Shopify Plus work that lives below the theme.

A Shopify Plus agency builds and maintains stores on the enterprise tier of Shopify, where the work is mostly the things the standard plans do not expose: checkout extensibility, Shopify Functions, B2B companies and catalogs, expansion stores, and the organization admin. The store design matters, but the reason a brand hires a Plus specialist is usually the logic underneath it.

Shopify Plus is the enterprise plan. Shopify documents it as supporting 9 expansion stores, unlimited staff accounts, up to 25 custom React-based storefronts, up to 200 locations, up to 100 themes, unlimited staging stores, 1 TB of file storage per store, Launchpad, and the Checkout Branding API. Those limits are what a growing brand usually runs into first.

Most brands do not need Plus for traffic. They need it for a specific capability: a second store for another region, real B2B accounts alongside DTC, custom checkout logic, or higher automation limits. If you cannot name the feature you are buying, you are probably not ready. We will tell you that on the call rather than after the proposal.

The storefront tools are largely the same. The difference is the enterprise layer: expansion stores under one organization admin, the Checkout Branding API, deeper Shopify Functions use, B2B companies and catalogs, Launchpad scheduling, unlimited staff accounts, and headless storefront allowances. You are buying control over checkout, multi-store, and back-office logic, not a faster shop.

A focused Plus build usually runs several weeks. A full replatform with B2B, ERP integration, and multiple markets runs longer. The variables that actually move the date are catalog and product data quality, how many integrations are in scope, and whether custom checkout logic needs Functions written and reviewed. We scope those before quoting.

Yes. We migrate from Magento and Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and custom builds. Products, customers, order history, SEO URLs, and B2B account structures come across with 301 redirects and a cutover plan. Contract pricing and account hierarchies are the parts most often silently corrupted, so we reconcile those before and after go-live.

A general Shopify developer works in Liquid, themes, apps, and the admin. A Plus build adds Rust or JavaScript Functions compiled to WebAssembly, checkout UI extensions, the Admin GraphQL API at enterprise volume, B2B data modelling, and multi-store governance. Different skill set, different review process, and a much bigger blast radius if it goes wrong.

We are not going to dress up a badge as a capability claim on this page. The useful version is this: bring us your actual Plus problem, the checkout rule you cannot get, the B2B model you need, the expansion store decision, the ERP sync, and judge us on how we answer it. If a formal partner badge is a hard procurement requirement on your side, say so early and we will tell you plainly whether we meet it.

Shopify documents that the Shopify Plus plan supports 9 expansion stores. In practice they get used for separate regions, separate brands, or a dedicated B2B store sitting beside DTC. We help you decide whether a market genuinely needs its own store or whether Shopify Markets on one store solves it with less operational overhead.

Checkout extensibility is the current, upgrade-safe way to customize checkout using apps, checkout UI extensions, web pixels, and the Checkout Branding API instead of editing checkout.liquid. Shopify announced checkout.liquid as deprecated in February 2023, so yes, this is the supported path now. Any new Plus build should be on it from day one.

Shopify set 28 August 2025 as the deadline for upgrading Thank you and Order status pages, after which additional scripts and checkout.liquid became non-editable and personally identifiable information stopped being accessible through legacy customizations. Shopify then began automatic upgrades in January 2026, with legacy customizations lost. If yours were auto-upgraded, the tracking and post-purchase logic likely needs rebuilding.

Yes. Shopify Markets lets you control how customers experience the store based on location, customer group, retail location, or sales channel, including currency, language, pricing, and theme content. For most brands one store with well-configured markets beats a store per country, because it avoids duplicating catalog and inventory work.

Shopify Audiences generates custom audiences for advertising platforms and exports them to your ad account automatically. It requires the Shopify Plus plan, Shopify Payments, and a store located in the United States or Canada. For US DTC brands on Plus it is one of the few plan features that touches acquisition rather than operations.

Launchpad schedules and automates promotions, so a sale, a product drop, or a theme change happens at a set time without anyone staying up to press a button. Shopify lists it as a Plus plan feature. We normally wire it alongside Shopify Flow so inventory, tagging, and publishing move together on one schedule.

Yes, natively, and it is now one of the strongest reasons to be on Plus. Shopify models a company as the business entity making a B2B purchase, containing locations and contacts. Each company location carries its own billing and shipping addresses, and catalogs are associated with company locations to offer exclusive product selections and negotiated pricing.

You attach a catalog to a company location. That catalog controls which products the buyer sees and what they pay, so two dealers logging into the same store can see different assortments and different prices. Volume pricing and quantity rules sit on top, which is how case, pallet, and minimum order quantities get enforced at the cart.

Yes, and for most brands that is the right call. One catalog, one inventory pool, one admin, with B2B buyers seeing their own pricing after login. A separate B2B expansion store makes sense when the assortments barely overlap or when the two sides of the business want genuinely different storefront experiences.

Yes. Payment terms are assigned at the company location level, so a buyer checks out on account rather than by card, with a purchase order reference captured at checkout. Where credit limits live in your ERP, we read them at checkout so an over-limit account is held for approval instead of ordering freely.

Shopify Functions let developers customize the backend logic that powers parts of Shopify, building functionality that is not provided natively. They can be written in any language that compiles to WebAssembly, with Rust recommended as the most performant choice and JavaScript also supported. They run server side inside Shopify, so there is no third-party script slowing checkout.

It gets rewritten as Functions. Discount logic, payment method gating, and shipping rules that used to live in Script Editor map onto the discount, payment customization, and delivery customization function APIs. The rewrite is usually the least glamorous and most important part of a checkout extensibility upgrade, because a missed rule shows up as a wrong price.

No, and most brands should not. Headless is worth it when you need a custom front end, content that lives in another system, or a storefront shared across apps and kiosks. Shopify documents the Plus plan as supporting up to 25 custom React-based storefronts. If a fast Liquid theme does the job, we will build that instead.

Yes. We integrate NetSuite, SAP Business One and S/4HANA, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Acumatica, Epicor, and Sage, using the Admin GraphQL API plus middleware such as Celigo, Patchworks, or a custom service. Products, inventory by location, customers and companies, orders, invoices, and fulfilment status are the usual sync surface.

Yes. The theme code, any Functions and custom apps, and the platform accounts are yours, in your repository and your Shopify organization. There is no proprietary layer you lose access to if you stop working with us, and no part of the build that only we can maintain.

Plus stores are never finished, so we usually continue on a monthly retainer covering platform changes, checkout and Functions work, new markets or expansion stores, integration maintenance, and conversion work. If you would rather run it in-house, we hand over documentation and stay available for the checkout and Functions work specifically.

Yes. A Shopify Plus build can be a fixed-scope project that ends when it ships, and plenty of brands should take that option. Retainers make sense when the store keeps changing: new markets, checkout and Functions work, integrations that need watching. They do not make sense as a condition of being allowed to hire us. If an agency will only quote a build alongside a twelve-month commitment, the commitment is the product. Ask what the project costs on its own and see whether they will answer.

Three things Plus unlocks and standard Shopify does not. Checkout customisation through Shopify Functions and checkout extensibility, which is where most Plus-specific engineering time goes. B2B on Plus, meaning company accounts, price lists and net terms without a third-party app. And expansion stores plus Shopify Flow for multi-market and automation work. A Shopify Plus development agency is really a team that has shipped those three, so ask for a specific example of each rather than a general Shopify portfolio.

Stay on standard Plus unless you have a concrete reason to leave it. Headless buys you front-end freedom and costs you the parts of Shopify that work out of the box, checkout being the important one. The honest triggers for going headless are a content-heavy front end Liquid cannot serve, genuine multi-brand or multi-region complexity, or an existing front-end team who will own it. Wanting a faster site is not a trigger on its own, because most Plus stores are slow for reasons a rebuild will not fix.