So you’ve taken the plunge and joined Shopify Plus. Congratulations! And welcome to the world’s most robust, scalable, and agile commerce platform for high-growth companies. We’re so glad you’re here.
You’re likely wondering “Where do I start? How do I make the most out of this new world I’ve entered, one that will help me streamline and further grow my business?” You’re in the right place. Here’s a list of things you can do now to get yourself oriented and off to the races.
1. Get a Jumpstart into onboarding
While you might be familiar with how our admin works and the app partners that plug into your ecosystem, it doesn’t hurt to have a good old fashioned orientation. Enter, Jumpstart—a welcome webinar that covers all the Shopify Plus basics, features, and resources available to businesses when they start with the platform. It’s the best way to get your bearings on the new-to-you service and set you on the course for success. During this orientation, Merchant Success Managers will give you a run-down of the support system and guide you on how to get the help you need navigating the platform.
They’ll also give an overview of all the features you get exclusive to Plus. Then, they’ll open the floor to a Q&A, so you’ll have a chance to ask anything that’s come up as you immerse yourself in all things Plus or that you’ve been wondering about since joining. These are live sessions, offered on a bi-weekly basis that accommodates multiple time zones. If you can’t make it on the scheduled dates, you can always get a recording afterward. While the orientation is fully optional, we’ve noticed businesses who attend Jumpstart have a better grasp of the Shopify Plus support system and are more likely to use the Plus features that lead to a great overall experience with us.
As one of our recent Jumpstart participants told us, “I thought this was a great overview! The hosts were very genuine and friendly and this webinar felt less “cold” than many others.”
If you’d like to connect directly with the Merchant Success Team, you can contact Plus Support via the live chat in their admin, or by phone or email.
2. Sign up for the “New from Shopify Plus” newsletter
You’ll want to be kept up to speed on the latest Shopify Plus updates as they happen. Our newsletter, called “New from Shopify Plus” drops in your inbox weekly with all you need to know about new product feature releases, beta opportunities, and Shopify Plus-related events.
3. Visit the Shopify Plus Academy
We know that growing a business is a marathon, not a sprint. Consumer behaviors and demands are constantly changing and, as the year 2020 has taught us, literally anything can happen. So how do you stay on top of it all?
You may have used Shopify Academy before, but with Shopify Plus Academy, you’ll access in-depth how-tos and ecommerce strategies in key business areas.
This is geared towards high-volume merchants with a focus on:
- Supporting your growth on Shopify Plus with product-specific resources
- Online workshops with industry experts across a range of topics
- The merchant growth model, designed to guide your business, no matter your stage of growth
At the Academy, you’ll find 50 self-guided courses on everything from marketing acquisition strategies to business operations to customizing your checkout. You can also watch tutorials, and Q&As with business owners at your own pace and on your own time.
Our most popular course, Accelerate growth with Shopify Plus products, walks through how you can optimize your store for a better customer experience.
4. Customize checkout experiences with Shopify Scripts
All the sales-boosting and conversion rate optimization you were doing via multiple apps and workarounds now has a streamlined “set it and forget it” life on Shopify Plus, thanks to our product Shopify Scripts.
Here’s what it’ll let you do:
- Customize your checkout directly—both its look and feel, as well as customizing customer fields, shipping methods, and payment options
- Personalize the checkout experience based on shopping cart values with the Script Editor
To increase average order values over Black Friday Cyber Monday, Brooklinen, for example, set up three discount “thresholds.” With Scripts, all of this took place automatically in a user’s cart:
Here’s how you can start using Shopify Scripts:
- Ask your Plus support team to help you clone your existing store to a staging instance (or testing site). With Shopify Plus, you can access multiple store instances at no extra cost.
- Install the Script Editor
- Click “Create script” inside your apps. You’ll see 15 script templates organized by underline items, shipping rates, and payment gateways:
- These 15 templates represent the most popular and profitable scripts. You can preview each script, edit the code, and apply your changes within your cloned store before copying them to your live store.
Find a full list of terminology, or “methods,” on this help page. The Script Editor also has its own guide, with several scripts examples you can apply to your site.
Check out Gavin Ballard’s “Getting Started with Shopify Scripts: A Practical Walkthrough” for a breakdown of how to get started.
If you’re working with a Shopify Plus Partner to develop a script, ask for the ability to adjust key variables like discount percentages and target product tags so you can make the changes yourself later.
Here are some more Shopify Scripts resources:
- Checkout.liquid access
- Shopify Scripts’ Ruby API reference
- Using, creating, and customizing with the Script Editor
- 13 Ecommerce Checkout Optimizations to Increase Conversions with Shopify Scripts
- Script generator by Jason Godson (third-party build)
5. Save time and energy with ecommerce automation
One of the biggest upsides of Shopify Plus is access to its premier automation tools, designed to save time and energy on routine tasks so you can focus on the big dreams and strategies necessary to grow your business.
Meet our suite of time-saving automation tools:
Shopify Flow
That crush of customer-facing and back-office task work that seems to suck up every hour of every day? Shopify Flow is a simple visual builder that automates a lot of those processes. These tasks include customer service, fraud prevention, design and development requests, merchandising, communications, and marketing and advertising (e.g. halting promotions when stock gets low or tagging customers for email segmentation).
Consider Shopify Flow the nerve center of your business: Its automation is able to consider “if this happens, then do that” to anticipate routine events in your processes. Flow stores and executes triggers, conditions, and actions that you enter once (and can update), no coding necessary.
For example, the team at luxury athleisure company Saski Collection built a workflow to automatically email its customer service team—telling them to send a $100 gift voucher to their top customers. During the first week, Saski Collection saw 40,000+ more website visitors, mostly from word of mouth about the loyalty program via social media.
You can use a similar workflow template to:
- Kick in once a customer spends over $500 with your store
- Trigger a discount based on the number of orders or average order value
- Tag customers as “gold VIP” and email customer service to send them a personal thank you, coupon code, gift, or anything you see fit
Check out this video intro to Shopify Flow:
Our library of pre-made Flow templates can be applied in seconds.
Get some more automation ideas by taking a tour through the four Shopify Flow templates made to save you time during Black Friday Cyber Monday.
Now that you’ve automated your back-end processes, how about making life easier for employees who set up and run your sales promotions?
Launchpad
Whether you’re introducing a new product or planning a flash sale, Launchpad lets you create an event and put it on autopilot. It will produce and deliver reports on the event’s activity so you can compare this year’s sale to last year and analyze the strategies that worked best when you plan for next year.
For example, amplified across four stores, Launchpad saves 100% Pure engineer Chris Tran 12 hours per sale or campaign. His time can now be directed towards solving other business challenges or innovating for future solutions. In the future, he’ll save hundreds of hours as he applies Launchpad for smaller campaigns and sales, too.
With Launchpad, you can pre-plan everything on your campaign to-do list and instantly roll it all back once the sale or event is over. Learn more about Launchpad by watching this video:
Here are a few more ecommerce automation resources for you to check out:
Once you’ve accessed Shopify Plus-exclusive tools, review the platforms you’re already using. We’ll discuss how to make them work better within your commerce ecosystem, next.
6. Power your store with API call increases and enterprise-level integrations
Time to juice up your store’s capabilities. Retailers seeing rapid growth—particularly those with a range of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs), multiple online stores, online-to-offline retail locations, expanding supply chains, or international markets—can also seamlessly integrate the third-party platforms already in use to streamline the whole business.
Some of those platforms include:
- Product information management (PIM)
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
- Inventory and order management (IMS and OMS)
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Third-party logistics (3PL)
- Warehouse management software (WMS)
- Or a global fulfillment partner
In each case, Shopify’s open API allows you to flexibly customize and connect with the platforms you need most.
Companies like U.K. organic babywear and newborn essentials retailer MORIleverage Shopify’s API to connect its store with its third-party logistics (3PL) to monitor performance in real-time.
With developer support, you can also build your own private apps tailored to your store and unique challenges.
When women’s clothing brand Whimsy Rose built a custom product uploader with Shopify API, they were able to track all customer-created custom styles and prints and manage the 2,000+ custom SKUs in-store and online. The custom orders are then printed and synced with their fulfillment solution, to be delivered within five days.
All brands on Shopify Plus can access exclusive APIs, and can double their API call limit (to your private and public apps) after a review process is complete. Your limit can be increased further on an as-needed basis—just reach out to your Plus support team.
7. Manage users and multiple stores all from your admin
When you upgrade from Shopify to Shopify Plus, one of the first things you’ll notice is the enhanced version of the standard Shopify admin. With it, you can simplify the management of your entire company with the new organizational management tool. This system allows you to manage users, quickly create new stores populated with data, update workflows, and get a high-level overview of key business metrics across all stores in your organization.
If you operate multiple stores, you can make changes to operations at the organizational level instead of at the individual store level. Users with permissions to make changes to the Shopify organization admin can perform actions across multiple stores in your organization that affect users, stores, and Shopify workflows.
Here are the benefits of each feature:
- Analytics overview: This gives you a centralized view of your business results so you can make sure your business is running as expected. See and compare your live performance and key business metrics across multiple time periods for all stores in your company.
- Shopify Flow management: Flow offers a centralized view of the automation flows across all of your stores. It lets you save time and resources by automating repetitive tasks and helps you enable and manage workflows from one central location, sharing them with any store in your business.
- User management: This is a centralized hub to view and manage users across your company. You can trust the right users with the right tasks and manage staff across all stores from a central location. Add, modify, and remove users and allow multiple users to perform these tasks.
- Store management: This gives you a centralized view of all of your stores. Experiment with new strategies and create environments with new stores and leveraged data (users and first-party apps) from your existing stores.
8. Explore our wholesale channel
The wholesale channel lets you expand your business by creating a separate, password-protected storefront that’s an extension of your online store. This lets you track all your wholesale customers and orders under your store’s Shopify admin—no extra systems necessary. Use existing product data and integrations and manage your B2C and B2B businesses from just one place.
You can also offer customized price lists through an intuitive self-service buying experience. This lets you offer wholesale buyers the same products that are on the menu for retail customers. You can also make it an exclusive wholesale-only product-only menu—this channel’s flexible.
Customize and scale your wholesale business by building an expansion store. Just ask your Plus support team to help you set up the expansion shop.
9. Build instant credibility with an extended validation SSL (EV SSL) certificate
You know that trust—between you and your customers, you and your suppliers, you and your investors—is the foundation on which your business is built. By adding an Extended Validation SSL Certificate (also known as EV SSL) to your site, you’re adding a layer of trust and an important signal of reliability to your customers. This certificate is the highest form of SSL certification on the web—appearing in the URL window of all major browsers as a green lock, green text, or “Secure” message.
Shopify Plus automatically provides Level 1 PCI DSS compliance, a site-wide SSL certificate to redirect traffic from HTTP to encrypted HTTPS, data protection, and risk assessment for every order.
While all Shopify merchants can secure their stores with Domain Validated SSL, only merchants on Shopify Plus can set up EV SSL with their store.
You can set up your EV SSL in just a couple of weeks at most. It can make a surprising impact on your bottom line.
10. Grow your business with unrivaled support
Look, you’ve come this far—building a fast-growing business drawing in hundreds of thousands (or even millions) in monthly sales is overwhelming and exhausting, but also something that should make you massively proud. The Shopify Plus team is here for you in those exhausting moments, when you need guidance and support when it comes to running the systems that power your business.
Our merchant success program gives you access to the right products, platforms, and training to help you define a clear roadmap for success. We also offer 24/7 priority support.
Whether you’re trying to plot out a flash sale, figure out some technical mechanism on the platform, or plan for the future, Shopify Plus’ support teams work tirelessly to help you make the most of your opportunities. They can also provide you with exclusive access to new features we’re just trying out.
You can also ask for assistance with third-party integrations, and help to find approved Shopify Plus Partners to work on design and development projects specific to your business. These businesses are carefully curated, selected only for creating some of the best integrations with Shopify.
Check out our Shopify Plus Facebook community or our Partners Directory to find peer support and potential partners.
It’s a journey
You’re going to keep learning as you grow your business and in your relationship with Shopify Plus. Here are more resources to maximize your new commerce platform capabilities:
- Sell everywhere your customer’s buy with multi-channel ecommerce
- Host up to nine expansion stores for internationalization and localization
- Participate in beta programs to preview and influence the product roadmap
- Access to Avalara AvaTax for worry-free tax compliance
- Make giving easier with the Gift Card API and Gift Card Adjustments API
- Manage multiple account users through the User API
Not on Shopify Plus yet?
A reminder about why this move is so advantageous to your business:
Shopify Plus gives you:
- Lower transaction costs, and with flat rates on Shopify Plus, many brands find huge savings. When sales volumes go up, savings increase.
- An additional reduction in credit card rates for brands that use Shopify Payments
- The ability to easily add a VIP channel, or a store for your staff or your sales reps. There are lots of ways to set up your shop so specific customers can see a tailored product list or get preferential pricing.
- Expert help in addressing pain points and driving growth
- The fastest web loading times out there by speeding up communication between Shopify and any other apps or software you’re using
