Shopify Advanced or Shopify Plus?

Recorded in Polish and published on April 18, 2023. Below is an edited English translation; we removed repetitions and asides without changing the meaning. Shopify plans, prices and features reflect that time; where something has changed, we add a dated November 2026 update.

What plans does Shopify offer?

Tomek: Hi! Today we're talking about Shopify's enterprise version, Shopify Plus. Many clients ask us which plan to choose: Shopify Advanced or Shopify Plus. This also applies to current merchants thinking about migrating to Shopify Plus. We'll compare both plans, point out which features are Plus-only and why it's worth choosing. Let's get started. Hi, Maciek.

Maciek: Hi, Tomek.

Tomek: Today we're comparing the Shopify Advanced and Shopify Plus plans, so it's good to start with which plans Shopify offers at all. We covered it in the last episode, but let's recap.

Maciek: Sure. Let's start with the simplest ones. I don't know if you know, but there's a plan called Lite. It used to be called Lite; now it's called Starter, I think. It lets you run a checkout for a single product, and you can plug it into your blog, for example. It's a small fee.

Tomek: So a simplified plan.

Maciek: Exactly, without all the features, just the ordering process. Then we have the core plans: Basic, Shopify and Advanced. And on top of that there's the enterprise plan, Shopify Plus.

2026 update (as of November 2026): Shopify's pricing page lists the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans. The "Shopify" plan is now called Grow; it's a rename, and the features stayed the same. The pricing page served in Poland doesn't show a Starter plan (shopify.com/pricing).

What drives the choice of plan: price and number of stores

Tomek: The basic question: what really decides which plan to pick? How should we make that choice?

Maciek: I think in nine out of 10 cases it's price. Of course it's not the only criterion. Sometimes companies pick a plan because of a specific feature they need. But price is key, mainly because the jump from Advanced, which until recently cost 300 dollars, and now costs around…

Tomek: 399.

Maciek: Exactly. Now almost 400.

Tomek: 100 dollars more, even.

Maciek: Exactly. It's a bit cheaper if you pay yearly. But moving to the enterprise plan costs 2,000 dollars a month, so the difference is significant. How to approach it? The best way is to compare the plans, for example in a calculator like the one on our website, which lets you work out which plan makes sense at a given revenue, but also with the transaction fees you've negotiated with Shopify or your own provider. Just check what works out better for you.

2026 update (as of November 2026): Shopify's pricing page for Poland lists Advanced at PLN 1,630 a month, or PLN 1,220 a month billed yearly (shopify.com/pricing). Shopify Plus costs from EUR 2,100 a month on a 3-year term and EUR 2,250 on a 1-year term; high-volume businesses with more complex models move to a variable platform fee based on revenue, and Shopify doesn't publish the rate (shopify.com/plus/pricing). You can work out plan costs at your revenue in our calculator.

Maciek: One thing worth watching is how many so-called storefronts you'll need. A storefront here means a separate store instance. When might you need one? Say you want to offer certain products to users in one market and don't want them available in another, maybe because of legal restrictions, your market entry strategy or any other reason. Maybe you want to give other markets a different shopping experience, so it's not only about the product range but also different marketing, or testing a different store design. There can be lots of reasons. Either way, you need a different store look, different features, a different offer for that market.

The second case applies especially to Poland, which we talk about a lot. You can't use Shopify Payments, but you want customers to check out in a currency they feel safe paying in. It's worth adding that you can choose a different currency for each Shopify store instance.

Tomek: So what you're describing mainly applies when we sell in several markets, several countries, and want a separate offer for those countries. That's one of the reasons we open a second store instance: we then have two parallel stores we can manage independently. The second point comes from Poland's limitations: no Shopify Payments means no multi-currency checkout, so every extra currency needs a separate instance. And why does that matter so much for the calculations you mentioned?

Maciek: There's also a third case: when you need a separate B2B channel.

Tomek: Sure.

Maciek: And to answer your question: it matters because on Advanced you pay a separate monthly fee for every storefront like that.

Tomek: So the fee multiplies.

Maciek: Yes, depending on how many storefronts you need. On Shopify Plus, besides the first, default store, you get nine more included, so 10 in total. You can buy more, of course. If you need several Advanced instances, you pass 2,000 dollars very quickly. That's the first dividing line.

2026 update: Shopify Payments has been available in Poland since March 2025 (changelog.shopify.com). With Shopify Payments, a store on any plan can show prices in local currencies and accept local payment methods, and you can create country markets in Shopify Markets with no limit (help.shopify.com). A separate instance per currency is no longer needed. Plus still includes the main store and up to nine expansion stores, but for one brand; each additional store costs EUR 250 a month or a revenue share, and a separate brand needs its own Plus contract (shopify.com/plus/pricing). How we choose between one store with Markets and separate stores is covered in Shopify Markets or separate stores?

Opportunity cost: when features matter more than price

Tomek: So should price really be the only criterion for choosing Shopify Plus? Or, as you said at the start, do some companies need a plan because of a specific feature? What else might convince you to go with Shopify Plus?

Maciek: Remember, in one of the earlier episodes we talked about opportunity costs, which come from not implementing a feature. Maybe the features Shopify Plus gives you will give your store a better conversion rate, you'll expand your range, you'll grow sales.

Tomek: So costs first. Whatever we say, it's a business, so it has to pay off. But the second point, a great one, is opportunity cost. Shopify Plus gives us extra features that sometimes let us ship solutions faster. We'll get to the Plus-only features in a moment.

What does Shopify Advanced add over the lower plans?

Tomek: First, since we're comparing Advanced and Plus, let's list a few features that make Advanced richer than Basic or the Shopify plan. Which parts of Shopify Advanced give you more than the core plans?

Maciek: Most often clients choose Advanced when a lower transaction fee pays off for them.

Tomek: That's important.

Maciek: And it's often the first factor. Second, Advanced gives you more staff accounts. If more than five people work on your e-commerce and all of them need access to the store, you automatically land on Advanced. Of course you can get creative and have several people log in with one account.

Tomek: But then it's hard to manage roles, because everyone has practically the same permissions.

Maciek: Exactly. As for everyday features, advanced analytics matters. Compared with the lower plans, it gives you extra insights and lets you build reports tailored to the data you care about.

2026 update: staff account limits haven't changed: Grow has 5 additional staff accounts, Advanced 15, and Plus is unlimited. But the pricing page now lists "200+ real-time reports, plus custom analytics" on every plan, so custom reports no longer set Advanced apart (shopify.com/pricing).

Tomek: Are there any typically technical Advanced features you'd like to mention?

Maciek: It's a nuance, but Advanced includes so-called carrier-calculated shipping rates.

Tomek: Can you expand on that?

Maciek: Say you install an integration with parcel lockers or another courier, and you've negotiated rates with your carrier that change over time or depend on parcel size, and you don't want to hard-code that a parcel up to a given weight or with given parameters always costs the same. Then you can query the API, the interface systems use to talk to each other. You ask the carrier's API for the price and show the customer the real, current price at checkout. That often helps conversion, if only because the costs are often lower.

2026 update: the Help Center still says third-party carrier-calculated shipping requires the Advanced or Plus plan (help.shopify.com).

Tomek: Let me repeat what you said. If the first criterion is often a lower transaction fee, it's worth saying that on the Shopify plan it's 1%, and on Advanced it drops to 0.5%. In the last episode we compared the costs of running a store, and at a large enough scale that 0.5% makes a big difference. So, as you say, it's usually the main reason.

Maciek: Same with Plus, where the rate drops even further.

2026 update: Shopify charges a transaction fee only when a store uses a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments. Today it's 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. With Shopify Payments you pay only the payment processing rate; in Poland an online card payment costs 1.65% + PLN 1.20 on Advanced and 1.45% + PLN 1.20 on Plus (shopify.com/pricing, shopify.com/plus/pricing).

How much does Shopify spend on product development?

Tomek: Let's move on to what Plus is, through the features reserved for it. Shopify's development policy works like this: new features, usually the most groundbreaking ones, come to Plus first, a bit like for a premium client, and only later sometimes reach the lower plans.

Maciek: While we're at it, I have a riddle for you. Do you know how much Shopify spent last year on research and development for its product and services?

Tomek: Since you ask it as a riddle, and I know Shopify's scale, I'll bet 100 million dollars.

Maciek: You were off by just a billion two hundred million, because it was a billion three hundred and something million.

Tomek: That's a huge amount. But honestly, it doesn't surprise me. It confirms what we say and what Shopify communicates strongly: that its solutions are tested on huge samples, in large studies. That's probably where the budget goes.

2026 update: according to Shopify's annual report for 2022, research and development expenses were $1.503 billion, up from $854 million a year earlier (Shopify's SEC filing).

Shopify Plus features: checkout and Shopify Scripts

Tomek: The list of Plus-only features is quite long. Let's start by picking three, maybe five top ones, the features that convince people first and have the biggest impact on the client's business.

Maciek: Let's say five, in no particular order.

Tomek: Every business may value a feature a bit differently.

Maciek: Very often clients choose Plus, leaving aside the rates we talked about, for a simple reason: they want to modify the checkout, for example to change it from several steps to one. For many reasons I think a multi-step checkout is better, partly because the cognitive load on the user is lower. Each screen has less information to enter, they focus on it and make fewer mistakes. But some companies believe a one-page checkout will work better, and very often that's the only reason they choose Plus. That's number one.

2026 update: one-page checkout is now the default layout, and switching to three steps is a setting in the checkout editor (help.shopify.com). You no longer need Plus for it. What stays on Plus is full checkout customization: the pricing page calls it "Full" on Plus and "Limited" on the other plans (shopify.com/pricing). The old way of editing via checkout.liquid stopped working on August 13, 2024; today the checkout is changed through Checkout Extensibility (changelog.shopify.com).

Maciek: Next is access to Shopify Scripts, a feature that lets you paste pieces of code at the cart and checkout stage and that way adapt the main purchase process to different parameters. That can be different rules for calculating discounts or adding free gifts. What you can do with it is an interesting topic; we can cover it in a future episode. That's the second one.

2026 update: Shopify Scripts have been retired: since April 15, 2026 they can't be edited or published, and on June 30, 2026 they stopped running. The replacement is Shopify Functions (discounts, shipping, payments, validations). Functions from public apps work on any plan, while custom apps with Shopify Functions are Plus-only (changelog.shopify.com, shopify.dev, help.shopify.com).

B2B and staff accounts on Shopify Plus

Tomek: The third is the B2B platform. You mentioned it among the decision criteria as fairly important. Can you explain in a nutshell how it works? I assume it's a topic for a longer conversation.

Maciek: We'll cover it in detail later. In short: B2B selling is possible on Shopify. Is it impossible on the lower plans? It can probably be done if you set up separate stores. But in 2022 Shopify launched a new version of its B2B solution. Before that it was a wholesale platform with some limitations, and the way you bought there was far from what the market expected. People want to buy in B2B the same way they shop in e-commerce every day. It's a platform that lets D2C customers buy on one side, and on the other has a B2B layer with extra features for business customers, like custom price lists or reordering. I don't know if that answers your question well enough.

Tomek: Absolutely. I understand the channel is officially available only on Plus.

Maciek: That's right.

2026 update: since April 2, 2026, Shopify's core B2B features (companies and their locations, up to three B2B catalogs, net payment terms, volume pricing, quantity rules) are also available on the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans. Unlimited catalogs, price lists assigned directly to companies, deposits and partial payments remain Shopify Plus features (changelog.shopify.com, help.shopify.com). Shopify retired the old Wholesale channel in 2024.

Tomek: That's why we're talking about it. What else would you name among the key ones?

Maciek: The point we discussed for Advanced may matter. There was a limit there; we said 15 users, I think. On Plus there's no user limit at all. That matters for enterprise brands with dozens of people working only on e-commerce in each of the markets they operate in. For them Plus is the obvious choice.

Shopify Audiences, API, warehouses and a contact at Shopify

Tomek: Do we want to mention any other selected features?

Maciek: I think we have to.

Tomek: We really have to. Then let's move on. Shopify Audiences?

Maciek: Definitely. It's a feature that helps you decide which products to target to which customer groups. Using machine learning and AI, Shopify Audiences suggests which ads, for which products, to target to which customers to get the best return on ad spend and sales.

Tomek: So a very smart marketing assistant.

Maciek: You could say that.

2026 update: Shopify Audiences is still available only to Shopify Plus stores that use Shopify Payments and are based in the United States or Canada (help.shopify.com). Stores based in Poland can't use it.

Tomek: And developer features? You said the checkout is open to some degree, because it allows changes, and there's Shopify Scripts, so we can inject pieces of code into the checkout. Does anything else in the data or code layer set Shopify Plus apart?

Maciek: For technical people, what matters is that Shopify Plus has a higher API rate limit, so you can send more requests to the Shopify API. That makes the store more efficient.

Tomek: But we mainly mean large stores where the number of requests is really high. The API isn't heavily limited on the other plans, but at large scale the higher limit matters.

Maciek: We can also mention the option to add more locations you ship from, that is, warehouses. That's quite important in some store setups. And the dedicated account manager, a success manager at Shopify who helps you grow your business and makes sure you're happy with the software and your sales grow.

2026 update: the pricing page now lists API limits of "up to 2x on select APIs" on Advanced and "up to 10x" on Plus, and 10 inventory locations on Basic, Grow and Advanced versus 200 on Plus (shopify.com/pricing). Support on Plus is priority 24/7 phone and chat support; neither the pricing page nor the Help Center plan description lists a dedicated account manager as a standard part of the plan (help.shopify.com).

Which brands move to Shopify Plus?

Tomek: Maciek, from your experience, do you see a link between industry or type of client and migrating to Shopify Plus? Does it matter?

Maciek: When we look at our clients on Shopify, my impression is that enterprise brands are all on it, without exception. But the fact that it's an enterprise solution doesn't mean it's only for large companies. Much smaller brands with good revenue, for whom it pays off, move to it successfully. Or brands that need a specific feature. And of course B2B brands. I think we'll soon see growing interest from manufacturing brands that want to get into e-commerce and from wholesale companies. It'll be a big change in the market.

Summary: when should you move to Shopify Plus?

Tomek: We're slowly reaching the end. Let me briefly sum up what should decide, or what affects, a merchant's decision to migrate to Shopify Plus.

Maciek: Go ahead.

Tomek: First, as you stressed, and I agree, it's about the business, so costs. First we check whether it pays off in business and cost terms. To remind you: Shopify Plus has the lowest transaction fee, 0.15%, which at a high enough monthly revenue becomes more cost-effective than Advanced, where by comparison it's 0.5%.

Next is opportunity cost, also a very important element. The features dedicated to this plan let us build a range of extra solutions that increase conversion. If we don't build them, because other plans don't allow it, we potentially lose revenue.

Then the team, the people who work on the store. Shopify Plus has unlimited accounts, which matters for large, often distributed teams. Plus very extensive reporting that lets us analyze all our stores. As we said, on Shopify Plus we can have up to 10 store instances in total within one plan and view results from each market in one dashboard, which makes managing a global business easier.

And of course B2B sales. When our business has that potential, or we're actually focused on business-to-business sales, Shopify Plus is really the only sensible choice. You can try to do it on lower plans, but with limitations. Would you add anything to this summary?

Maciek: We can mention that there's a set of Plus-only apps that enable integration with selected ERP and PIM systems. Lower plans have integration options too, but on Plus we get access to these exclusive integrations.

2026 update: the third-party gateway fee is now 0.2% on Plus and 0.6% on Advanced, and Shopify waives it with Shopify Payments. Plus still includes the main store and up to nine expansion stores for one brand. Core B2B has been available on all plans since April 2, 2026 (details above). Plus-only features include Launchpad (scheduling launches and sales) and access to Shopify Plus Certified App Partners, while Shopify Flow (automation) is a free app on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans; custom partner app tasks in Flow are Plus-only (help.shopify.com, help.shopify.com/flow).

Tomek: Maciek, thank you very much for today's conversation. And thank you, too. I hope this episode gave you the information you need to choose a plan and that you now know more about Shopify Plus. Watch our next episodes.