Chapter 2: What is Shopify Plus

What is Shopify Plus?

Launching in 2014 off the back of Shopify’s success, Shopify Plus is aimed at providing a fully hosted, SaaS eCommerce platform for medium-sized and fast-growing merchants at a relatively low cost (when compared to traditional enterprise-grade eCommerce solutions). The platform is scalable and has the infrastructure to help any rapidly-growing brick and mortar and/or eCommerce retailer achieve sustainable growth.

In addition, Shopify Plus comes with benefits including super-fast servers, unlimited bandwidth, and the ability to cope with a huge spike of simultaneous visitors and sales at a moment’s notice. Additionally, Shopify will also dedicate a Success Manager or two to every Shopify Plus account to help strategize marketing efforts and improve customer experiences.

The Big Three: Comparison

When a retailer is considering making the move to the next level of eCommerce and retail, chances are they are toying over three options: BigCommerce, Magento, and Shopify Plus. In this section we will look at the advantages and disadvantages of Shopify Plus when compared to BigCommerce and Magento.

Development & Maintenance Costs

You don’t need us to tell you that operating an enterprise eCommerce store can be expensive in terms of time and resources. However, if you don’t have a web development team at your disposal, then your biggest expense is your opportunity cost taking away from product development and marketing.

Therefore, the biggest advantage of Shopify Plus is that it removes a lot of that opportunity cost. You don’t need a dedicated team of web developers to manage and update your website and online assets. One person can do the job of many using Shopify. In fact, you can even outsource and hire a freelancer when needed. It’s that easy to use.

Another big plus of using a global platform such as Shopify Plus is that you will never have to deal with important (and often time-consuming) aspects of running the website, such as servers, bugs, feature implementations, bandwidth and file storage. This is all taken care of.

Predictable Pricing

Shopify Plus’ pricing plans start at around $2,000 per month although this figure can increase based on specific needs (such as expected traffic levels and specific customizations). The good news is that pricing stays constant from the day you sign on, so you always know where you are.

While $2,000 is a considerable chunk of money to set aside every month, it will make sense for many enterprise-level companies. This way of pricing is cheaper than paying for hosting plus fees plus web developer retainers. It is also more predictable and constant than hiring a developer for bug fixes, feature requests and to implement changes. Finally, if your store has big traffic fluctuations, this monthly fee is more predictable than budgeting for bandwidth, servers or cloud hosting fees.

Reliability at Scale

At an enterprise level, web infrastructure takes on a whole new set of challenges. No matter how big or quick your company is growing, it is essential to ensure that hundreds/thousands of visitors running concurrent sessions are having a fast and secure shopping experience — not to mention the fact that your orders must be processed correctly and efficiently.

With the rise of cloud hosting, there are plenty of services, best practices and case studies on handling traffic at scale. But for stores or brands who do not have a core competency in server architecture or cloud hosting, it usually doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend time there.

The key issue of scaling traffic should be marketing and inventory – not whether or not your servers are holding up.

Are these visitors converting as predicted? Do we have the inventory and selection available? Are my products being presented and updating accurately?

Letting a vendor with proven infrastructure deal with these issues is a big advantage for many enterprise-level clients.

Disadvantages

Like pretty much anything in business, there is no such thing as a ‘best choice’. There is only the best fit for your company at the time. It goes without saying that, for all its positives, Shopify Plus does have several disadvantages.

CMS & Content Limitations

There is no denying that Shopify Plus is a fully-fledged eCommerce platform. However, if you are looking for a fully-fledged feature-rich content management system, then you may find yourself left wanting more.

Shopify Plus does indeed have built-in blogging tools as well as a page management system, while you can certainly build a publishing or information-rich website that can compete in a content marketing world. However, publishing is not Shopify Plus’ forte. It is built for eCommerce, and you can definitely tell the limitations if you are coming from a publishing platform like WordPress.

In fact, many of the most well-known Shopify stores exist on a subdomain or have their blog on a subdomain for that reason. With that said, unless your major source of revenue is from content marketing from a blog, then this may not be a big issue for you.

Platform Lock-in

Platform lock-in is another inherent disadvantage when using a hosted platform like Shopify Plus.

For example, if Shopify runs into financial trouble (and considering they are doing very well on the NYSE, this isn’t likely!) you do bear the vendor risk. If you want to close your store and migrate to a new platform, you can only get the data that Shopify exports for you.

Either way, vendor risk and platform lock-in is a disadvantage that has to be weighed, especially since there is open-source software available that can do a similar job.

Platform Expertise

Using Shopify Plus does require developing some in-house Shopify expertise. Shopify’s API and front-end templating language, Liquid, was developed and made in-house. Unfortunately, this means that Liquid is not as common as, say, Javascript, Ruby, or one of the many other popular programming languages out there.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to rush out and employ the services of an in-house developer — Shopify attempts to make it easy for anyone to jump in and make changes. Still, when it comes time to give the site a makeover or make layout changes, the cracks begin to show, as Shopify Plus is not drag and drop type of product.

Don’t let the above frighten you though! If you do not have an in-house developer, Shopify Plus does have an extensive network of vetted agencies that you can work with – we personally recommend BVAccel, as they have done some amazing work for our customers.

Shopify makes it super easy for anyone to be able to jump in, make changes and setup their shop in minutes. - Ally Daley, Education Program Developer