Shopify Plus

Most retailers asking the question do not need it yet. Plus earns its cost at three thresholds: when you need to change the checkout itself rather than the theme around it, when your B2B pricing is genuinely customer-specific rather than a handful of price lists, or when you are operating enough separate storefronts that managing them individually has become the job. Volume alone is a weak reason, plenty of high-revenue stores run perfectly well on standard Shopify.

The checkout is the real difference. Plus opens checkout extensibility and custom apps built on Shopify Functions, so discount logic, shipping rules and payment presentation can follow your business rules rather than the platform defaults. You also get more storefronts under one plan, higher API limits, and customer-specific B2B pricing; the B2B basics have been on every paid plan since April 2026. Everything else (themes, apps, the admin) is the same product.

Since April 2026 the B2B basics, company profiles, payment terms, volume pricing and up to three B2B catalogues, are on every paid Shopify plan. Plus adds what most wholesalers eventually need: unlimited catalogues, catalogues assigned directly to each company for customer-specific pricing, and deposits and partial payments. That is enough for a large share of wholesale businesses. Where it strains is deep account hierarchies, complex kits and bundles, or pricing that lives in an ERP and must be honoured in real time at the moment of checkout. Those are worth testing against your actual rules before you commit to the tier.

Three to five months is typical for a mid-market replatform, and the schedule is usually set by decisions rather than development, product data quality, how many integrations are in scope, and how quickly sign-off happens. A storefront on an existing catalogue with two integrations can move much faster; a B2B and D2C build sharing one platform will not.

Only when content and commerce serve more than one destination, or the front end must change independently of the platform. Headless costs you the editorial experience and adds moving parts, and small teams feel that hardest. For a single storefront, the standard theme layer is usually the better engineering decision even when headless is technically available.

Yes, and we will tell you when it is the wrong move. The cases where it is right are usually about operational cost rather than capability, a platform team you no longer want to staff, or infrastructure work that is not earning anything. Where your commerce logic is genuinely non-standard, moving it into a SaaS checkout can cost more than it saves.

Our head office is in Sydney and we work with clients across Australia (Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and regional NSW included) as well as in New Zealand, where the duty free stores across the major airports have run on a platform we build and support since 2021. Delivery has been remote-first for years, so a project runs the same way whether you are ten minutes away or across the Tasman: scheduled calls, a shared board you can see at any time, and one named point of contact. We are happy to meet in person in Sydney.