Shopify Plus in New Zealand

Do the arithmetic before the feature list

Shopify Plus starts around USD 2,300 a month against roughly USD 400 for Advanced Shopify. That is a real difference, and whether it is a good deal is a calculation rather than an opinion.

Work out, on your own numbers:

• Your card and transaction rates today, and what they would be on Plus at your volume. On a store doing several million, this alone can cover a large part of the difference.
• What you pay in app subscriptions each month, and how many of those apps Plus makes unnecessary.
• What you currently pay a developer to work around things Plus would simply do.
• Revenue you can point at that you are not getting because the checkout cannot be changed.

If that adds up to less than the difference, stay where you are and spend the money on the store. Any developer proposing the upgrade should be willing to do this sum with you — the ones who only hand you a comparison table are selling Shopify's marketing rather than advising you.

What Plus actually unlocks

The checkout. This is the real one. On standard Shopify the checkout is fixed, and no amount of budget changes it. On Plus you can add custom logic, fields, validation and upsells at the point where money is decided.

B2B alongside retail. Wholesale customers with their own pricing, payment terms and catalogues, on the same platform as your consumer store, instead of two systems and a spreadsheet reconciling them.

Several storefronts. Multiple brands, or New Zealand and Australia as separate stores with their own currency, pricing and content, run from one account.

Automation. Rules that fire without a person: flag fraud, tag customers, route orders, notify the warehouse.

Higher API limits. Which matters the day you connect an ERP and start syncing thousands of products.

If none of those describes something you currently cannot do, you do not need Plus yet.

Migration: the SEO is the risk, not the build

Moving a large store from Magento, BigCommerce or a custom platform is well-trodden work. Products, customers and order history migrate reliably. The part that damages businesses is URLs.

A store with thousands of product and category pages that launches without a complete redirect map can lose a large share of its organic traffic overnight, and recovery takes months of a year you only get one of. This is entirely preventable and it happens constantly.

Make the redirect plan a named deliverable:

• Every existing URL mapped to its new home, signed off before launch.
• A crawl of the old site kept as evidence of what existed.
• Search Console monitored daily for the first fortnight.
• Someone responsible for fixing what turns up in week two.

Ask each developer how they have handled this on a store of your size. The experienced ones will start talking about it before you finish the question.

Audit the apps while you are here

Most established Shopify stores are paying several hundred dollars a month across a dozen or more apps, several of which overlap, one of which nobody remembers installing, and two of which are the reason the theme breaks after updates.

A move to Plus is the right moment to go through them. Ask for the audit as part of quoting: what stays, what Plus replaces, what can simply go. It is a real monthly saving and it reduces the number of things that can break your store without warning.

Checkout customisation is something you now own

The checkout is Plus's headline feature and it is also the part most likely to need attention later. Shopify has been steadily reshaping how checkout customisation works, and businesses that customised heavily have had to revisit that work.

Two things to settle in the quote:

• How the customisations are built — using Shopify's current supported extension points, or something clever that may not survive.
• Who maintains them, and what it costs when Shopify changes the rules.

Customise where it earns money, not everywhere it is possible.

Ask about the team, not the badge

Shopify Plus partner status is worth something, but it tells you about the agency rather than about the people who will do your work. Ask:

• Which Plus stores have you launched, and can I visit one?
• Who specifically works on this, and are they here or offshore?
• Have you migrated from the platform we are on?
• What does support cost after launch, and what does it include?

Comparing five quotes

Read for:

• Who did the arithmetic on whether you need Plus at all?
• Who made redirects and SEO a named deliverable rather than a line in a method statement?
• Who audited your apps and told you what to cancel?
• Who quoted the integrations — accounting, inventory, shipping — rather than assuming they carry over?
• Who told you what happens after launch, and what it costs?

Describe your annual revenue, your current platform, how many products and orders you handle, and the specific thing you cannot do today. Developers who work on Plus stores will tell you within a paragraph whether you are ready for it — and the good ones will tell you when you are not.