The Shopify Plus Platinum Partner for Europe’s leading fashion, lifestyle, and beauty brands.

Common questions

• What is Shopify Plus and who is it for?

  Shopify Plus is Shopify’s enterprise tier, unlocking technical capabilities the standard plans don’t include: customisable checkout (Checkout Extensibility and Functions), up to 10 stores under one Plus organisation, native B2B alongside DTC, and Plus-only tooling like Launchpad and the full Flow trigger set. Most of our clients are fashion, lifestyle, and beauty brands scaling internationally. They typically migrate when they hit one of three walls: payment-processing fees that compound at volume, checkout limitations they can’t engineer around, or operational complexity (multi-brand, multi-region, B2B) that the standard plans weren’t designed for. Shopify positions Plus from around €1M in annual revenue, but in our experience the platform investment really pays off above €3M. Below €2.5M with no custom requirements, you’re better served on Advanced.

• What’s the difference between Shopify and Shopify Plus?

  Shopify Plus is the enterprise tier of the same platform. The differences: a customisable checkout (standard Shopify’s is locked beyond branding), Plus-only tooling like Launchpad for scheduled launches and the full Shopify Flow trigger set, Shopify Functions for custom cart, discount, shipping, and checkout logic, up to 10 stores under one Plus organisation, dedicated Launch and Merchant Success managers, and a 99.99% uptime SLA. Pricing starts at $2,300/month (around €2,100) for Plus, versus roughly €33-380/month for standard Shopify (Basic, Grow, Advanced). You move to Plus when you’ve outgrown what standard Shopify can do, not because you’ve hit a revenue line. Most brands need it past €2.5M GMV, or once they’re doing multi-store, B2B, or custom checkout.

• How does Shopify Plus compare to Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

  Shopify Plus moves faster, costs less, and is easier to staff. Salesforce Commerce Cloud (formerly Demandware) has more flexibility for complex B2B catalogue logic and integrates with the rest of the Salesforce stack (Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, Agentforce). For most fashion, lifestyle, and beauty brands that depth isn’t needed, and you pay for it twice: in licensing (GMV-based, typically 1-3% of revenue) and in developer hours per change. Plus’s checkout is faster and converts well, the app ecosystem is roughly twice the size of Salesforce AppExchange, and you ship features in days, not quarters. Where Salesforce still has an advantage: enterprises above $500M GMV with complex multi-region B2B (RFQ workflows, multi-level approval, deep contract pricing), or shops where multiple Salesforce clouds already form the system of record. Most migrations from Salesforce to Plus are driven by TCO and velocity, not by needing more enterprise depth.

• Should I migrate from Shopware to Shopify?

  For most fashion, lifestyle, and beauty brands, yes. Shopware demands more dev hours per change (open-source means you own updates, patches, and plugin compatibility), the extension marketplace is a fraction of Shopify’s app store, and the architecture drags once you sell internationally because multi-region setup is manual rather than turnkey. Shopify Plus ships features faster, the partner network is larger, and the checkout converts better (Shopify’s commissioned research shows up to 36% better than competing platforms). Where Shopware still has an advantage: heavy B2B catalogue logic (10,000+ customer-specific price lists, approval workflows), GDPR-native data sovereignty, and the German Mittelstand market with its SAP / DATEV integrations. The honest answer depends on what you’re optimising for, but for unified commerce consumer good brands, most stop fighting Shopware once they cost out three years of dev time and infrastructure.

• Magento vs Shopify Plus: when is the migration worth it?

  When developer hours start eating the budget. Magento (rebranded by Adobe as Adobe Commerce in 2018, with the free Magento Open Source still alongside) demands a developer for nearly every change, carries operational and infrastructure overhead, and the upgrade cycles are notoriously painful. Adobe Commerce licences start around $22K/year (On-Premise) or $40K/year (on Cloud) and scale with GMV, before you’ve paid for hosting, devs, or extensions. Shopify Plus hosts everything for you, ships features faster, and Shopify’s commissioned research shows a 29% better TCO and significantly higher checkout conversion on average. Where Magento still wins: extremely complex B2B catalogue logic, approval workflows, large multi-store / multi-brand operations with shared catalogue logic, or enterprises that need on-prem control for compliance or data sovereignty reasons. Most Magento-to-Shopify migrations are TCO and velocity plays: brands costing out three years of developer hours, infrastructure, and licence creep, and choosing to spend that money on growth instead.

• What is Shopify Hydrogen and when should I build with it?

  Hydrogen is Shopify's official React based framework for building headless storefronts, deployed on Oxygen, Shopify's global edge hosting network. It gives you sub-100ms load times through server side rendering, React Server Components, and Incremental Static Regeneration, running on a CDN with global edge nodes close to your customers.The cases where it makes sense: you need a real interactive layer that Liquid can't carry (complex product configurators, app like UX, real time personalisation), you're running a composable architecture where Shopify sits alongside an external CMS like Sanity or Contentful, or you need headless commerce architecture for a multi storefront or multi region setup. The honest trade off is cost and complexity. A production grade Hydrogen storefront starts at €200k and requires ongoing engineering to stay current with Shopify platform releases that Liquid stores absorb for free. We build Hydrogen storefronts regularly, but we recommend custom Liquid first unless the brief genuinely requires it.

• What does a zero downtime Shopify migration actually mean?

  It means your current store stays fully live, taking orders and serving customers, while the new Shopify Plus build runs in parallel. There's no maintenance window, no revenue gap, no "we'll be back shortly" message. At Ask Phill, zero downtime migration is our standard method for every replatform, whether it's a no code migration or a full enterprise replatform with ERP integration and custom headless storefronts.In practice it means careful DNS cutover timing, data sync between old and new platforms in the final hours, SEO preservation (redirects, metadata, canonical structure all verified before go live), and a rollback plan that's never been needed but always ready. We've run 200+ migrations this way. The risk isn't the cutover. It's the work done before it.

• How long does a Shopify Plus migration take?

  Two to three months for a no-code migration. Three to six for a custom build with our Ask Phill Accelerator (APA) for a custom designed theme. Five to ten for full enterprise replatforms with deep integrations or multi-store. The variance isn’t effort, it’s scope. We scope honestly in discovery so the timeline isn’t a surprise.

• What does a Shopify Plus migration cost?

  €20-60k for no-code or theme migrations. €50-200k for standard mid-market custom theme builds. €200k+ for custom enterprise work with headless, multi-store, or deep integrations. Pricing follows scope, not hours. Projects are typically built up from strategy and consultancy, design, front-end development of the theme, and where applicable, back-end integrations and data migrations. Not every project includes all of these.

• What's the difference between a React based headless storefront and a custom Liquid theme?

  A custom Liquid theme runs inside Shopify's native rendering engine. Fast to build, easier to maintain, and every new Shopify feature lands automatically. A React based headless storefront decouples the front end entirely: your storefront is built in React (using Hydrogen, Shopify's official React based framework, or Next.js for more editorial or composable setups), communicates with Shopify via the Storefront API, and is deployed on a separate hosting layer like Oxygen or Vercel.The performance ceiling is higher with headless. React Server Components, Incremental Static Regeneration, and global edge hosting on Oxygen can deliver sub-100ms load times and sub second page loads at scale. But the build cost is 3 to 5x higher, the maintenance burden is yours, and you give up the plug and play benefit of Shopify's native ecosystem. Our default recommendation is a custom Liquid theme unless your UX, composable architecture, or real time personalisation requirements genuinely can't be met within Liquid's constraints.

• How is Ask Phill different from other Shopify Plus agencies?

  We’re a Shopify Platinum Partner, the top tier of Shopify’s global partner program. Ten years on Shopify, since before Shopify was cool, with 200+ migrations behind us. We’ve made every mistake possible over the past decade, so you don’t have to. We focus on fashion, lifestyle, and beauty because depth in a vertical compounds. Our team is AI-native: we use it daily across discovery, design, code, and content, which keeps timelines lean and deliverables sharp. We bring developers into discovery early, so design and architecture don’t fight each other later. And we’ll tell you when you don’t need us: when Shopify alone is enough, or when a smaller agency is the right fit.

• How do you protect SEO rankings during a Shopify Plus migration?

  SEO preservation is one of the highest risk parts of any replatform and one of the most overlooked. Our migration process includes a full pre migration SEO audit: crawl of your current URL structure, redirect mapping for every changed URL, metadata migration (titles, descriptions, canonical tags), structured data preservation, and Core Web Vitals benchmarking on the new build before go live. We test redirects in staging, verify them post launch, and monitor organic traffic in the weeks after cutover. For brands with significant organic traffic, we sequence the launch to avoid releasing during high traffic periods. We've moved 200+ brands without a material SEO loss, because it's built into the process, not bolted on at the end.