A Developer's Pitch on Upgrading to Shopify Plus: Apps
Wednesday, May 24, 2017Lauren Macdonald
This week, we bring you Part 2 in our 3-part series, where we look at Shopify Apps and explore how being a Shopify Plus merchant will gain you access to a number of exclusive Apps that will empower your business.
Apps
Apps serve as the backbone for any Shopify merchant, adding out-of-the-box functionality and third-party integrations with minimal configuration required. As a Shopify Plus merchant, you'll gain access to a number of exclusive Apps, providing more power for your e-commerce brand. These apps include:
Shopify Scripts
The Script Editor app allows merchants to write certain 'logic' that is triggered when a customer adds an item to their cart. This can include rules around pricing, shipping and payments. For example, a script could be written to automatically discount a product price for a customer logged in with a certain customer tag or provide a discount on shipping rates once a certain minimum order size is hit. Scripts are written with a Ruby API that allows a great deal of control and flexibility, meaning logic can be built to meet a merchant's exact specification. Although there are a number of apps available in the Shopify app marketplace that add similar functionality to your store, using Shopify Scripts ensures the rules are handled exactly as you intend without the limitations that most apps have in their own execution.
Additional Resources
· Shopify Scripts API Documentation
· Shopify Scripts App Landing Page
Wholesale Sales Channel
Shopify has a number of 'Sales Channels' available for merchants where they can easily list their products on third-party marketplaces and social media platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon and many others. Recently, Shopify has released a Wholesale Sales Channel that's built specifically to help merchants offer a more customized approach to selling to their B2B customers. Once activated, the Wholesale Sales Channel will be accessible by an entirely separate, password-protected 'storefront'. The Wholesale Sales Channel provides an immense amount of control over products including pricing, order minimums, quantity increments and differing price levels for different customer groups. All orders created via the Wholesale Sales Channel are then added as 'Drafts' within Shopify to provide further customization and moderation by merchants prior to processing any payment, which can be done via a dedicated payment link sent to customers or via an offline method. Overall, the Wholesale Sales Channel provides a turnkey way for merchants to expand their wholesale business.
Additional Resources
· Wholesale Sales Channel App Landing Page
Launchpad
Launchpad aims to solve the issue of scheduling, coordinating and executing major marketing campaigns and sales events. Particularly helpful for merchants that run 'flash sales', Launchpad gives you the ability to add/remove products, update prices, change inventory levels and more, all in an automated, pre-scheduled manor. This helps bring a new level of sophistication to managing an e-commerce store and can take some of the burden off the shoulders of staff that might have to otherwise coordinate these events manually.
Additional Resources
· Launchpad App Landing Page
Bulk Account Inviter
Particularly useful for companies that are migrating to Shopify for the first time, Shopify offers a 'Bulk Account Inviter' app that allows merchants to send customer account invites independent of when those customers are imported into Shopify. This can be really helpful when trying to coordinate a migration and looking to review imported data before customers actually 'gain access' to the website. It can also be useful for merchants looking to sync up their customer acquisition efforts with creating actual customer accounts in Shopify.
Additional Resources
· Bulk Account Inviter App Landing Page
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