Understanding Shopify Plus from a Developer’s Perspective
Shopify Plus offers unparalleled support, infrastructure and security for your e-commerce business, but, these are all table-stakes in the world of enterprise e-commerce. If you really want to understand the benefits of upgrading or migrating to Shopify Plus, you need to take a closer look under-the-hood. Given that eBridge Connections lives in the world of APIs and data management, we decided to put together an article that explores the many unique benefits that your e-commerce development team might find when using Shopify Plus and how those translate to potential growth for your business.
APIs
Shopify’s rich API library is what makes it a favorite among developers, who are able to build within and on-top of the platform with incredible ease. As a Shopify Plus merchant, you’ll gain access to a number of exclusive APIs, adding a deeper layer of functionality to your store. These APIs include:
Discount API
Discount Codes form the backbone of any promotional strategy within Shopify. They allow merchants to provide percentage-based, fixed amount or free shipping offers to their customers. Currently, Shopify allows for some control over how these discount codes can be applied by requiring order minimums, limiting them to certain products, collections or customer groups, or by setting a date or quantity expiration. During Shopify’s annual Unite conference, they announced that this entire system will be overhauled with a much more flexible ‘Pricing Rules Engine’ to be unveiled in the coming months. In the meantime, Shopify Plus merchants can create, disable, enable or destroy Discount Codes ‘on the fly’ using the Discount API. This could be a great way to automate some of your Discount Code management and even ‘trigger’ the creation of certain Discount Codes based on particular customer behavior.
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Multipass API
Multipass login speaks to the need of merchants that maintain an existing external database of users that might also need access to Shopify. For example, a merchant that runs an online forum that wants to allow their forum members to purchase products through a separate store can help make the process easier by ‘integrating’ the existing forum user profiles with their Shopify customer profiles. This is accomplished via a Multipass login that will redirect users from the forum to the Shopify store and seamlessly log them into the store with the same email address. Overall, this creates a better experience for users and eliminates the need to directly synchronize with another customer database.
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Gift Card API
Gift Cards are used within Shopify to handle both store credits as well as the traditional concept of pre-paying for a Gift Card that can later be redeemed as payment during checkout. They’re a ubiquitous offering in the world of e-commerce and a vital component to running a successful online store. The Gift Cart API allows merchants to view, create, modify and disable Gift Cards on the fly. This is an especially important feature when migrating from another e-commerce platform to Shopify where existing Gift Card balances need to be carried over. This would be impossible without the use of Shopify’s Gift Card API.
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User API
Shopify distinguishes between Customers and Users, those that purchase from the store vs those that manage the store. Although it’s not a feature that’s likely needed too often, the User API allows merchants to get information associated with the admin Users that are set up within their account. This can be helpful for merchants looking to build a more robust method, such as via a private app, of querying information related to the Users setup within their store.
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API Call Limits
Like most professional SaaS products, Shopify uses the ‘leaky bucket’ algorithm as a controller for API calls. As mentioned in their API documentation, “The bucket size is 40 calls (which cannot be exceeded at any given time), with a “leak rate” of 2 calls per second that continually empties the bucket. If your app averages 2 calls per second, it will never trip a 429 error (“bucket overflow”).”As a Shopify Plus merchant, the call limit can be increased for private apps. This is especially helpful during a migration process where large amounts of data are being added to Shopify, such as important tens of thousands of products. This can also be helpful if merchants find themselves using reporting tools that hit Shopify’s API with a large number of calls as well.
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Apps
Apps serve as the backbone for any Shopify merchant, adding out-of-the-box functionality and third-party integrations with minimal configuration required. As a Shopify Plus merchant, you’ll gain access to a number of exclusive Apps, providing more power for your e-commerce brand. These apps include:
Shopify Scripts
The Script Editor app allows merchants to write certain ‘logic’ that is triggered when a customer adds an item to their cart. This can include rules around pricing, shipping and payments. For example, a script could be written to automatically discount a product price for a customer logged in with a certain customer tag or provide a discount on shipping rates once a certain minimum order size is hit. Scripts are written with a Ruby API that allows a great deal of control and flexibility, meaning logic can be built to meet a merchant’s exact specification. Although there are a number of apps available in the Shopify app marketplace that add similar functionality to your store, using Shopify Scripts ensures the rules are handled exactly as you intend without the limitations that most apps have in their own execution.
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Wholesale Sales Channel
Shopify has a number of ‘Sales Channels’ available for merchants where they can easily list their products on third-party marketplaces and social media platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon and many others. Recently, Shopify has released a Wholesale Sales Channel that’s built specifically to help merchants offer a more customized approach to selling to their B2B customers. Once activated, the Wholesale Sales Channel will be accessible by an entirely separate, password-protected ‘storefront’. The Wholesale Sales Channel provides an immense amount of control over products including pricing, order minimums, quantity increments and differing price levels for different customer groups. All orders created via the Wholesale Sales Channel are then added as ‘Drafts’ within Shopify to provide further customization and moderation by merchants prior to processing any payment, which can be done via a dedicated payment link sent to customers or via an offline method. Overall, the Wholesale Sales Channel provides a turnkey way for merchants to expand their wholesale business.
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Launchpad
Launchpad aims to solve the issue of scheduling, coordinating and executing major marketing campaigns and sales events. Particularly helpful for merchants that run ‘flash sales’, Launchpad gives you the ability to add/remove products, update prices, change inventory levels and more, all in an automated, pre-scheduled manor. This helps bring a new level of sophistication to managing an e-commerce store and can take some of the burden off the shoulders of staff that might have to otherwise coordinate these events manually.
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Bulk Account Inviter
Particularly useful for companies that are migrating to Shopify for the first time, Shopify offers a ‘Bulk Account Inviter’ app that allows merchants to send customer account invites independent of when those customers are imported into Shopify. This can be really helpful when trying to coordinate a migration and looking to review imported data before customers actually ‘gain access’ to the website. It can also be useful for merchants looking to sync up their customer acquisition efforts with creating actual customer accounts in Shopify.
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Shopify Flow
Although minimal information has been released at this point, Shopify is planning a beta in June 2017 for a new ‘automation platform’ that they’re calling Flow. The promise is that it will allow merchants to customize unique backend ‘workflows’ without the need for programming, making the lives of a developer that much easier. Some of the key workflows that will be capable within Flow include:
- The ability to customize the way Shopify works so merchants can automate the repetitive tasks that occur within their business on a regular basis
- Allows for logic customizations to trigger actions after certain events and conditions are met, automating and streamlining administrative and monitoring tasks to create greater efficiency in existing and new business processes
- Customizations are created visually with a common language and logic and do not require coding knowledge
- Enabling customization and change will allow the platform to adapt and grow alongside the varied, unique and complex businesses on Shopify Plus
- Allows for discovery and experimentation by combining different sets of events, actions, and conditions
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Mobile Store Builder
Another feature that’s slated for release soon, but still with minimal information available, is Shopify’s new Mobile Store Builder. The Mobile Store Builder will allow merchants to build a native mobile app without any technical expertise or coding. Some of the main features include:
- The ability to quickly create native iOS and Android apps
- Beautiful, immersive themes that can be styled to match your brand
- Navigate through collections, products, cart, and customer accounts
- Reduce checkout friction with simpler payment options (Apple Pay and Android Pay)
- Publish to both the Apple App Store and Google Play
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Theme
Shopify already provides an incredible amount of flexibility in designing and developing custom themes for your store using their theming language, Liquid. As a Shopify Plus merchant, you’ll have even more flexibility as you gain access to customize the checkout portion of your store:
Checkout.liquid and Checkout.scss.liquid
The checkout process for standard Shopify merchants has a limited number of brand elements and styling properties that can be customized within your store’s settings. Shopify Plus merchants have the opportunity to expand beyond these basic settings using the Checkout.liquid layout and the Checkout.scss.liquid template. Between these two files, merchants can add custom styling, JavaScript and HTML elements that would otherwise be prohibited. There are still some baseline requirements such as including the {{ content_for_layout }} object to ensure the usual expected fields are output within your checkout process. Beyond that, however, developers have the opportunity to create a much improved checkout experience for users.
Additional Resources
As you can see above, there are a number of reasons to consider upgrading to Shopify Plus that would excite any developer managing your website. Beyond these APIs, apps and theme features lie a number of other benefits that any e-commerce executive would find just as enticing. These include a built-in integration with Avalara to handle global tax management, 9 additional ‘clone stores’ to help meet the demands of growing an international e-commerce business and a dedicated account manager directly within Shopify to help prioritize support requests, answer platform questions and provide early-access to Shopify’s product roadmap. If you’re a growing an e-commerce enterprise that needs a robust platform to manage your sales and operations, consider getting in touch with Shopify Plus to discuss how an upgrade or migration could help take your business to the next level.
This article originally appeared as a three-part series on the eBridge Connections blog.
