22+ Shopify Plus Experts Reveal: When is Best to Upgrade to Shopify Plus
Are you considering moving your ecommerce website to Shopify Plus? Perhaps your current platform has been feeling a little “snug” for your growing ecommerce business, and is lacking the functionality you need to keep expanding.
Whether you are upgrading from Advanced Shopify or replatforming from BigCommerce or Magento, making the move to Shopify Plus a fantastic next step for your ecommerce business. Shopify Plus is an enterprise-level solution designed for high-volume, high-revenue merchants that require increased scalability, customization, and support.
Although the platform was created for enterprise companies generating high-volume sales, Plus merchants come in all sizes. While many major brands use Shopify+, the user base also includes mid-sized businesses that benefit from the additional features.
When Is Best to Upgrade to Shopify Plus?
Shopify Plus offers the same standard features as Shopify, with the addition of exclusive benefits like increased transaction capacity, customizable checkout, global store expansion, and premium customer support.
Of course, switching ecommerce platforms is a big decision—so how can merchants tell if it’s the best time to make the move to Shopify Plus? We asked 22 of the top Shopify Plus Partners that very question. Read what the experts had to say below!
“How can an ecommerce brand tell when it's time to make the move to Shopify Plus?”
Carson McComas
Fuel Made
CEO
We’ve found that Plus starts to make sense for merchants when they reach around $1-2 million in annual revenue. It's not necessarily the revenue that triggers the need, but it's around this mark when the extra support and unique features of Plus start to make it worth the investment for their business.
Tools like Scripts, Launchpad and Flow can really give your business an edge, freeing up valuable time to focus on business growth. Both Scripts and Launchpad can work together nicely to create and schedule flash sales in advance, putting sales on autopilot. Flow is basically Zapier on steroids, and can automate different aspects of your business (you can use it for fraud detection, hiding out-of-stock products, rewarding loyal customers, etc.). Other strong features of Plus include a higher level of support, checkout customization, API access, multi-store, multi-currency (for international expansion) and additional bandwidth–all of which give you the functionality to create a more authentic experience for your customers.
Dan McIvor
Swanky
Founder & Director
Take time to sit down with your team and stakeholders to reflect honestly on your business and answer some questions about what isn’t working for you anymore.
• Can you rely on your ecommerce platform to stay up and running even during your busiest sales periods?
• Are you ploughing too much time, money and resources into support and maintenance?
• Is your current platform stifling your customisation aspirations?
• Do you find it difficult to do things like add products, manage the back-end of your store and make tweaks to your website’s design?
• Is your ecommerce solution preventing your business from scaling?
• Are your ecommerce team regularly frustrated by platform constraints?
You know it’s time to make the move to a new ecommerce platform when the gripes of your current solution outweigh any fear you feel about the re-platforming process.
If you’re concerned about the time and money required to switch platforms, remember that the long-term benefits of moving to a more reliable, dynamic, scalable platform like Shopify Plus can quickly eclipse the costs of carrying out an ecommerce store migration.
Kurt Elster
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
Shopify Expert
In our experience, the move to Plus is less about revenue, and more about solving a business pain or problem. There are several unique technical features exclusive to Plus– Shopify Scripts, Launchpad, Flow, and access to the checkout template. Being able to power complex promotions without the use of discount codes using Scripts has been a tremendous revenue driver. Solving bespoke shipping restrictions with Scripts or editing checkout.liquid to display messages addressing legislative issues like Prop65, GDPR, or CBD restrictions is powerful. When you start to feel constrained by technical limitations is often when it’s time to upgrade to Plus.
Jessica Thiele
VL OMNI
Marketing Director
It's simple: if you live in a world of cobbled-together work-arounds and manual processes, you've outgrown your current solution - a fantastic problem to have since you can take the time to build strategy into your next-level technology decisions. Plus and their world of expert Partners are there to help scaling merchants achieve more without the need to build out an internal IT team who are looking to capitalize on system-wide (or beyond) strategy, cultivating channel efficiency and brand loyalty and much more.
Maya Page
The Chicago Web Co.
Creative Director
As an e-commerce brand, once you start hitting certain milestones and targets, you may feel like Shopify Plus is right for you. Generally, once you reach a certain revenue per month (around $75,000 per month or so) and start to experience rapid growth, Shopify Plus will be the right upgrade. You’ll usually know the time to switch is right when you start asking yourself whether switching to Shopify Plus might be beneficial for your business.
It might be sudden or it might be gradual, but you’ll one day realize that you need the “next step” in your business. Shopify Plus offers a plethora of features, meant to help take your business to the next level. If you want to customize your checkout, sell in different currencies or customize your sites for different countries, or if you want to take advantage of automations, you’ll know that the time is right.
One of the biggest things to consider is: how much you are paying a month in transaction fees? (The switch alone might make actually end up saving you money every month). Sitting down and running through your numbers might reveal that you’re losing money by not switching to Shopify Plus.
Travis Johnson
WITTY
Founder
The first factor we use to assist our clients with the possible upgrade to Plus is their monthly revenue. Our general rule of thumb is if you're selling $100k+ per month, upgrading to Shopify Plus is a no-brainer and will save you money. After that we look at their specific business model, industry, etc to determine the specific ways they can benefit from upgrading to Shopify Plus.
Aleks Cugalj
Carson eCommerce
Lead Customer Success
Revenue, of course! When you hit the annual revenue of about $1M, it can be a sign to move the store to the next level. This is the point where the cost of a $2000+ monthly fee starts to make sense for Shopify investment.
Another sign could be that you need to customize your checkout page. Plus members have access to the liquid.checkout file on their stores, so they would have more flexibility with their checkout to create a personalized experience for their customers.
Also, if you’re considering expanding your business internationally, thinking about the upgrade would be justified. Plus merchants get several free clone stores, allowing them to customize their store by language, currency, culture, or season.
Other aspects, such as the need for the wholesale store, can tell if you’re ready to move forward with the upgrade to Shopify Plus. However, if you noticed any of the aforementioned ones, the next step would be contacting the Shopify Plus team to determine your next steps or simply to discuss if your store is ready for the upgrade.
Mark Perini
ICEE Social
Founder
In my mind, the single best reason to move over to Shopify Plus is for international expansion. Every country has its own tax rule/implications that you can control on a per-store basis.
Moreover, your accountant is going to thank you twice over when you're receiving payouts in the local currency of that country. Shopify Plus gives you 9 expansion stores that you can use to plot global Ecommerce domination.
Michael Bower
Sellry, Inc.
Ecommerce Technologist & Agency CEO
There are three important signals for ecommerce brands to take into consideration as to when to move to Shopify Plus:
1. You need the advanced functionality, support and APIs offered by Shopify Plus.
2. You will save money on transaction fees by doing so. Shopify Plus eliminates per-transaction fees.
3. You want to make your site as fast as possible. Shopify Plus, coupled with modern frontend "headless" technology, can dramatically improve your loadtime and conversion rate.
Richard Emanuel
Parkfield Tech LLC
Co-Founder & Director
I say it's 2 major things, they are making above $1m USD or the 2nd thing is brand, simply feeling they've outgrown their technology. They've become to feel the limitations of basic Shopify and want to provide better customer experiences from taking advantage of cart based discounts, provide dedicated localized stores or they want to provide a separate store experience for their B2B customers.
Another big thing we are educating our clients now is automate as much as you can to free you up from the daily grind and Shopify Plus can do this with Shopify Flow.
Martin Cox
Overdose
Technical Director
Most businesses that choose Shopify Plus are doing so to de-shackle themselves. From messy tech stacks with layers of patch up jobs, costly overheads and unreliable servers. The SaaS ecosystem provides businesses the chance to eliminate complexity and focus their resources on growth.
Dustin Thede
FOMO Agency
President
These things boil down to ROI. Shopify Plus will cost a lot more than the other Shopify plans. Will you get back more than that cost in value? Look at the basic things like fees, and understand what you may be saving there. Could you benefit from the additional features:, like: Flow, Launchpad, Support, a more flexible checkout, or even going headless?
The best tip is to talk to a Plus Representative. They are great figuring this out, and if you do not need it, they will usually tell you that.
Jon Cattivera
Sleepless Media
CEO + Creative Director
Out of many reasons, wholesale is high on the list. If you're looking to do B2B in combination with your B2C shop, Shopify Plus gives you the option of a native Wholesale Channel, or a Clone (aka Expansion) store for even more control. You can also use Shopify Scripts to help achieve what many clients are looking to achieve when it comes to wholesale.
Jennifer Caust
Underwaterpistol
Head of Marketing
A core use-case we see for migrating to Shopify is brands needing a powerful, competitive and nimble tech stack. When it comes to Plus, the needs of the business will be more complex, such as launching in markets with different currencies, customising checkout and using Shopify Flow to automate business processes that traditionally would have required new staff - ultimately boosting bottom line.
Emily Forrest
Reload Media
Head of Business Development
In my opinion and based on what we've seen, the main reason people move to Shopify plus is that they've hit the limit of what they can do themselves. They've likely created band-aid solutions (ie: local stores) that are doing really well but not likely the end product. They are definitely growing but are likely so deep in the business that the blinkers are on and they need an impartial outsider to see the opportunity and help them get there. Usually outside of the limitation of their existing platform, plus gives them the chance to take risks but with the additional support it pays off.
Daniel Sheard
Velstar
Co-Founder & Managing Director
As a brand scales up there are a lot of tasks that can become repetitive quickly, Shopify Plus can help support in this area with Shopify Flow. An automation tool that lets merchants create 'flows' to handle repeatable tasks.
Another key indicator that a brand is ready to move to Shopify Plus is when they're looking to expand internationally, with Shopify Plus you get up to 10 expansion stores and the new look Shopify Plus backend makes it easier to manage multiple stores and control user access to them.
Jose Gomez
Koombea
Director of Operations
When the business is ready to scale fast and big, integrate with multiple systems for logistics, accounting, tracking, data analytics. When the business has thousands or more mission-critical transactions per minute. You better have Shopify Plus by then.
Chad Fisher
Ambaum
Founder & CEO
Ambaum has performed a number of migrations to Shopify Plus. We find that the stickiest parts of the migration process can be in moving over customer, order and sales data from your old platform to Shopify Plus. Here are some of the best practices/tips to consider:
1) Create data migration best practices- the data you plan to import should be in one of these formats: 1) JSON, (2) CSV, (3) XLSX, (4) XML. There are online tools available for converting file formats.
2) CSV imports are faster than the Shopify API – the Shopify API imposes a rate limit of roughly 2 records per second, so large datasets can take days or even weeks to import into Shopify via the API.
3) Utilize Shopify metafields and tags to deal with custom data fields – For example, a merchant might have a custom field for BOGO sales, so in Shopify a tag can be created and then with some code you can look for the tag and then display a sale message on Collection and Product pages to the customer.
4) Leverage migration apps – Excelify is a good one that we have used and had success with, but keep in mind that apps can’t do everything. For example, Excelify is good for importing WordPress Blog Posts into Shopify but it’s not good for importing WooCommerce Orders. The Excelify developers have built the app to automatically map the blog post fields to Shopify but the app will not automatically map the order fields.
5) Migrate a test batch of data and then start analyzing, compare Shopify data to source data and start figuring out what needs to be fixed. For example, maybe the “cost per item” showed up in the “compare at price” field or maybe all product reviews are missing their images. You’ll need to troubleshoot those types of things. Issues might need to be addressed by a custom script, an app, or some configuration in the export or import.
Jaimie Geier
Tomorrow Agency
Director of Project Management
As your business grows, you develop greater, more complex needs, which could include managing an increase in demand, streamlining of processes, or even taking your business international. Shopify Plus offers solutions to support you in these areas, along with robust customization solutions to help optimize conversion, stand out amongst your competitors, and ultimately facilitate your growth.
Daria Rose
TVP NYC
Director
There are a few surefire ways to know when to make the move to Shopify plus:
1) Pricing. If your yearly revenue is over $1 million and growing, on a processing fee point alone it makes sense to move. At that point, you end up paying around $500-750 (considering processing fees) for plus features
2) Features, notably pricing scripts, checkout, or multipass. Those are the features we see get people to upgrade. If you can increase your AOV by adding free gifts, and your revenue can support it, upgrade.
Michael Janiak
Pattern
Creative Director & Co-Founder
We usually gauge this in a few ways. Is the business growing double digits? Is the brand ready for a big leap forward in terms of positioning, visual design and UX? Have you maxed out your teams capacity and need more automation? Are you running more than a handful of apps to try and stitch together advanced features? Is your revenue & transaction volume reaching the point where the cost of Plus is nominal compared to what your projections are? If the answer to more than half of these is "yes", we advise merchants to consider moving to Shopify Plus.
Ashley Scorpio
Hawke Media
VP, Partnerships
It’s always a great time to upgrade from Shopify to Shopify Plus! If you are looking to create a more personalized customer or checkout experience, are expanding into specific countries or regions, or want to apply specific shipping rules or automate discounts or tasks, then it’s time to upgrade.
In addition, by upgrading to Shopify Plus you can enjoy lower transaction fees, unlimited staff accounts, and faster API calls.
Beyond that, if you are running into any roadblocks with your store - like delays in processing orders or slower site loading times, or if your store ever crashes from a surge in traffic or if you’re spending too much on IT support or maintenance, then it’s time to upgrade.
Paul Rogers
Vervaunt
Founder
I personally would say this depends on what functionality is needed by the merchant when comparing Shopify Advanced and Plus. We’ve got clients currently doing low volumes online but they need more control over the checkout or Shopify scripts and then others in the same boat that need several clone stores (which can often make Plus price competitive in itself). Equally, we’ve then got a few clients that do a fair amount online, but remain on Advanced as they’re super simple.
In my experience, merchants will often decide to upgrade when they get to a certain level of turnover (probably around $1.5m), but it’s almost always the features that make the decision and also dictate the timing. The features that we’ve most commonly seen to be part of this are:
Shopify Scripts - to help with different levels of promotions (e.g. gift with purchase) and business logic etc
Ability to edit the shopify.liquid file - to customise aspects of the checkout
Clone stores - most commonly for international growth
If the upgrade is just from general growth, features like Shopify Launchpad and Shopify Flow also contribute to this. I wrote this piece a while comparing Shopify Plus and Shopify Advanced in particular, which is still relevant.
Time to Upgrade to Shopify Plus? Here’s What You Should Know
Deciding to upgrade to Shopify Plus can be a big decision. Make sure you’ve got the timing right with the following tips.
Here are the key signs that our experts identified that it’s time to upgrade:
Your Ecommerce Store Has $100k+ Revenue Per Month ($1m+ Revenue Per Year) — At that point, one of our experts said that it’s a “no-brainer and will save you money,” because the pricing model of the Shopify Plus platform eliminates per-transaction fees.
You Need More Control Over Your Platform/You’ve Outgrown Your Current Platform — Shopify Plus allows greater control over how your store looks and operates — including checkout customizations and automation workflows.
Your Business is Expanding Internationally or Moving Into Wholesale — Shopify Plus includes the ability to create cloned and localized stores for specific use cases such as international ecommerce and wholesale channels.
You Want to Simplify Your Tech Stack — While you might need a whole suite of apps to supplement your current ecommerce platform functionality, Shopify Plus can often partially or completely replace that stack.
Are you migrating to Shopify Plus? Be sure to read The Ultimate SEO Migration to Shopify Plus Guide and contact us for our SEO migration services.