What plan is the best for our business?

Shopify Discussion
1

Hello!

For the past couple of years, we have been operating our existing domain through GoDaddy. We have our own website that is equipped with customer reports, shipping, inventory, and all other settings to operate a website. We have been thinking about connecting our existing domain through Shopify, but we are having a hard time deciding which plan will work better for us. We sell around 100 different apparel items, and we are looking to boost our online sales. Should we do the basic, shopify, or advance plan, or should we look into integrating a shopify buy button?

2

Welcome to the Shopify Community Forums, @SelfishLLC !

Excited to hear that you’re looking at Shopify as an option to help operate your website.

Have you taken a look at our plan and pricing page here? If you scroll down and click on the Compare plan features button, it’ll open up a table with more information on each plan and how they compare to each other. From that table, there are a few main differences between the subscription plans that I’ll unpack a little bit further for you:

  1. Reports: While our platform offers analytics and reporting for business owners and staff members to analyze their store’s activities, the types of reports that are made available differs within each plan. For example, you mentioned having access to customer reports on your current website—if you decide to move to Shopify and opt for the Basic plan, your store’s customer reports won’t be made available to you as you’ll need to at least be on the Shopify plan to access this feature. For more information on which analytics and reports are available for which plans, I recommend checking this help guide.

  2. Shipping: How do you currently configure and show shipping rates to customers on your website? When it comes to shipping, the biggest difference between the subscription plans is the ability to access the third-party carrier-calculated shipping rate. For context, stores on the Basic plan and below won’t have access to this feature, meaning that they will need to create their own flat shipping rates. On the Shopify plan and beyond however, you’ll have access to enable this feature, allowing you to charge customers shipping rates from a third-party shipping carrier of your choice, such as UPS or USPS (depending on where you’re based).

  3. Credit card rates and transaction fees: You can access this and view the differences of the credit card and transaction fees (if you’re not looking to use Shopify Payments) directly on the plan and pricing page I linked earlier. As you can see, the higher-tiered plans will offer you lower fees overall.

There are other differences, apart from the ones I listed above, but I find that these tend to be the main factors that drive merchants to choose one plan over the others. So ultimately, the plan you choose will depend on your business’ needs and requirements—typically we recommend that businesses start on the Basic plan if they’re just starting out and require an independent website, but those who are simply looking for ways to sell their products without an online store can now take advantage of our Starter plan too.

For more established businesses however, the features of the Basic plan may not be enough for them to operate smoothly, in particular due to the lack of reporting and inability to have access to the third-party carrier-calculated shipping rate I explained earlier. So if these are features that your store needs, you may be better off looking into the higher-tiered plans. Keep in mind that you can always choose and try a subscription plan for a month or so to begin with, to see if the features suit your business’ needs. If you have a change of heart and believe that you’ve chosen the wrong plan, you can always update your store’s subscription plan directly from your store’s admin, as explained here.

For more information, you can also look at installing a third-party app from our Shopify App Store if preferred, rather than choose a higher-tiered plan, if you happen to find an app that offers you capabilities similar to the features offered in the higher-tiered plans. Merchants in the Basic plan often do this, for example, by installing a third-party reporting app to help cover the lack of analytics in the Basic plan.

Let me know how you get on with the information I’ve laid out above! If you need me to clarify anything, feel free to reply on this thread and I’ll do my best to help. In the meantime, I’ll leave you here with this help guide, which lists all of our plans’ features, in case you need more information on each of the different plans.

3

Since we already have a website that customers can visit and shop from, do you think it will be a hard process to switch to Shopify? Will it change the layout of our website?

4

@SelfishLLC

Migrating can definitely take time, especially if your website is already well-established and includes a lot of data you’d like to carry over. This can include products, customer lists, historical orders, and any blogs available on your website, for example. There are different ways in which you can migrate all of this data—a popular option is to export them as CSV files from your current ecommerce provider, and to then import that onto Shopify via the CSV file format we have available.

On Shopify’s end however, the CSV export and import method is only available for some aspects of a store, like products and customers. So for a more complete migration of your data, a third-party app may be the best option to help for a smoother migration.

While there are a few migration app options available in our App Store, the most popular ones are:

I recommend taking a look at those two to begin with, to see if they’ll suit your business’ needs. Just a note also that because these migration apps are created by third-party developers outside of the Shopify platform, if you have any questions or concerns about any of the apps you’ll need to contact the app support team directly. They’re best equipped to assist you with app-specific issues and queries.

In regards to the design of your website however, this won’t be carried over in the migration as Shopify uses Themes to help with store design. Themes are pre-designed online store templates that merchants use to help define the skeleton of their website, but you can customize themes to make them suit your own brand.

For more information on migrating to Shopify, please refer to our help guides below too:

5

So to clarify, the theme/ design we already have for our website will not transfer over to Shopify after connecting our domain? Does this mean we will have to completely redesign our website? If we wanted to keep our design and overall layout of our website, what other ways can we utilize Shopify on our website?

6

@SelfishLLC

That’s correct—themes and design files tend to be configured differently across platforms, so while you’ll be able to import and transfer products, customers, and many other store data from your previous store to Shopify, you’ll need to use a compatible Shopify theme as a basis for your store’s design.

If you’d like to carry over your current website design from GoDaddy to Shopify, you may consult with a Shopify Expert who should be able to inspect your theme files from GoDaddy, as well as your overall website design, to see if they can help design a custom theme for you that is as close to your current website as possible.

Otherwise, if you’d like to still host your website on GoDaddy for the most part, but would like to make use of Shopify’s checkout and payment system, our Starter plan can be used so that you can implement buy buttons or links to products on your current website. When a customer goes to purchase one of your products, they will then be taken to a Shopify checkout page for them to process their order and payment.

7

Okay, so I am thinking the buy button might be the best fit for us. We already have a checkout system, but we would like our customers to be able to choose to checkout with shopify. So, will adding the buy button do that? Also I read the article about the buy button and it states that Shopify does not recommend the use of Buy Buttons on the Shopify online store or blog, because they can cause problems with the checkout process, and instead, consider using permalinks to pre-load the cart. What are permalinks?

8

@SelfishLLC

It should be possible to do, however keep in mind that buy buttons are typically used on websites and blogs rather than an already functioning online store with its own checkout system. Buy buttons are embedded on websites via coding though, so if your current website allows you to embed a custom buy button code then you should be able to implement a Shopify-specific buy button on your product pages, allowing your customers to checkout with Shopify. You can find more information on how to implement a buy button on our blog here.

If you’re comfortable with coding and would like to test this out yourself prior to committing to our platform, just a note that you can make use of our 3 day free trial and current trial extension of $1/month for 3 months. Because your buy button coding would then be implemented on an external website outside of Shopify, if you need help with customizing your codes you can try reaching out to a Shopify Expert to see if they can assist you with your custom codes.

In regards to permalinks, this shouldn’t concern you as much because you’d be implementing buy buttons on an external website, rather than a store that’s being run on Shopify. Permalinks work similarly to buy buttons—for example if you were to include a cart permalink on your product page, visitors who click on the permalink will be taken to the cart page directly, and they will see their cart being automatically pre-loaded with the specific product that you’ve set for the cart.

9

Okay, now we would like to know a little more information about getting our store on the Shop app. How do we go about doing that?

10

@SelfishLLC

You can firstly check our document here for a full list of merchant and product requirements to be featured in the Shop app.

If your store meets the eligibility requirements, then the Sell with Shop setting is activated automatically, and your store and products will be discoverable within the Shop app. Managing the settings or viewing the eligibility of your store on the Shop app can be done via the Shop sales channel, which you’ll need to install if it isn’t already automatically available within your Shopify admin.

I’ll leave our Shop guide here for you to review, as it includes all of the information you need to set up and showcase your store and products within the Shop app.

11

Would it best for us to do the Starter Plan or the Basic Plan?

12

@SelfishLLC

Are you meaning in relation to the Shop app, or just in general?

As we’ve previously discussed, there are different advantages to choosing a higher-tiered plan, though this isn’t necessarily needed if your business doesn’t require it. For a refresher on what’s offered in both plans, you can refer to this document for features of the Starter plan, and this one here for our Basic plan features.

Using the Shop app doesn’t necessarily require you to be on the Basic plan, as your store can also be featured and utilize the features of Shop app within the Starter plan too. So if you’re wanting to start out with a more cost-effective plan to begin with, just a note that you can absolutely use the Shop app on the Starter plan, as long as you meet the requirements.

13

I was asking in the relation of the Shop app. I just wanted to make sure we were choosing the right plan. As I previously stated, we already had a website and we are just deciding to keep our website through GoDaddy and utilize the Shop app to showcase our products as well. So, I was just double checking to make sure we could pick either plan, because I had asked the virtual assistant and it said the only way I could use the Starter plan was if we install Shopify payments and Shop pay.

14

@SelfishLLC

Ah gotcha, that’s understandable.

The virtual assistant is correct, using Shopify Payments and Shop Pay are indeed a couple of the requirements that a store will need to meet in order to be featured in the Shop app. Those aren’t the only requirements, however, so I would rely on the document I sent in my previous reply to cross-check all of the requirements needed to be featured in the Shop app (as it also states that a store will need to be on an active Starter plan or higher as one of the criteria).