Should I Switch to Shopify Plus? And When?

Start-up businesses spend hours agonizing over their options for eCommerce websites. Rapidly growing business owners wring their hands over when the best time to make a switch might be. And we hear it all.

We often chat with eCommerce business owners who are struggling to decide if Shopify Plus is a better solution than their current platform. Is a switch worthwhile? When should it happen?

It’s a common issue eCommerce businesses face. And even among eCommerce experts, it’s an area of hot debate.

For our part, we squarely fall in the Shopify camp. We love Shopify, and it’s what we recommend most often. (Considering Shopify Plus is our area of expertise, this will hardly come as a surprise.)

But Just So You Know, Shopify Plus is Not Always The Best Solution

We know what you’re thinking. As Shopify pros, we’re biased.

We promise you, we’re not. We don’t try to cram every eCommerce biz that comes our way into the Shopify shoe. There have been situations in which we’ve advised clients to stick with their current eCommerce solutions during a rebrand, instead of retooling.

There have also been times that we’ve created an entire eCommerce business on a platform other than Shopify.

To us, it’s more important to consider the individual client than to just go with what we like best.

But we do have some thoughts on why Shopify Plus is, generally speaking, a preferable option for most businesses. To help you assess which route you want to take, here are some of the reasons we love working with Shopify Plus.

9 Reasons Shopify Plus is Our Top Choice for eCommerce

Shopify is usually at the forefront of innovative ideas that improve eCommerce experiences. There are dozens of awesome things they offer, but here is a handful of things that we’ve found our clients appreciate the most about Shopify.

Designed to Scale

Shopify was created to help eCommerce businesses easily and quickly scale for growth. Whereas other options tend to get shakier the bigger you grow, Shopify only gets more robust.

Technical Support

Unlike other popular eCommerce solutions, like Magento and WooCommerce, Shopify has 24/7 customer support. All day, every day, any day. Because it’s a paid platform, you have full tech support to help you with all your major headaches (uptime, web security, hosting, etc,.) You can email, chat, or send in a ticket.

Best Uptime and Performance

Shopify uses a global network of state-of-the-art servers and a best-in-class Content Delivery Network (CDN). This means that should your website suddenly experience a massive traffic spike, your site won’t go down. (There’s nothing worse than a page that won’t load when someone is trying to buy your product.) Shopify’s speedy servers ensure your customers don’t deal with any load issues and you don’t lose any money from server-related site crashes.

Easy Website Management

Shopify is easy. Management, adjustments, adding new products and pages — it’s all possible with pretty minimal effort. For eCommerce shop owners that want to spend more of their time on their products and not on their website, this is a big win.

Streamlined Interface

But Shopify isn’t only easy for you to use, it’s also easy for your customers. With over 150,000 Shopify Plus merchants and over $7 Billion in Sales, they’ve got oodles of data at their fingertips, which means that they’ve done ALL your optimization research for you. They know how to build an admin panel and checkout experience that is as efficient as it gets.

Digital Wallet Integration

Anyone who has checked out on ANY site using Shopify has the option to save their payment information for next time. They also have a seamless integration with Apple Pay, which means it takes nothing more than a thumbprint for a customer to buy that product they’re eyeing. Snazzy, right?

Continual Optimization Upgrades

Because Shopify has a virtually endless amount of customer data, thanks to thousands of users all over the globe, they have a lot of research backing their choices for optimization and interface updates.

And their solutions are not stationary. They’re running out new updates all the time to keep pace with shifts in consumer purchase trends.

Secure Third-Party

As a paid platform, Shopify has the budget and motivation to invest in a lot of security. They were among the first to implement the new GDPR standards for businesses operating within the European Union, which are arguably the most stringent personal data protection policies to date.

Collaboration and Ability to Sell from Social Media

Did you know that Shopify Plus allows you to sell directly from social media (think Instagram sales or Buyable Pins)? Well, now you do.

Shopify Plus API

For enterprise customers that currently have SAP, SAGE, Magento, or other ERP solutions, the ability to make integrations and port over existing customers easily (and at a low cost) is a huge draw.

Advanced SEO

Shopify Plus has put a lot of effort into create an advanced eCommerce CMS and shopping cart that can be customized with H1, title tags, and meta tags for search engine optimization. Additionally, automatic sitemaps.xml file generation means new products and site changes show up quickly on search engines.

How Do You Know If You Should Make the Switch?

The fact that you’re even considering it indicates that there are things about your current solution that you’re unhappy with. (Sometimes, those issues can be resolved without the need to replatform. If you’re unsure whether this is the case, talk to a trusted company to get some advice.)

Here are a few common growing pains that are pretty good signs you’re ready for a move:

• You dread new product launches because it’s so difficult to do on your WooCommerce site.
• You’re spending hours in online forums trying to solve website issues yourself because you have no customer support team with your current platform.
• You want to spend more time on building your business than on figuring out coding changes to your website.
• Your ability to create original designs has resulted in a hodge-podge, inconsistent site. You don’t have the time/skills necessary to develop a branding strategy and implement it on your site.
• You need a website redesign anyway, and are considering a platform switch at the same time to save money down the road.
• Your website can’t keep up with your flood of success and consistently gets more traffic that it can handle.
• Your hosting and app purchase costs are similar to what you’d pay for Shopify Plus, with none of the benefits Shopify offers.
• You want to be prepared for rapid growth.
• You are experiencing security issues.
• You sell to the EU and are struggling to ensure your site meets GDPR standards.

How Hard Is It to Replatform?

Moving your website is a headache, we won’t no lie. And if you’re planning on doing it yourself, it’ll be closer to a month-long migraine.

The problem is in transporting the data. Even if your site is relatively small, there’s still a lot more data than you may think.

• Products
• Customers
• Transaction history
• Current/outstanding orders
• Redirects
• Email addresses (if your host was managing your email accounts)
• Domain (possibly)

All of this data has to migrate on your new platform 100% accurately for your site to continue functioning. Your challenge is to make the transfer quickly and precisely so that your site has minimal downtime and few errors.

The larger your site, the more data you have, and the more opportunity for errors exist. It’s a big undertaking. Mistakes could mean a big loss of revenue, unhappy customers, and/or missing data.

But don’t run away screaming just yet.

Here’s What We’d Tell Our Moms To Do.

If you’re still thinking about switching, switch now.

Your growing pains and current site issues aren’t going to go away if you just wait. In fact, they’ll only get bigger and more complicated. Yes, it’ll be a hassle now, but postponing only makes it a bigger hassle later.

(The only exception to this is if you’ve got a seasonal boom that you foresee dying down in a few weeks or months. In that case, wait until things have slowed.)

Otherwise, now is your moment, friends.

Want Help? We Don’t Blame You.

A platform switch is a big project. But, that’s exactly what we specialize in, so we’ve got you covered if you need us. We can help you reassess your design, your branding, your functionality, and your user path for better conversions and even more growth. Give us a call — we’re here to help.

Love,

Mammoth Factory