As a dedicated eCommerce development company, we always try to help our clients to make the most out of an eCommerce development platform. One such popular platform for developing eCommerce sites is Shopify Plus. Shopify Plus is a highly powerful eCommerce platform. It is an enterprise-level eCommerce solution. It handles the technical legwork of running a large eCommerce store for you. While Shopify is mostly used for small and medium level enterprises, Shopify plus is considered best for high volume stores. After owning a large eCommerce store, the question arises how do you keep evolving after hitting the enterprise-level?
The bigger your store is, the more time you spend maintaining tech infrastructure. Shopify plus is the perfect solution in this scenario. It is a cloud-based and completely hosted platform. While, in the standard Shopify accounts, there is only informative analytics and reporting, in Shopify Plus you can also check their average order value over time. Shopify Plus also allows “clone stores” or “multiple stores“.
In this article, we will focus on how your business can expand its business into the DTC (Direct to Customer) space through Shopify Plus powerful enterprise eCommerce features.
Regardless of the size of your business, if you are looking to go DTC, Shopify Plus would be a highly powerful eCommerce platform for meeting your business requirements.
Why Choose Shopify Plus?
An online store whose functioning is simple to act as an add-on to web tools is not enough for providing a next-level customer experience. Shopify Plus will help from scratch to end and would be really beneficial in having extra control over how the visitors will interact with your
Captivating Checkout Design
No eCommerce store owner likes an abandoned cart. You would be surprised to know that the cart abandonment rate is nearly 70%. It means out of 10 customers, 7 customers don’t complete the transaction. It is essential to reduce the cart abandonment rate as much as possible. There are several solutions by Shopify Plus for this:
- Admin features which let you know how many orders are incomplete and then you can send customized abandon cart emails to those customers
- Dynamic checkouts so that the customer can directly purchase from the product page through an accelerated one-tap system
- There are higher authorization rates in Shopify payments that any other payment method
- If you pair Shopify payments with Shop Pay, it can help in increasing the conversion rate by up to 18%
You can also customize the design of the checkout page in Shopify Plus using many form fields and aesthetic options. These solutions will not only help in decreasing the abandoned cart rate but also engage your customers, motivate for repeat transactions, and increase customer loyalty.
Full Integrations
A Shopify Plus development company like us can help you in integrating all the essential tools and features & functionalities which your business may require such as:
- CMS ( Content Management System)
- ERP ( Enterprise Resource Planning)
- Product Information Management
- CRM ( Customer Relationship Management)
- WMS ( Warehouse Management System)
- IMS ( Integrated Management System)
Integrated these capabilities into your eCommerce store will help you in many different ways. You can showcase the products in front of customers anywhere you connect with them such as offline channels ( brick and mortar store), kiosks, smart mirrors, mobile devices, etc.
Also Read: How To Develop A Shopify eCommerce Store – Complete Guide
Capabilities of Global Commerce
There are hundreds of global payment providers by default in Shopify Plus which you can use if you are serving customers cross-border. You can use Shopify Plus for:
- Providing Multiple Currencies option on your eCommerce store
- Target key markets with localized content in expansion stores
- Providing multi-language options on your eCommerce store
- Get insights into your target audience and trends using the global analytics and insights tools
At Emizentech, our expert eCommerce developers are having proven experience in working with Shopify Plus’ international sales management features.
Reliable Servers
What differs between Shopify and Shopify Plus is that Shopify Plus comes with its own hosting with very reliable servers and high speed. If your eCommerce store is having slow speed it will lead to slow sales. Do you know that if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load then the customer will leave it and switch to your competitor? Also, every one-second improvement in your site speed will correlate to a 2% increase in conversions.
The average uptime of Shopify Plus is 99.99% and comes with highly optimized eCommerce site performance for increasing your sales and a better brand value. Shopify Plus can easily handle high traffic volume and increase your conversion rate through different ways such as:
- Give you unlimited bandwidth so that the website keeps running even at high traffic
- Shopify Plus supports 4 million hits per second. This is incredibly high even for a highly popular eCommerce marketplace.
- There is a Storefront Renderer that can accelerate the performance from the server end by up to five times.
- It can process up to 10,000 peak orders every minute
Also Read: How To Migrate from Magento to Shopify: Complete Guide
Wholesale Capability For Home Brands
Shopify Plus is not lagging behind in B2B commerce and provides a feature-rich set for your B2B customers. You can provide an automated process to your customers by which they can purchase, track, and reorder easily. It will simplify how to track orders and invoicing.
Do you sell home goods to both wholesale and retail? Shopify lets you sync your B2B and DTC inventory, orders, and customers.
Comprehensive Support
Shopify Plus comes with extensive support that will guide in every step of the development. There is a successful manager who will be helpful in many different ways:
- Helps you in learning about the platform
- Gives you monthly updates about new features
- Provide answers to any questions
Powerful Discounting Features
As per a survey, nearly two-thirds of the customers buy those products which were they not intended to buy because of the discounts or offers. The same survey reveals that 80% of the customers are more likely to make a first time purchase from a brand if they find a discount. There are many different options for providing discounts in Shopify Plus such as:
- Product Bundles
- Tiered Pricing
- BOGO Sales
- Free Shipping
- Volume or percentage-based orders
- Gifts with purchase
Possibilities Of Expansion
Currently, more than 1,100 developers have been partnered with Shopify for integrated apps which will help in expanding the scope of your eCommerce store:
- Inventory Management
- Accounting
- Marketing
- Customer Service
- Discount & Offers
- Wholesale Customers
Mobile-Optimized
Consumers now prefer to shop anytime and anywhere, even on the go, thus mobile eCommerce applications are more in preference vis-à-vis websites. Hence, eCommerce is turning to mobile commerce or M-commerce. It has been estimated that in 2019, there were sales of $2.3 trillion in 2019, which has been expected to reach the figure of $3.5 trillion, in 2021 globally. Using Shopify Plus, you can develop an eCommerce store that would be highly optimized for smartphones.
Learn More: Magento vs WooCommerce vs Shopify vs Opencart: Best Ecommerce Platforms 2020
Seamless Data Migrations
Data management is a very important thing while dealing with the eCommerce store. It is possible to migrate all your data into a new eCommerce platforms system in Shopify Plus. You can migrate your customers, inventory, order history, product data, etc. from other eCommerce platforms such as Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, etc.
How Home Brands Are Using Shopify Plus?
There are many popular home brands such as Leesa, Brooklinen, Boll & Branch, Magnolia, etc. which are using Shopify Plus for the eCommerce store. It is due to its features which help the brands for going to the market faster, keeping control of the costs, and many other benefits such as:
Big-Ticket Purchases
Today’s customer when spending a lot of money on a product, they expect a finance option provided by the online retailer.
Even the credit card options are not sufficient. As per a poll of FuturePay:
- Nearly 75% of respondents confess that it is important for them that eCommerce retailers provide other payment options apart from credit cards.
- 15% of customers had decided against buying a big-ticket item online as there isn’t any suitable financing option.
- More than 50% of the customers said that if they are buying something online worth more than $1,000, then they will prefer to finance their purchase.
You can use Shopify Plus to provide many different payment plans to your customers by integrations like Affirm, AfterPay, or Klarna.
Multiple Online Channels
In the omnichannel commerce approach, the aim is to provide a holistic and integrated customer experience. In this approach, there is an underlying assumption that most of the customers will engage with a brand by multiple channels before making a buying decision. “All channels” revolves around the customer for creating a unified customer experience. You can integrate multiple marketing channels with Shopify Plus such as:
- Amazon
- eBay
- Industry outlets such as Buzzfeed or Houzz
You can also feature the products of your ecommerce store on Instagram feed.
Business Automation
Automating the business workflows will save your precious time and efforts along with money as well. You can focus on improving the business instead of internal workflows. The automation system of Shopify plus will help you to efficiently manage customer rewards, merchandising, fraud-prevention, etc. You can also experiment with marketing campaigns or strategies for maximizing sales and better customer engagement. You can use Shopify for automating these functions:
- Give Tags or Make Groups of Customers on the basis of their buying behavior: Manage lists, increase sales, and build stronger relationships with personalized outreach.
- Track Loyalty Rewards: You can use loyalty programs to increase customer engagement & encourage repeat sales.
- Inventory automation: Integrate your selling platform with an inventory system for tracking & managing items.
- Standard merchandising & product organization: You can manage the products in many different ways so that the customers can easily find what they are looking for.
- Track & reward customers on the basis of their life spend: You can use data analysis for identifying worthy or loyal customers in your store and give exciting rewards to them.
- Flag high-risk orders: Reduce your exposure to fraud, hackers, and other dangers by setting up automatic flags and rejections.
- Discounts Automation: Discounts on products that are not getting sales or are going to expire, etc.
- Customer Customization: Personalized user-experience is highly important for customers.
Direct-to-Consumer System
If you are having only B2B business or wholesale only, then Shopify Plus can help you with a quick setup of a DTC eCommerce store. It will be able to:
- Integrate your 3rd Party Service Providers & inventory for a faster launch
- Order & Inventory Synchronization for both sets of customers. Thus there will be no disruption in the wholesale business
- A better customer experience with reliable customer support
- Data gathering of customers and direct marketing.
Also Read: How To Perform Shopify Speed Optimization: A Complete Guide
Important Tips for Migrating Your Home Brand to Shopify Plus
An eCommerce development company will successfully migrate your existing eCommerce store to Shopify Plus. Still here are some tips that you must read:
Offer Creative Navigation
Provide different points on the e-commerce store where the customers can engage. For instance, organize your products by room and item type to help shoppers think of brilliant ideas for their spaces.
Provide Robust Filters
There are many scenarios when a customer looking for something particular such as “Black Nike Shoes For Men – 8 Size under $100.” Then you can provide filters such as:
- Color
- Material
- Size
- Price
Up-sell
In the Upselling strategy, the user will find a better version of the product on the site. The intention is to make a bigger sale. You offer your customer the chance to purchase an upgraded product with better features, better specifications, more volume, or simply an expensive version for maximizing the value of the purchase.
Cross-Sell
After Upselling, Cross-selling is another very popular strategy of selling products. Here you show the related products which customers are buying. The products can be of any category but must be complementary to each other for e.g. A room fresher refill for an automatic room freshener.
Learn More: eCommerce UpSell vs Cross-sell vs Related Products – The Complete Guide
Wrapping Up
In this article, we have understood the importance and concept of Shopify Plus and you can leverage it for your home brand store. If you are looking for an eCommerce development company that can develop an eCommerce store from scratch or migrate the existing one. Then we can help you with this. Let us know your requirements.