Shopify vs. Shopify Plus: when should you make the leap? (2026 guide)

Shopify vs. Shopify Plus at a glance

Shopify Plus is Shopify's enterprise tier. It starts at $2,300/month and is built for merchants doing $1M+ in annual revenue who need things standard plans can't do: full checkout customization, native B2B wholesale, up to 10 stores under one contract, roughly 10x higher API limits, a dedicated Merchant Success Manager, and lower transaction fees (0.20% vs. 0.6–2% on standard plans).

Standard Shopify plans run $39–$399/month and work well for most small and midsize ecommerce businesses. Whether Plus is right for you comes down to your revenue, how complex your operations are, and whether you're bumping up against the limits of a standard plan.

Here's how the two compare across every feature that matters.

How much does Shopify Plus cost compared to standard plans?

Shopify offers three standard plans: Basic at $39/month, Grow at $105/month, and Advanced at $399/month. Annual billing saves 25%. All plans include unlimited bandwidth, secure hosting, and access to the Shopify App Store.

Plus starts at $2,300/month on a 3-year contract, or $2,500/month on a 1-year term. Once a store crosses roughly $800,000 in monthly GMV, pricing shifts to a variable model, typically 0.25–0.40% of monthly revenue depending on the contract. Shopify caps this variable fee at around $40,000/month, so costs stay predictable even at very high volumes.

The real story is in transaction fees. Plus merchants using third-party payment gateways pay 0.20% per transaction, compared to 0.6% on Advanced, 1% on Grow, and 2% on Basic. A store processing $200,000/month through a third-party gateway saves about $800/month in transaction fees alone by moving from Advanced to Plus. That covers a good chunk of the platform cost increase before you factor in any other benefits.

And you can always check your main KPIs vs the industry/country ecommerce benchmarks and see how you stand compared to other shops.

Feature comparison table

Here's how the plans stack up as of May 2026:

What checkout customization does Shopify Plus offer?

This is the biggest reason merchants upgrade to Plus. On standard plans (Basic, Grow, and Advanced), you can add your logo, change accent colors, and tweak some basic settings. That's it. The checkout layout, fields, flow, and logic are all controlled by Shopify.
Plus unlocks Checkout Extensibility, a set of APIs that replaced the older checkout.liquid system (fully deprecated in August 2024). With Checkout Extensibility, you can add custom form fields for things like gift messages or delivery instructions, put upsell and cross-sell offers directly in the checkout flow, build conditional logic that shows different payment options based on what's in the cart or who the customer is, add trust badges and social proof, and create separate checkout experiences for B2B and DTC buyers.
All of this works with Shop Pay, Apple Pay, and other accelerated checkout options. Brands that invest in checkout optimization after moving to Plus commonly see conversion rate improvements of 5–15%. On high-volume stores, even a small lift in checkout conversion pays for the entire platform upgrade.

What are Shopify Functions? (and what happened to Scripts?)

If you've been on Shopify for a while, you probably know Shopify Scripts. It was a Plus-exclusive tool that let merchants write custom Ruby code for discounts, shipping, and payment logic. Scripts is going away permanently on June 30, 2026. Shopify extended the deadline from August 2025 to give merchants more time.

The replacement is Shopify Functions, built on WebAssembly. Functions run directly on Shopify's infrastructure, so they're faster and more reliable than Scripts. They handle custom discount logic, cart transformations, payment and delivery customizations, and checkout validation.

Here's the key distinction: public apps built on Functions are available to stores on any Shopify plan through the App Store. But if you need custom-built Functions (the kind that replicate your own Scripts logic or implement proprietary business rules), you need Plus. Shopify's developer docs are clear on this: only Plus stores can use custom apps with Shopify Function APIs.

If your business runs on complex discount structures like tiered wholesale pricing, conditional free gifts, or dynamic shipping rules, Plus is the path forward after the Scripts deadline.

Is Shopify Flow available on all plans?

Yes. This is one of the biggest changes since we first wrote this article. Shopify Flow used to be Plus-only. Now it's available on all plans (Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus). Shopify rolled it out in stages between 2022 and 2024.

Flow automates repetitive tasks using a trigger-condition-action model. Set up inventory alerts when stock runs low, tag customers based on order behavior, flag suspicious orders for review, fire off email notifications, and more. It connects to hundreds of third-party apps through Shopify's connector ecosystem.

The core Flow experience is the same across plans, but Plus merchants get extra capabilities: access to tasks from custom partner apps, higher usage limits that match Plus-level API thresholds, and the new Sidekick AI integration that builds automations from plain-language descriptions.

For most small and midsize merchants, Flow on a standard plan does the job. Plus becomes necessary when you need custom partner app integrations, higher execution volumes, or want to pair Flow with Plus-exclusive tools like Launchpad.

What is Shopify Launchpad?

Launchpad is a campaign scheduling tool, exclusive to Plus. It automates time-sensitive store events like flash sales, product drops, and seasonal promotions so nobody has to manually push changes at go-time.

You can schedule product visibility changes across sales channels, set temporary sale pricing that reverts automatically when the event ends, bump inventory levels at event start, swap your store theme for campaign-specific creative, and track performance through a real-time dashboard.

Launchpad pairs well with Flow. Launchpad handles the scheduled changes (prices go live at midnight, theme swaps at 6 AM). Flow handles the dynamic stuff during the event (product sells out? Pause its ads and send a restock alert).

Merchants on standard plans can approximate some of this with third-party scheduling apps at $10–$50/month each, but there's no native equivalent. Coordinating multiple apps during a high-stakes sale adds complexity and risk you don't need.

Does Shopify Plus include B2B and wholesale features?

Yes, and this is one of Plus's most important additions in recent years. Native B2B is exclusive to Plus. Before this, wholesale on Shopify meant third-party apps, cloned stores, or manual workarounds. Now Plus merchants run DTC and B2B from one admin.

The built-in B2B tools include company accounts with multiple buyer profiles and locations, custom price lists and catalogs per customer or company, net payment terms (Net 30, Net 60) with vaulted credit cards, purchase order-based checkout, min/max order quantity controls, and employee-level permissions for managing assigned wholesale accounts.

Shopify keeps adding to this. The Winter 2026 Edition brought per-market checkout customizations for B2B, expanded employee permission controls, and Apple Pay support for wholesale buyers. If you sell both DTC and wholesale, having unified inventory, orders, and reporting across both channels eliminates the overhead of managing separate systems.

How does Shopify Plus handle multi-store and international selling?

Plus includes up to 10 store instances under one contract: one primary store and nine expansion stores. Each can have its own branding, product catalog, pricing, currency, and language settings while sharing centralized management. Additional stores beyond the nine cost $250/month each.

This matters for brands operating across multiple regions, running separate B2B and DTC storefronts, managing different brand identities, or maintaining staging environments.

Shopify Markets (available on all plans) lets you localize a single storefront for different countries with automatic currency conversion, market-specific pricing, up to 20 languages, local payment methods, and custom domains or subfolders per market. For many growing brands, Markets removes the need for multiple stores entirely.

Plus extends Markets with automatic geolocation detection (customers see the right market experience without choosing it) and per-market checkout customizations. Between Markets and expansion stores, Plus gives you the most flexibility for selling globally.

What level of support does Shopify Plus provide?

Support is one of the less-talked-about reasons merchants upgrade, but it's a real one.

Every Plus merchant gets 24/7 priority support by phone and chat from Plus-trained specialists, a dedicated Merchant Success Manager for strategic guidance, a Launch Engineer for setup and major migrations, access to the Shopify Plus Academy, and early notifications about platform updates.

Standard plans offer chat support (Basic and Grow) or enhanced chat (Advanced). None include phone support or a dedicated rep. If a few hours of downtime during Black Friday could cost you tens of thousands of dollars, the direct line to expert support is worth something on its own.

How do API limits and performance differ on Plus?

Plus provides roughly 10x the API call limits of the Advanced plan. Advanced caps REST API calls at 4 requests per second. Plus raises that ceiling significantly. This matters for stores running complex integrations with ERP systems, warehouse management platforms, custom inventory tools, and multi-channel orchestration.

Plus also comes with a 99.99% uptime guarantee, unlimited bandwidth, and the ability to process over 10,000 concurrent checkouts per minute. Infrastructure scales automatically during traffic spikes. During flash sales, viral moments, or Black Friday/Cyber Monday, you won't worry about your store going down.

What other features are exclusive to Plus?

A few more Plus-only capabilities worth knowing about:

• Shopify Audiences: uses aggregated Shopify commerce data to build high-intent custom audiences for Meta, Google, and other ad platforms. Shopify says it can cut customer acquisition costs by up to 50%

• Organization Admin: one dashboard to manage multiple Plus stores, user permissions, and settings across your whole portfolio

• Unlimited staff accounts: standard plans cap at 2 (Basic) to 15 (Advanced). Plus removes the cap with granular, role-based permissions

• Higher Shopify Balance rewards: Plus merchants earn 3.32% on Shopify Balance vs. 2.29% on other plans (as of March 2026)

• Agentic Storefronts (new in Winter 2026): your products can surface directly in AI chat platforms like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity, so buyers can discover you through conversational AI before they visit your store

• Shopify POS Pro at preferred pricing: POS Pro is an add-on on lower plans, but Plus merchants get better rates for unified online and in-store selling

When should you upgrade from Shopify to Shopify Plus?

Plus makes sense when its exclusive features save or earn you more than they cost. We've worked with hundreds of Shopify merchants since 2010. Here are the signals we look for:

1. You're doing $1M+ in annual revenue and transaction fee savings alone start closing the cost gap between Advanced and Plus

2. You need checkout customization to reduce abandonment, increase average order value, or serve different customer segments

3. You're paying for separate Shopify accounts for multiple storefronts across regions or brands

4. Your wholesale operation has outgrown app-based workarounds and needs native company accounts, price lists, and net terms

5. You're hitting API rate limits that bottleneck your ERP, fulfillment, or inventory integrations

6. You're running 3+ third-party apps to piece together functionality Plus includes natively, and the app fees are adding up

7. Slow support response times during peak sales are directly costing you money

On the other hand, if you're under $500K in annual revenue with a single store and straightforward operations, the Advanced plan at $399/month gives you plenty to work with. Lots of successful brands run on standard Shopify for years before the complexity of their business genuinely calls for Plus.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Shopify Plus cost per month?

$2,300/month on a 3-year term or $2,500/month on a 1-year term. Stores doing over $800,000 in monthly GMV shift to a variable model (0.25–0.40% of monthly revenue), capped at about $40,000/month.

What's the difference between Shopify Advanced and Shopify Plus?

The big ones: checkout customization (Plus gets full Checkout Extensibility, Advanced doesn't), native B2B wholesale, up to 10 expansion stores, roughly 10x higher API limits, a dedicated Merchant Success Manager, Shopify Audiences, Launchpad, and lower transaction fees (0.20% vs. 0.6% for third-party gateways).

Is Shopify Flow still exclusive to Plus?

No. Flow is now available on all Shopify plans including Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus. Plus merchants get extra capabilities like custom partner app tasks and higher usage limits.

What happened to Shopify Scripts?

Scripts is being deprecated on June 30, 2026. Shopify Functions replaces it. It's faster, more flexible, and built on WebAssembly. Public apps using Functions work on all plans, but custom-built Functions require Plus.

Can I sell wholesale on Shopify without Plus?

Shopify's native B2B tools (company accounts, custom price lists, net payment terms, PO checkout) are Plus-only. On standard plans, you'll need third-party apps or workarounds, which add cost and complexity.

How many stores can I run on Shopify Plus?

Up to 10 (1 primary + 9 expansion stores). Extra expansion stores cost $250/month each. Standard plans allow one store per subscription.

Does Shopify Plus include phone support?

Yes. 24/7 priority support by phone and chat with Plus-trained specialists, plus a dedicated Merchant Success Manager. Standard plans are chat-only.

At what revenue should I consider Plus?

Plus typically makes financial sense around $1M in annual revenue. At that level, transaction fee savings, automation efficiencies, and checkout conversion improvements tend to offset the higher platform cost. Some businesses benefit earlier if they have complex multi-store, international, or B2B needs.

Need help deciding?

We've been a Shopify Plus Partner since 2011, one of the original eight agencies to get the designation. We've helped brands at every stage figure out whether Plus makes sense for them, and we'll give you an honest answer.

If you're weighing the move, considering a migration, or just want to make the most of what you're already on, get in touch. We'll help you run the numbers.