Shopify Plus: Customize Your Online Store for Growth and Better Sales with GetDevDone

Shopify. This popular e-commerce platform seems to be getting more merchants enthralled with it every passing day. While Shopify already provides a ton of tools to manage online stores successfully, though, the higher-end version of this system — Shopify Plus — enables store owners to achieve unequaled fine-tuning of their sites to suit their growing needs.

There’s a common misconception that the standard Shopify platform is used by small and medium-sized businesses while Shopify Plus is only intended for the big guns, the likes of Red Bull. Well, this is partially true. The numbers of Shopify and Shopify Plus users do differ significantly, which shows that Shopify Plus is not geared toward the masses:

Source: https://builtwith.com/

At the same time, what matters most, in this case, is the potential for business augmentation. If you expect your business to grow exponentially — to millions of customers in all corners of the globe — you will need more features than the standard Shopify plans can offer.

Sharing the same dashboard with Shopify and having the same core features, Shopify Plus takes online shopping to the next level. It offers merchants one-of-a-kind e-commerce functionality, access to the under-the-hood code, unique integrations, and one-to-one support that reacts to every issue and answers every question in a split second.

We’re not going to discuss all the differences between Shopify and Shopify Plus in this post. Instead, let’s take a look at just 2 specific Shopify Plus features that make its hefty bill worthwhile and in which GetDevDone Shopify development professionals have extensive expertise.

CHECKOUT FINE-TUNING WITH JAVASCRIPT, CSS, HTML, AND SCRIPTS

There’s no place as important in an e-commerce store as the checkout page. Make it slow and cumbersome and guarantee yourself a high cart abandonment rate. Shopify merchants are unable to change their checkouts the way they want, unlike Shopify Plus users.

With Shopify Plus, it’s possible to customize the functionality and appearance of your checkout page by adding your own HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to the checkout.liquid asset. Thus, you can give the checkout page your specific branding style and make your customers’ payment experience pleasant, fast, and efficient.

Another way to make the checkout more fine-tuned is by using the Shopify scripts. Scripts are written in Shopify Scripts API (a variety of the Ruby programming language) in the Script Editor. This tool also enables you to modify your scripts and add them to your live store.

There is a number of script types, such as shipping or payment, with each type having its own methods. Here’s an example of a script (taken from the official page) that auto-selects default payment methods and chooses a specific payment method at the checkout:

# Define the preferred order of gateways.

PREFERRED_GATEWAY_ORDER = ['Invoice', 'Shopify Payments']

# Sort gateways.

Output.payment_gateways = Input.payment_gateways.sort_by do |payment_gateway|

  PREFERRED_GATEWAY_ORDER.index(payment_gateway.name) || 999

end

Shopify scripts allow you to achieve very deep customization of the checkout functionality to meet your growing customer base’s needs. You can cater to your highest paying customers, change shipping methods, apply discounts for all your customers or target a specific group, and do much, much more.

Writing checkout scripts seem daunting? No worries: our Shopify Plus developers can do that for you in the most efficient way and in compliance with your exact specifications.

ADVANCED API ACCESS

Application Programming Interfaces or APIs make Shopify and Shopify Plus the powerful e-commerce solutions as we know them. APIs are used by numerous apps available through the Shopify app store to help merchants address any business-related tasks including accounting, inventory management, customer service, and a host of others.

While Shopify allows store owners to take advantage of APIs as well, Shopify Plus opens the doors really wide with its advanced API limit. It allows Plus customers to call their API 4 times each second. Shopify customers, in their turn, are only given 2 calls per second.

Besides, you can integrate custom and private apps with your Shopify Plus store, which Shopify users can’t do. Custom apps can be installed on one Shopify store only, while private apps are created for one Shopify store or a small group of customers. More on the differences between custom, private, and public apps read here.

Private and custom apps have access to some advanced API resources:

• The Gift Card resource is another method to pay for purchases, with each card having a unique code entered at checkout.
• The Multipass login resource that helps redirect visitors to a Shopify Plus store, for example, from a forum without having to enter an additional login/password combination.
• The User resource, which enables the store owner to create, delete, and modify staff accounts.

All of these resources are available to Shopify Plus merchants only.

GetDevDone professionals can leverage Shopify APIs to create any custom feature for your store or facilitate integrations with external systems such as CRM.

SHOPIFY OR SHOPIFY PLUS — GETDEVDONE CAN HANDLE EVERYTHING

Not every merchant can afford to switch to Shopify Plus, but in many cases, it’s not actually necessary. If your annual revenue is still below the $1-million mark, then you should do with basic Shopify quite well.

Shopify provides a lot of valuable tools for online store owners with ample room for customization. Shopify Plus makes this customization scope even wider, allowing merchants to look under the system’s cover and tweak its underlying code.

Whichever flavor of this e-commerce platform you use, GetDevDone Shopify developers can handle all your requests. We can customize Shopify themes, provide third-party app integrations, and do other Shopify-specific tasks. Talk to us about your project. We are always happy to help your business grow and prosper!