Shopify Plus vs Advanced — cost calculator (NZD)

What the calculator doesn’t show you

The calculator above is honest about platform fees, transaction fees, and the FX premium NZ stores pay. But Plus isn’t bought on platform fees alone. The reason most stores upgrade — and the reason I’ve helped clients move to Plus when the maths above said “stay on Advanced” — is what Plus does that Advanced can’t.

Checkout customisation that actually works

On Plus you get full control of the checkout surface: custom fields, validation logic, multi-step flows, and dynamic content driven by cart lines or customer attributes. That work sits in Shopify Functions and Checkout Extensibility — the current, supported model Shopify is steering everyone toward.

It matters when checkout drop-off is expensive: high average order value, subscription businesses with fiddly first-order rules, hybrid B2B-style DTC that needs PO numbers or terms surfaced cleanly, or flash events where checkout speed and stability under load are part of the product.

It usually does not matter for standard physical-goods DTC where the native Shopify checkout already does what you need. That checkout converts strongly for a reason. Don’t pay for Plus to “pretty up” checkout unless you can name a specific job it cannot do today.

B2B and wholesale, built in

Plus includes Shopify’s native B2B channel: company accounts, catalogues, company-specific pricing, NET terms, and draft orders that support quote-style workflows — without bolting on a wholesale app stack.

That matters when you are already running meaningful B2B next to retail. The typical pattern on Advanced is several paid apps layered together. Replacing that stack with the native module often saves hundreds of dollars a month in subscriptions before you count the cleaner admin UX and fewer integration edges.

It does not matter for pure DTC. The capability is excellent, but you fund it whether you touch it or not — so if wholesale is hypothetical, keep the money in inventory and marketing until the channel is real.

Expansion stores for international markets

Plus includes multiple dedicated storefronts (the exact count depends on your contract tier) so you can run separate themes, languages, currencies, and payment methods per region under one Plus org. One account, deliberately separated customer experiences.

That matters for NZ businesses selling into Australia, the US, the UK, or anywhere “Markets on Advanced” cannot model cleanly — especially when you need a genuinely separate brand or catalog per region, not just a currency toggle on the same theme.

It does not matter for single-market stores. Shopify Markets on Advanced handles a lot of “sell overseas from one storefront” cases. Expansion stores are the answer when you need separate operations, not when you need a modest export lane.

Shopify Functions limits raised significantly

Plus raises the ceiling on Shopify Functions — custom logic that runs in Shopify’s managed runtime for discounts, shipping, payments, and cart validation. Advanced gives you a small allocation; Plus gives you room for serious promotional and fulfilment logic.

It matters when your merchandising team invents rules that break native discounts, when shipping has to vary by SKU combinations, or when you need validation that cannot live in theme JavaScript.

It does not matter when your promotions are straightforward. For many stores, the Advanced allowance is plenty — buying Plus for “future flexibility” you never use is an expensive insurance policy.

Dedicated support that responds

Plus pairs you with a Merchant Success Manager — a named contact who knows your account — and routes technical issues into faster queues than the standard plan ticket pool.

That matters when downtime or checkout incidents have a direct revenue line. Roughly speaking, a four-hour outage on a store doing half a million a month is not “annoying IT”; it is a measurable hit. Faster triage can pay for itself quickly in those scenarios.

It matters less when incidents are rare and cheap. If your worst day is a minor theme glitch, Advanced support is usually fine — just slower when things go wrong.

Unlimited staff accounts

Plus removes Advanced’s fifteen-staff cap, adds finer permissions, SAML SSO, and audit logging — the sort of controls IT teams ask for before they let more people touch production.

It matters for agencies or in-house teams where twenty-plus people legitimately need admin access, or where compliance asks for SSO and an audit trail.

It does not matter for small teams. If you are not brushing against the staff limit, this is not a reason to upgrade.

Plus is worth it when at least one of these capabilities changes how you run the business. If you are looking at Plus because “we feel like we should be on Plus”, that is not a reason — and the calculator above will probably tell you so. If you are looking at Plus because you have hit a real wall on Advanced, the numbers and the feature set start to line up.

For a longer narrative on plan economics and agency incentives, the Shopify Plus vs Advanced guide goes deeper — this page stays focused on what the calculator cannot quantify.

Working with me on a Plus migration

I have been building on Shopify since 2017 — Shopify Partner since then, Christchurch-based, and I still operate my own store at shop.jimny.co.nz so I am not theorising from a slide deck. The same person who answers your email is the person who works in your theme and checkout — no offshore handoff, no junior bench learning on your production store, and no commission structure that pays me more when you tick the Plus box.

When the calculator above says stay on Advanced, I say the same thing in conversation. I lose the migration project; you keep the thirty-odd thousand dollars a year. I would rather be useful on the next brief than be the person who talked you into a plan your volumes do not justify.

When Plus is the right answer — B2B is real, expansion stores are on the roadmap, checkout customisation is blocking revenue — I handle the engineering end to end: theme audit, checkout migration, Scripts-to-Functions rewrites, app rationalisation, expansion store setup, and B2B configuration. Work happens in NZ business hours with fixed-scope quotes so you know what you are buying.

The first call is about fit, not a sales funnel. If Plus is wrong for your stage, we stop there. If it is right, what follows is migration work — not a billing toggle dressed up as strategy.