales and products.

This is a whole lot easier to do when you haveShopify’s Launchpad tool, an app that is only available to users of Shopify Plus.

It’s designed so that you can quickly set up and track sales and product launches whenever you want. Decide when you’d like these events to start and stop, which will affect the price of your products, collections, or sale items.

You can even use Launchpad to coordinate theme changes whenever these events take place, an amazing option for running seasonal sales or launching campaigns with specific branding.

Launchpad will even give you a specific analytics dashboard that you can use to track the performance for these kinds of important events in real-time.

No page on an eCommerce website is as important as yourcheckout page.

After all, if it doesn’t do its job, what does it matter if the other pages do?

And yet, countless companies entrust this crucial last step of their eCommerce funnel to default options that lead to low conversions andhigh abandonment rates.

This has always been a weakness of most of the other Shopify plans. Aside from their looks, there’s not a whole lot you can do to improve your checkout page.

One of the biggest reasons so many enterprises find Shopify Plus worth the price is because of how customizable its checkout pages are right out-of-the-box. Decide how many pages you want your checkout process to be, customize each of them, and then conduct A/B testing to make sure your changes are having the desired effects.

Arguably the best way to increase your conversion rate andAOV (Average Order Value) is to leverage the power ofcustom pricing.

This is especially true for B2B companies that need to service a diverse market of clients.

With Shopify Plus, you’ll enjoy an equally wide range of pricing options for your products. These include:

• Tiered Pricing
• Custom Pricing by Buyer
• Bulk Discounts
• Shopping Rules
• Wholesale Product Sales

You can put all of these features behind a password-protected section of your store reserved solely for B2B buyers. So, you can also have a store that’s open to B2C customers without having to launch a second site.

This approach completely eliminates the kind of friction that ruins conversion rates for most B2B companies online because they have to talk to the buyer in order to offer them bulk, discounted, or wholesale pricing.  

And whether they’re B2C or B2B, Shopify Plus makes it almost effortless to offer your customers the kinds ofpersonalized experiences that are proven to drive conversions.

While competitors using other platforms will have to jump through all kinds of hoops to utilize personalization, you can use Flow to automate customer-targeted homepages, pricing, and coupon displays that all change based on previous customer interactions.

Along with custom pricing, Plus will let you create shipping policies that make the most sense for your company.

So, you can create preset shipping options for wholesale customers or anyone who spends a certain amount or define shipping options by product.

With the help of Flow, you can automatically route customer orders to drop shippers and fulfillment centers as necessary.

If you have highly specific demands for your site, here’s yet anotherway Plus will let you customize your company’s online presence.

WithShopify Script Editor, you – or your developer – can write custom scripts or edit existing ones that are hosted by Shopify to create all kinds of functionality that you may otherwise not be able to achieve with available apps.

Popular examples of this type of functionality include things like:

• Percentage-based discounts
• Dynamic pricing based on volume
• Product bundle offers

If Shopify Plus doesn’t already offer an option for customizing your shopping or checkout experience, there’s a good chance you can get it done with Script Editor.

And let’s add one more option for creating competitive edges for your eCommerce website.

Shopify Plus gives you increased access to the API, which is extremely valuable if your company handles lots of volume and could use some help from an outsideERP system. Shopify allows double the number ofAPI calls it will support for Shopify Plus users compared to standard merchants.

And if you decide to migrate to Shopify Plus, the company can even raise your API limit to help speed up the entire process.

But maybe you’re not migrating.

Maybe your traffic is still manageable at the moment.

In that case, having this kind of API access is still a huge advantage because being able to seamlessly integrate countless systems and tools means your eCommerce website’s potential is virtually limitless.

Plus will even grant youheadless architecture  if you want to create completely unique storefronts across any device without default frontend systems deciding how your content has to look to users.

As you can probably tell by now, this platform has the potential to bring you a ton of traffic and give you the tools you need to continuously increase your conversion rate.

For most companies, these features justify the price of Shopify Plus all by themselves.

But wait…

There’s more…

Plus also comes packed with in-depth reporting that ensures you always have easy-to-access numbers in real-time that you can use to improve your store’s performance.

Furthermore, its reporting tools are designed to integrate with advanced analytics platforms likeGlew andLooker. Integrating with either will give you even more actionable insights to take your company’s website to the next level.

There may be a number of reasons your enterprise needs multiple websites.

For example, you may need different sites for different countries.

You may sell the same products but with different brands – necessitating different sites.

Whatever the reason, running multiple websites is an absolute nightmare when you have to constantly log in and log out of different dashboards to monitor what’s happening.

It gets REALLY old REALLYfast.

Shopify Plus users don’t have to deal with this excruciatingly annoying problem to track events across completely different sites.

Just use one single dashboard.

Simple.

And yet, Shopify Plus takes things one crucial step forward.

Users can easily clone their eCommerce stores up to nine times without spending more on their plans.

That’s amazing.

No starting from scratch.

No paying the costs for a brand-new site.

Just clone your current version and get it up-and-running in no time.

So, if you’ve been putting off that second site you need in another language because the thought of building it from scratch – rightfully – makes you break out in hives, Shopify Plus comes ready with a simple solution.

Alright, we’ve covered a lot of ground so far –a lot.

Maybe even enough that you’re now convinced Shopify Plus is well worth the price.

But still, what about the learning curve?

Will all of these incredible features be more trouble than they’re worth?

If that’s a concern, I have good news.

The last few spots on this list will be dedicated to the three ways Shopify makes it as easy as possible to make the most out of this platform.

Though, quick reminder:hiring an agency makes it completely effortless to take full advantage of Shopify Plus.

Okay, first let’s talk aboutShopify Plus Academy.

In short, it’s a massiveonline library of training videos that will walk you through everything from the many tools available to you to SEO training to live workshops. It even offers business workshops from more than 90 instructors like Tim Ferris and Daymond John.

So, even if you won’t need help using Shopify (because you’ve hired a trustworthy developer), there’s still plenty to learn from Shopify Plus Academy.

Another way Shopify wants to help its Plus users is with itsShopify Plus Merchant Growth Model (MGM), which will walk you through six different business areas that can improve your eCommerce store’s online presence.

For example, clothing brandTrue Vintage used its Shopify Plus Merchant Growth Model to increase theiremail marketing revenue to $225,000.

You’ll also receive weekly newsletters to keep you informed about updates to your platform.

ANDthe Facebook community for this feature is insanely helpful. Thousands of fellow merchants, partners, and industry professionals are there to answer just about any question you may have about operating your site.

Finally, if those two incredible resources aren’t to your liking, the price of Shopify Plus covers your own personal account manager.

This expert’s one-and-only job is providing you with support whenever you need it.

No waiting in line.

No staying on hold.

If you’re already a good candidate for this premium platform because of your monthly revenue, waiting around for support when you really need it could literally mean losing thousands and thousands of dollars – maybe more.

Now, look, if you’re one of our eCommerce clients, we’ll be there for you around the clock.

But otherwise, it’s still smart to have an agent in your corner 24/7.

In short…it depends.

As I’ve mentioned, the big variable here is how much your eCommerce platform makes every month.

If $2,000/month is within your budget, you’re probably doing well enough that many of the aforementioned features are essential to your ongoing success.

And here’s the thing: if your company is at the level where it needs enterprise software, then there’s room to negotiate the price.

So, if you decide on a platform that you know would fit your company's eCommerce needs, feel free to contact the company and try negotiating the price. Plenty of businesses have succeeded at getting a lower price on Shopify Plus and other premium platforms (obviously, it helps if your eCommerce company is successful).

At the very least, you have nothing to lose (except overhead).

As I mentioned at the beginning, if yours is a small or medium-sized business, there are three great alternatives to Shopify Plus that will be a lot easier on your budget:

• Basic Shopify:$29/month
• Shopify: $79/month
• Advanced Shopify: $299/month

So, there's no reason to rush into Shopify Plus. You can always start with one of these other versions and work your way up.

And, as I mentioned earlier, we may be able to customize more affordable versions to add the functionality you need without paying the price for Shopify Plus.

And, of course, there are other completely different eCommerce platforms to choose from, as well. Here are some comparison posts to help with your decision:

• Shopify vs. Magento
• Shopify vs. BigCommerce
• Shopify vs. Volusion
• Shopify vs. Etsy
• Shopify vs. Squarespac
• Shopify vs. Amazon
• Shopify vs. WooCommerce 

By all means, do your own research, but if you’d like to decide sooner rather than later…