Our Real World Experience with Shopify Plus

Come ride the cable cars with us next week! As a Shopify Plus Partner, we are heading to the Shopify Unite conference in San Francisco. This has caused us to reflect on our experience with Shopify Plus since the service launched in February 2014.

Our experience in one word: Awesome!

If you aren’t familiar, Shopify Plus is the enterprise version of the Shopify ecommerce platform. Shopify Plus serves high volume online shops and fast growing startups. Both Shopify versions are fully hosted ecommerce solutions, so Shopify affects a big part of the customer experience. This translates to fast server speeds – an essential for ecommerce shops.

Research shows that 57% of consumers will abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Faster web pages have higher conversion and a lower bounce rate.

As well as being a fast and secure hosting platform, Shopify Plus offers the customization that most shop owners want.

“Shopify Plus has worked very well for our ecommerce clients,” said Sara Bacon, founder of Command C. “In our experience, it’s extremely rare to have a security or hosting issue with it, and the flexibility Plus offers is very valuable.”

The Value of a Plus Account Manager

A significant benefit of Shopify Plus is having a dedicated Plus account manager for your online store.

Our clients have already chosen Command C to be their dedicated web team from strategy through development. Adding a Shopify Account Manager to that team strengthens it.

Your Plus manager answers questions quickly and keeps us abreast of the latest added benefits to Plus. This allows us to quickly jump on opportunities for a competitive advantage and quickly resolve any minor bugs that arise.

Our client Arccos Golf had a SSL layer (now a standard on all Shopify sites) many months before others did.

Same Domain Checkout

Shopify Plus clients can maintain the same branded domain throughout checkout to avoid a disconnect between the storefront and checkout experience. This branded URL is important to ecommerce shops who need to prove themselves trustworthy, credible and professional. On Shopify basic, URLs begin like this: checkout.shopify.com/[storeIDnumber]… On Shopify Plus, it’s all one cohesive brand experience.

The Bud Shop that we recently created uses a branded URL, as do our other Shopify Plus clients.

Customizing the Customer Checkout Experience

Billions of dollars are lost each year during the checkout experience, according to new research by PYMTS and BlueSnap.

“The magic of Shopify Plus really happens in the checkout experience,” explained our lead developer Tiffany. “We have more control and can make the best choices for our clients’ needs. And we can customize tracking of conversions.”

Our client Pop Chart Lab uses custom conversion tracking and analytics in checkout.

Other configurations we’ve added to the Plus checkout experience include:

• Customized checkout styles
• Confirmation of email address on checkout with a second email field
• Other extra validation of form fields to include items such as country, province, etc.
• Addition of an “Agree to terms and conditions” item within checkout

A positive checkout experience is crucial for sales. On desktop and mobile, you need to be testing and improving your customer experience. We can help with this.

And if you are also heading to the Shopify Unite conference, find Command C founder, Sara Bacon, to talk about ecommerce and Shopify Plus. San Francisco, here we come!