The perfect start with Shopify Plus

Moving from traditional Shopify stores or other platforms to Shopify Plus brings huge opportunities. The new features and tools want to be used properly to unleash the full potential of the enterprise platform. As a German Shopify Plus partner, we have summarized the 8 most important features to consider when upgrading to Shopify Plus.

1. Customize the checkout

Increasing sales or optimizing conversion rates, even if it's just a few percentage points, can make a big difference to your store's bottom line. In the past, you may have used special workarounds to customize your checkout. Now, with Shopify Scripts, exclusive to your Shopify Plus merchant, you can create your own optimized checkout experience.

Shopify Scripts - Your advantages:

1. Customize your checkout directly - both in look and feel and by customizing customer fields, shipping methods and payment options.
2. Personalize the checkout process with the script editor, based on the shopping cart values.
3. To increase the average order value, you can set different discount thresholds. With Scripts this all happens automatically in the customer's shopping cart.

2. E-commerce automation

Your time is your most valuable resource. That's why it's important to free yourself or your team from repetitive and labor-intensive processes. That's where two of the Shopify Plus-only automation tools come in handy.

Shopify Flow

Shopify Flow is a simple visual process builder that automates customer-facing processes as well as back-office processes. Some of these automated tasks include customer service, fraud prevention, design and development requirements, merchandising, communications, and marketing and promotions (such as stopping promotions when inventory is low or flagging customers for email segmentation). Flow does this by storing and automatically executing triggers, conditions, and actions you specify without coding.

Below is an example of what you can delegate to Flow:

Trigger: Customer orders for over 300,- EUR.

Automation: marking the customer with tag "VIP"

Follow-up automation: customer receives an automated email with a special gift voucher.

Check out this video to learn more about Shopify Flow:

To reduce the time you spend creating and implementing a workflow, Shopify Plus provides you with Shopify Flow templates. These templates take the guesswork out of what workflow you should use. You can thus browse a library of pre-built workflow templates and implement them in a matter of seconds.

In addition, you can download 11 workflow templates with use cases for further automation ideas, check them and implement them if necessary. Your backend processes are now automated. Now how about making life easier for you or your employees who set up and run promotions and upsells?

Here is the solution:

Launchpad

Launchpad is a tool for planning and automating all the activities required to run a flash sale, product launch, promotion or any other campaign. With Launchpad, you can prepare everything on your to-do list and immediately reset it when the sale or promotion is over. Again, here's a video that tells you even more about Launchpad:

3. Support your store with API call elevations and other integrations

You can always expand your store's functionality with apps - that's nothing new. But for merchants experiencing rapid growth, especially with a range of items, multiple online stores, multiple store locations, expanding supply chains, or international trade, you can also seamlessly integrate the platforms and solutions you already use.

Some of these platforms include, for example:

1. Product Information Management (PIM)
2. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
3. Inventory and order management (IMS and OMS)
4. Customer relationship management (CRM)
5. Third-party logistics
6. Warehouse management software
7. Global Fulfillment Partner

In each case, Shopify's open API provides the flexibility to customize the platforms you need and connect them to your store. All merchants on Shopify Plus have access to exclusive APIs and can double their API call limit (for private and for public apps) after a review process. The limit can be further increased if needed.

4. Management of multiple storefronts

Multiple storefronts, or multiple stores for different markets, can be extremely helpful as you go international. With the new multi-store management solution, you can manage all stores, analytics, employee accounts, user permissions, and automation tools like Shopify Flow in a single place.

With this dashboard, your store grows at the speed of your ideas - along with the most powerful and intuitive trading platform in the world. Facilitate your team: Mobilize your entire team and make it easier to work with different stores.

Strategic Alignment: Get a quick overview of your results and metrics. The global view of analytics, employee accounts, stores, and workflows helps you do this. Let the results inform new growth strategies and review your results. Automate to accelerate your growth: Optimize your entire business and create room for growth by leveraging the power of e-commerce automation. This gives you a centralized view of all integrated Shopify Flow workflows. Save even more time by automating tasks across multiple stores at once.

5. Familiarize yourself with the new announcements

Shopify's fourth annual partner and developer conference, Unite 2019, took place in Toronto, Canada in June. We were there for you and have summarized the new Shopify announcements and the exclusive Shopify Plus announcements. We have already described new Shopify Plus features in more detail in this post. But here are some of the features at a glance:

Order processing and advanced shipping profiles: This allows orders to be edited after the fact. This includes adjustments to quantities, variants, products, or shipping methods in an order. You can edit orders until they are shipped.

The Shopify Fulfillment Network: a geographically dispersed network of fulfillment centers with intelligent inventory allocation technology. It will initially be rolled out in North America only. Europe is expected to follow in the near future. Native support for video, AR & 3D: You can combine videos with 3D model assets, giving customers a better understanding of your products.

6. The Wholesale Channel

The wholesale channel allows you to set up a password-protected area as an extension of your store. All your registered customers and orders are visible in the dashboard of your current store. You can use existing product data and integrations and manage B2C and B2B business from one place. You can offer customized price lists through an intuitive self-service buying experience. Your wholesale channel is based on your online store, so your wholesale customers can be offered the same products that are offered to retail customers. Additionally, you can add exclusive wholesale products that your retail customers can't see.

7. Create trust with Extended Validation SSL (EV SSL) 

It all comes down to just a few points - especially when it comes to building trust with your customers. Adding an Extended Validation SSL certificate (also known as EV SSL) is an additional sign of trust for your customers. EV SSL is the highest form of SSL certification on the web, appearing in the URL window of all major browsers as a green lock icon, green text, or "secure" message.

Shopify Plus automatically provides Level 1 PCI DSS compliance. This is a site-wide SSL certificate to redirect traffic from HTTP to encrypted HTTPS. This means data protection and risk assessment for every order. While Shopify merchants can secure their stores with Domain Validated SSL, Shopify Plus EV allows merchants to set up SSL in their store, and with their own domain/URL as well.

8. Direct Shopify Plus Support

Rapidly expanding and bringing in hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of monthly orders can be overwhelming and stressful. The good news is that you can now rely on Shopify Plus for all the support you need. The Shopify Plus Merchant Growth Program provides access to the right products, platforms, and training to help you define a clear roadmap for success. Shopify Plus offers 24/7 priority support for this. For any adjustments to your store, advice on features and design, and strategic points for specific markets, we're always there to support you.