Our 10 Favorite Shopify Plus Features

Shopify Plus extends your commerce capabilities so that you can focus on the important stuff. These ten features, in particular, go beyond the competitive advantage of Shopify Plus—they make it an enjoyable platform to work on by optimizing your workflow and reducing your headaches.

Shopify Plus Feature #1: Advanced Fraud Detection

Fraud comes with the territory as a digital merchant, but Shopify goes the extra mile to thwart as much fraud as any platform can. On a Shopify plan or higher, you’ll see a fraud risk rating telling you if there is a low, medium, or high risk of a chargeback.

Shopify Plus merchants are given access to even higher tech protection systems internally, with additional support when investigating fraud. These additional protections are specifically designed to handle large scale fraud cases and the Shopify support team can be a big help in dealing with fraud cases.

Shopify Plus Feature #2: Advanced Reporting

Shopify analytics has powerful insights at most levels but they reserve the best for Advanced and Plus clients. You can customize customer reports to understand your best and worst customers better. Here are a few ways of slicing the data:

1. At-risk: A repeat customer that is somewhat likely to buy again but hasn’t placed an order in a while.

2. Dormant: Customers who are unlikely to buy from you again.

3. Loyal: Repeat customers who buy more than the average buyer. (These are your customers who make the 80/20 rule true.)

4. Promising: Customers who are likely to become loyal customers. If you play your chips right, these customers are the ones who are likely to become way more valuable than most of your other customers.

Think of what you can do with that data. For at-risk customers, maybe it’s time to send them a promotion that draws them back. For loyal customers, how can you make them feel special - maybe a gift or thank you for their patronage? This data enables Shopify Plus merchants to get in front of customers at their most important stages and can help you build a true tribe of loyal customers.

Shopify Plus Feature #3: Additional sites for multiple environments

Shopify Plus caters to large scale merchants and for enterprise merchants, feature enhancements and site changes need to be carefully developed, tested and staged for review. The only way to support this process is to be able to easily spin up multiple environments, copies of the production site where you can experiment without risk to your main site.

Shopify Plus includes (at no additional cost) ten additional clones of the site. Another great use of your ten additional sites is to run stores in other languages/foreign markets. And to support this, Shopify Plus' higher API throughput allows merchants to sync inventory and product data across all international sites.

Shopify Plus Feature #4: Automated workflows

When you use Shopify Plus you get access to a feature set called Shopify Flow that, when used correctly, can do magic. Put simply, Flow lets you automate away repetitive tasks to save you time. The automation “flows” can be as simple or as complex as you want, with multiple paths for different states and decisions.

A Flow in Shopify is a collection of:

1. Triggers - the events that occur in your Shopify store that start a Flow

2. Conditions - defines the conditions when your automation should occur

3. Actions - what changes should occur in your store when the Trigger occurs and your Conditions are met.

Put these three together and you have a powerful automation tool at your fingertips. Here’s the simple interface of Shopify Flow showing how easy it is to get started with rewarding your top customers.

Shopify Plus Feature #5: Real-time carrier shipping

Showing the estimated price of shipping before checkout to a customer is a great way to build confidence in the final price of a transaction to a buyer. Enter real-time carrier shipping: the ability to show the estimated shipping total before you complete checkout.

By showing the shipping price earlier in the process, you can reduce the anxiety of the unknown total of the purchase. This strategy works for most merchants regardless of shipping price because you’ll satisfy users by delighting them with a lower shipping price or avoid frustration before they spend time ordering your product.

Shopify Plus Feature #6: Customizable checkout

The ability to customize the checkout flow is one of the most powerful and coveted features in all of Shopify and only Plus merchants have this available to them. You can better brand the entire checkout experience via Liquid templating and customize the data and views within the checkout process. This includes the steps for inventory issues, customer information, shipping method, payment method, review order, processing/forwarding, and order status.

For our client Biossance, we implemented a fully custom cart experience engineered for their customers. When a specific product is ordered, the cart detects certain criteria and offers the selection of a free gift if the criteria is met. This gesture doesn’t cost Biossance much but it does wonders to add value to the product they are getting as well as a nice surprise when someone checks out.

Shopify Plus Feature #7: Shopify Scripts and the Scripts Editor app

Shopify Scripts are small code snippets you write to programmatically alter the behavior of your store. The Shopify Scripts Editor is a tool to help you write scripts by providing templates to get started, management features, and a helpful debugger.

When you look under the covers at what high growth merchants all have in common you tend to find the three things:

1. a relentless focus on reducing buyer friction

2. a conversion focused agile marketing process

3. religious devotion to Shopify Scripts.

The latter is the tool that Shopify merchants most frequently turn to achieve growth and improve conversion. Here are a couple of scripts in particular that we’ve seen our clients use with success.

1. Storewide discount: a super simple script, easy to implement, and something that no app can accomplish so effortlessly for no added cost and no theme code.

2. Auto-Select Default Payment Method: another simple script to front-load preferred payment methods to accelerate checkout / reduce friction.

Check out 15 Ecommerce Checkout Optimizations with Shopify Scripts to Increase Conversions.

Shopify Plus Feature #8: Dedicated Shopify Experts (who are real humans!)

Shopify Plus customers get access to a dedicated Launch Engineer who will serve as a resource during your entire migration and launch on the platform.

Once live, a Merchant Success Manager (MSM) will partner with you to move the needle on sales and scale your store. A MSM provides toolkits, resources, process, and training in addition to your agency partner that can help move things a lot quicker. In the case of late-night problems when your MSM is sleeping, there is 24/7 priority support which offers a direct line to priority support, day or night, to support resources with expertise on the Shopify Plus platform.

Shopify Plus Feature #9: 99.99% uptime guarantee

We love this tidbit: Shopify merchants sold over $1 billion during Black Friday and Cyber Monday Weekend in 2017—with zero outages. If the platform were a single merchant, it would be the 4th largest online retailer in North America, coming just after Walmart during Black Friday and Cyber Monday

As every digital merchant knows, uptime is revenue so a serious SLA for uptime is mission critical. Shopify Plus delivers on that with a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%. Up to 10,000 orders per minute per store, 7,000+ cores, and a fully-integrated Fastly CDN.

Shopify Plus Feature #10: Higher API limits

Shopify Plus merchants benefit from twice the rate limits as non-Plus merchants. Whether you’re doing 50 or 5,000 orders a day, Shopify Plus automatically scales with you without us having to do anything extra.