Top 3 things to do when you just moved to Shopify Plus in 2023

You just upgraded to Shopify Plus. You’re excited. Let’s use all these new capabilities! But what are they? What can be set up on day one?

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1. Shopify Scripts

Shopify Scripts are small pieces of code that let you create personalized experiences for your customers in their cart and at checkout. They are easy to set up and quite powerful. 

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Think of situations where you wanted to offer 50% off if the shopper bought 3 or more items. Or BOGO offers upon adding a specific item to the cart. Whatever it is you want to configure, scripts can do it!

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There are three kind of scripts:

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Line item scripts

Line item scripts affect line items in the cart and can change prices and grant discounts. These scripts are run when a change is made to the cart.

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This allows you to add multiple discounts or bundles in the checkout. Without scripts, the limit of discounts is one.

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Shipping scripts

Shipping scripts interact with shipping and can change shipping methods and grant discounts on shipping rates. These scripts run when the checkout reaches the shipping options page.

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Payment Scripts

Payment scripts interact with payments and can rename, hide and reorder payment gateways. Note that payment scripts do not interact with payment gateways shown before the checkout screen, such as Apple Pay. These scripts are run when the checkout reaches the payment page.

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We recommend this script creator to build scripts. Here’s a guide on how to use it to create a line item script that discounts a product once it’s added to cart.

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2. Checkout customization

The Shopify checkout is a bit of the last frontier. It’s been guarded closely by Shopify as it processed $4.6 billion in purchases last year. Their rationale is that they know what converts best as they’ve A/B tested this checkout flow a lot. Shopify is slowly opening up the checkout to merchant customizations. 

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When you’re on Shopify Plus, you’re now able to customize the checkout with static and dynamic elements.

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Static

Add a customized progress bar at the top of the checkout. This can be a bar showing you’re close to a shipping threshold. Could also be a countdown timer. Or just badges that instill trust with the shopper.

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Add custom design and colors to the page as a whole. Same colors, font and logo as elsewhere on your website. This will keep the shopper engaged and will instill trust they’re still buying from your store, and not some 3d party checkout.

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Dynamic

Upsells (our favorite!). You can add clickable elements to the checkout for shoppers to interact with. The most important use case is adding an upsell to the checkout.

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You can add an upsell to show on all 3 steps, Information, Shipping, and Payment, or just some of those pages.

Here's an example of Caudabe.com. They sell phone cases.

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They customized their checkout with:

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• A shipping progress bar at the top, nudging people to take the upsell
• A screenprotector as upsell in the checkout that matches the phone model for the phone case in cart
• Trust badges at the bottom

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This is one of the simplest, yet most effective Plus checkout sidebars we've seen.

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If you’re on Plus, checkout upsells can pay for your Plus subscription fees, depending on your traffic. Based on the upsell data we have from dozens of Plus merchants upselling in the checkout, 2000 orders a month is the sweet spot.

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3. Play around in the Plus sandbox

Once you move to Plus, it packs a lot of dev environments. These come in handy when you’re trying out new themes, want to expand to multiple countries or need to test custom code.

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Make a copy of your live theme and use it as a sandbox environment to try out all the new toys that come with Shopify Plus.

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Bonus:

Lower payment processing fees. If you’re using Shopify Payments as your payment processor, transactions just got cheaper. Fee breakdown:

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Basic Shopify – 2.9% + $0.30 for every online transaction and 2.7% 

Shopify – 2.6% + $0.30 for online and 2.5%

Advanced Shopify – 2.4% + $0.30 for online and 2.4%

Shopify Plus - 2.15% + $.30/transaction

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If you’re doing $1,000,000 of sales a year, this drop on transaction cost (2.4% to 2.15% will pay for Shopify Plus. You will be saving $2500/yr in fees, and more if you’re growing your sales that year)

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This is the lowest the fees will get using Shopify Payments. If you use a third-party processor, Shopify adds 0.15% on top of their fee.

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Good luck with your new Shopify Plus store!

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