How customisable is Shopify Plus?

September 5, 2022

Whilst Shopify is known as a simple ecommerce solution for those looking for an ‘out of the box’ online store, Shopify Plus appeals to enterprise-level businesses due to being highly customisable in terms of aesthetic, functionality, payments and more.

But can you fully customise Shopify?

Shopify Plus makes it possible to customise all of the elements of an online store that matter to today’s online shoppers, and many of these customisations can make life for merchants a whole lot easier, too. Whilst some of these changes may be possible with more basic Shopify plans, there are some key areas of your ecommerce website that can only be modified if you’re using the Plus plan, which is the most advanced version of the platform designed for enterprise level businesses.

Keep reading to find out more about how key website features can be customised with Shopify Plus. 

Themes on Shopify Plus

Many large ecommerce businesses prefer to use a custom theme over a ready-made template. With Shopify, you can customise your store’s theme, from small tweaks to complete redesigns. This can give your site more originality, and ensures every aspect of your store is on-brand which can give a more polished and professional impression to website visitors. You can, however, create a great looking site with Shopify’s pre-built theme templates, so whether you decide to go custom or not will depend on your business goals and resources – heavy customisation requires the skills of a developer.

Products

Product pages are arguably the most important element of any ecommerce website, and it’s crucial that merchants strike the balance between beautifully showcasing products and ease of checkout. Customisation can come in handy not only in the appearance of your product pages, but functionality, too. If you need your product pages to allow customers to personalise their items, for example in colour, size or custom text, then Shopify’s customisation capabilities will appeal to you. As standard, the platform has a 100 product variant limit, but complete control over your website code removes this limit entirely.

Discounts

Shopify offers a lot of customisation when it comes to discounts. There are times when a blanket discount code just won’t cut it. Shopify allows merchants much more flexibility over the discounts they offer, meaning they can be far more strategic in using them. For example, first-time buyer codes can be utilised by adding the appropriate code to the top of each customer’s browser so that it follows them throughout their journey, making a sale much more likely. Wholesalers may also benefit from custom discounting, as they can offer unique discounts to specific merchants or apply a tiered discounting system to their products in order to increase average order value.

With Shopify Plus, merchants get access to Shopify Scripts. If your business has complex tiered pricing, bundled products, or customer and tag specific pricing or shipping requirements, Shopify Scripts are the answer. They’re small pieces of code, available to Plus merchants only, that allow you granular control on all aspects of things such as pricing, discounts, shipping costs and methods, and even showing/hiding certain elements within the site such as showing different payment methods to different types of customers or hiding shipping methods for others.

Customising the Shopify Plus checkout

One of the main draws of Shopify Plus is the ability to customise the checkout process. Allowing for a more streamlined and seamless purchasing process, a customised checkout can seriously reduce basket abandonment. The checkout can be edited via the checkout.liquid file, which is self contained and doesn’t render any additional template files. You can create extremely personal, creative, innovative and high performing checkout experiences with Shopify Plus that are tailored to your brand, building on Shopify’s already market-leading conversion experience.

Plus is the only Shopify plan that will allow you to make changes to your checkout process – the other plans offer basic checkout options that are standard across all stores (if you’re familiar with Shopify you’ll be able to spot a Shopify store as soon as you enter the checkout screen).  

As well as being able to make your checkout screens match the rest of your site in terms of appearance and branding, you’ll also be able to decide how many stages or screens your customers go through to complete a purchase, adding true cross-sell/upsell, and additional screens if necessary and testing out what works best for your business. 

Perhaps what appeals most to many enterprise-level businesses however is that a custom checkout process makes it easier to sell internationally, and therefore scale your business. With Shopify Markets, you can create separate groups of customers based on geo location and can tailor taxes, prices and shipping costs for each group. Whilst not exclusive to Plus, this functionality comes into its own on stores with large internationalisation requirements and worldwide tax obligations.

Payments on Shopify Plus

Shopify offers 100s of payment gateways, meaning you can customise payment methods to suit you and your customers. Whilst it’s not recommended to have too many options, it’s good to be able to migrate an existing gateway if you have a preferential rate, or start using Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, accelerated checkouts and all they have to offer. We tend to find that stores using Shopify Payments have higher conversion rates than those using third party gateways.

Wholesale on Shopify Plus

We’ve already touched on discounts, but the B2B benefits don’t stop there – Shopify Plus is a really convenient solution for wholesalers. This largely comes down to the level of customisation it offers. In 2019, Shopify announced it was adding the capability to create custom pages for the wholesale storefront, along with a user-friendly menu builder. This feature significantly improves communication with B2B customers and also saves merchants some time thanks to the platform’s signature easy-to-use approach. In the same update, they added custom domains for wholesale storefronts, too. 

Wholesale on Shopify Plus allows customer or group specific price lists, customer or group specific discounts, payment terms, self-service, account credit control and more. It’s quickly becoming the de facto way to operate a wholesale business on Shopify and, as the feature continues to develop, it’ll only become more integral.

Integrations

One of the key benefits of Shopify and Shopify Plus is the ability to add custom functionality in a matter of minutes, thanks to simple integrations. Merchants can connect all third party systems (such as ERP or CRM) with Shopify APIs to customise functionality beyond the standard ecommerce site. Integrations mean that you don’t have to trade responsiveness and speed for customisation and control – customers get a more personalised experience, and merchants have more time to focus on growing their businesses. And from a development perspective, Shopify’s developer-friendly tools put the entire Shopify experience in the developer’s hands for quick, easy customisation.

Want to see Shopify Plus in action? When it became apparent that longtime client Yogamatters had outgrown their website in 2020, we knew that a Shopify Plus build was the best solution. One of the biggest pain points arising from their Magento site at the time was that customisation was impossible without a laborious and time-consuming process. Fast forward two years and they have the flexibility to develop and deploy as and when required, ease of administration and most importantly, have achieved scalable growth, increasing revenue by 29% in just 12 months. If that’s piqued your interest, you can read the full Yogamatters case study here. 

Looking for an ecommerce site that can keep up? Venture Stream are Shopify Partners who specialise in Shopify Plus, Shopify and all things e-commerce. To chat about Shopify development, send us a message and we’ll be in touch.