The average sales growth experienced by Shopify Plus stores in 2016 was 126% proving that Shopify Plus is a powerful e-commerce platform that allows brands to be flexible, whilst being reliable and cost efficient. Shopify Plus gives you the freedom to develop quickly by providing secure servers, payment compliance and unlimited bandwidth, taking the IT headache away from e-commerce, letting you focus on your product and customers.

Here are a few of the features you will enjoy as a Plus client:

1. Scalability:

Unlimited bandwidth with scalable SaaS hosting equates to a fully supported, flexible, reliable solutions. With 99.99% uptime and 4 million hits per second, you can be assured that from Black Friday to Mother's Day, your store will be up with Shopify Plus being capable of 8000 orders per minute. Plus customers also enjoy 200TB storage capabilities and unlimited bandwidth for all Shopify customers.

2. Complete Customisation:

Shopify stores, out the box, are some of the most stylish in the market, and every last one responsively designed. On top of this, you can customise each theme to an impressive degree, including changing homepage content and layout, header and footer menus, typography and colours.

However, for bigger brands looking for something more exclusive, Shopify Plus can be customised to cater to every demand with full Javascript and CSS control. With full CSS and Javascript control, you’ll be able to push the customisation of your checkout and incorporate any conversion optimisation techniques you like, right up to and including the checkout page.

3. High Volume Traffic - no problem:

Launchpad is the new tool for Plus merchants who run flash sales and product launch events. It gives merchants the power to schedule bulk changes to their store to coincide with the start/end of an event. You can schedule:

• Product pricing, inventory and per-channel product visibility
• Theme-level changes, allowing for event-specific creative content
• Lock your store for a predetermined duration – great for building anticipation before a big launch.
• Use of captchas on the checkout to prevent bots getting in on the action.

It also provides a real-time analytics dashboard to track the success of your events.

4. Success Management:

A dedicated Success Manager will aid you with all aspects of Shopify Plus and will keep in touch to ensure a successful store launch. This includes bi-monthly updates from the Success Manager on new apps and features with dedicated priority support including a personalised email address and phone number for critical, time-sensitive issues.

Powerful Discounting Functionality:

Using Shopify’s Scripting feature you can set up discounts such as:

• Percentage based discounts
• Free shipping or a free gift
• Tiered pricing, allowing you to offer discounts to specific retailers or VIPs
• Product bundles and combination offers
• Buy one get one free

With Shopify Plus, you gain access to the Script Editor allows developers to write custom scripts that are hosted and run by Shopify, giving developers and e-commerce store owners the ability to build custom business logic into their stores.

5. Apps and Integrations:

Shopify out of the box has all the features you'll need to start an online store. But as you get further along you'll want to add more sophisticated features to your e-commerce campaigns. Shopify partners with over 1100 app developers to make your life easier. These apps are checked and verified by the Shopify team, with a customer based star review system so you can see what apps are really working for businesses in your current situation. There are apps to help with:

• Customer service
• Inventory management
• Accounting
• Marketing
• Discounts and special offers
• Handling wholesale customers

Shopify Plus allows you to have higher API limits which will allow you to accomplish a lot more when it comes to app and ERP integrations. Shopify Plus allows you to make multiple integrations work cohesively without worrying about hitting API limits. This allows you to set up real-time connections between everything from your CRM to Accounting neatly together.

6. Shopify Pay:

Shopify Pay will allow customers to save their credit card, shipping and billing information so they can check out faster the next time they visit your store. This reduces the form filling aspect of 16 fields to just 2, which will have a significant impact on mobile conversion rates.

7. Wholesale Management:

Shopify has been seen as lacking when it comes to accommodating merchants’ wholesale needs, with multiple workarounds to successfully run a wholesale business. Announced at Unite 2017 is a new wholesale platform, giving merchants the power to run a separate wholesale website from their existing Shopify account.

More features coming soon to Shopify Plus:

8. Mobile store builder:

Currently only available on Shopify Plus, this new feature will allow brands to create native iOS and Android apps without any technical knowledge. We’ve seen a demo of one of the apps created with this new feature and it looks impressive. For retailers without the budget to build a bespoke mobile app, it will be an attractive proposition.

9. Customisable workflows:

Flow is an automation platform that allows Plus merchants to manage the backend of business, such as inventory and order management, without the cost of building a bespoke system. Besides affording merchants time-saving automations and seamless integrations with external tools, Flow provides the agility necessary to experiment with backend customizations designed to instantly boost productivity. Update: Flow has now launched, you can read more about it here: Shopify Flow - e-commerce automation from Shopify Plus

If you're ready for a Shopify Plus redesign or replatform, send us an enquiry to see how we can help.