Choosing the right Shopify plan
When you start selling with Shopify, there are different packages that you’ll be choosing from in order to use the platform to sell your products or services. Choosing the right package is important because it will determine what sort of features you get with your store and the tools that you’ll have at your disposal to run your business.
The easiest way to allow you to determine what package you should go with is to describe each feature that Shopify offers, based upon this chart, and then mark which membership tiers get access to that feature.
At the time of this writing, the Shopify plans are as follows:
- Lite: $9 per month
- Basic: $29 per month
- Pro: $79 per month
- Advanced: $299 per month
Features Offered by Shopify with Membership
Online Store: Basic, Pro, Advanced
With Shopify, this is where everything begins. If you want to have an online store, you need to choose one of the membership plans that offer it – Basic, Pro or Advanced. If you choose the Lite plan, you aren’t going to get a store.
Point-of-Sale: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
You get the point-of-sale feature with all of the plans. What this gives you is the ability to take payments any way you need to using the Shopify POS. That means that you can accept payments in both the virtual and real world and it is easy to set up with an app on your mobile device and an intuitive design that requires no training whatsoever. There is also a retail add-on package that gives you everything you need to sell in a brick-and-mortar store.
Facebook Integration: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
With this feature you store gets fully integrated with Facebook so when people visit your page, they can see the items that you have in your store, updated whenever you change them, and be able to click through to your store and buy if they want to. No matter which plan you choose you get this integration.
Pinterest Integration: Basic, Pro, Advanced
This feature comes with every package except for the Lite package and it allows you to sell items from your store directly on Pinterest buy having a buy button integrated into your pins. Buyable pins allow customers to buy without even leaving Pinterest and could definitely result in a lot more sales.
Twitter Integration: Basic, Pro, Advanced
Again, comes with every package except for the Lite, and this feature works pretty much the same as the Pinterest integration does. Anytime you tweet a product, it will automatically include a buy button, product image and description so that people can shop without even leaving Twitter.
Shopify Buy Button: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
The Shopify buy button is how you can add your buy button to any website that you choose, and it comes with all of the different packages that Shopify offers.
Retail Package: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
This is the cost of the retail add-on package. With some features, you get a discount with the higher priced Shopify packages, but with this particular one, the retail add-on costs $40 no matter which package you go with.
Credit Card Rates: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
As mentioned in the last feature, some tiers give you different costs. This is an example of those. You pay less fees for accepting credit cards the higher of a tier you choose. So for the Lite and Basic packages, you pay 2.9% plus 30 cents online and 2.7% plus 0 cents in person while the Pro package only charges you 2.6% plus 30 cents online and 2.4% plus 0 cents in person. The Advanced package gives you a further discount – 2.4% plus 30 cents online and 2.2% plus 0 cents in person.
Transaction Fees: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
So, for this package, you don’t pay any transaction fees with Shopify Payments no matter which package you choose. But if you use external payment gateways you are going to pay 2% on the Lite and Basic packages, and 1% with the Pro. The Advanced package only charges you half a percent transaction fees on outside payments.
Number of Products: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
No matter which package you go with, you get an unlimited number of products in your store.
24/7 Support: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
All of the packages include 24/7 support. If you are paying for a package with Shopify, you get access to support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year.
Shipping Label Discounts: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
When you buy shipping labels from Shopify you get deeper discounts with the higher tier packages. With Lite and Basic, you get up to 50% off shipping labels while you get another 5% off with Pro and another 10% off (for a total of up to 60% off) with Advanced
Fraud Analysis: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
No matter what package you go with you get Shopify’s award-winning fraud analysis to make sure that you are protected from fraudulent purchases.
Manual Order Creation: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
Again, you get this feature no matter which package you choose. What a manual order feature gives you is the ability to enter an order manually without having the customer purchase the product online. That means if you sell something in the real world you can still take advantage of Shopify’s features by entering it into the system manually.
Website & Blog: Basic, Pro, Advanced
With the exception of the Lite package, you get to have a website and blog through Shopify with any of the tiers that you choose. This allows you to blog and builds authority as well as gives you an e-commerce store. Blogging can help you rank for more keywords as well.
File Storage: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
No matter what you choose here, you get unlimited file storage.
Discount Codes: Lite, Basic, Pro, Advanced
Discount codes allow you to run promotions and give your customers a discount when they use a specific code. This is a very good tool for knowing where your traffic came from and which advertising methods work the best.
Gift Cards: Basic, Pro, Advanced
With the Basic, Pro and Advanced packages you get gift cards that your customers can use to give to other people or use at a later date.
Professional Reports: Pro, Advanced
The Pro and the Advanced packages are the only ones that give you the ability to run advanced reports and see what is really going on in your store. You do get some basic reporting without this feature, but it is very limited and it could be worth upgrading to the Pro or Advanced packages all by itself.
Abandoned Cart Recovery: Pro, Advanced
This allows customers to come back after closing out the page and finding their shopping cart just as they left it.
Advanced Report Builder: Advanced
The only package that you get this advanced report builder in is the Advanced package and in fact, this is one of only two features that you can only get with the Advanced package.
Real Time Carrier Shipping: Advanced
This is the other feature that you get only with the Advanced package.
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