If your store is past $500K a year and the upgrade question keeps coming up, the gap between Shopify Advanced and Shopify Plus is wide on price and narrower on features than most comparisons say. Several things that used to be Plus-only, including Shopify Flow, B2B and custom reports, now ship on every plan. What is left on the Plus side is real, but it is specific: checkout control, custom Functions, expansion stores, scale limits and support.
We rewrote this comparison in October 2026 and checked every number against Shopify’s pricing page, Plus pricing page and Help Center on 6 October 2026. Where Shopify publishes rates that differ by country, we say so.
Key takeaways
- Advanced is $299 a month billed yearly, or $399 billed monthly. Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a three-year term or $2,500 on a one-year term, and Shopify also offers a variable platform fee for more complex businesses.
- Shopify Flow, B2B with up to three catalogs, and custom reports are all on Advanced. None of them is a reason to upgrade on its own.
- Plus-only: full checkout customisation, custom apps built with Shopify Functions, up to nine expansion stores, Launchpad, unlimited staff, 200 inventory locations, 25 headless storefronts and up to 10x API limits on select APIs.
- For a single-store, single-market brand, Advanced is usually the right plan until one Plus feature has a revenue case worth more than the price gap.
Shopify Advanced vs Shopify Plus: comparison table (2026)
| Feature | Shopify Advanced | Shopify Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $299 a month billed yearly, $399 monthly | From $2,300 a month (3-year term) or $2,500 (1-year term) |
| Third-party gateway fee (US) | 0.6% | 0.2% |
| Staff accounts | 15 | Unlimited, with custom user groups |
| Inventory locations | 10 | 200 |
| Expansion stores | None (each store is a separate plan) | Up to 9 included |
| Checkout customisation | Limited: branding in the checkout editor and app blocks on the Thank you and Order status pages | Full: every checkout step, plus separate B2B and DTC checkout flows |
| Shopify Functions | Through public apps from the App Store | Public apps and your own custom apps |
| Shopify Scripts | Retired for every plan: Scripts stopped running on 30 June 2026 | |
| Shopify Flow | Yes | Yes, plus tasks from custom partner apps |
| B2B | Up to 3 catalogs | Unlimited catalogs, catalogs per company location, deposits, partial payments, payment requests per fulfilment |
| Launchpad (scheduled sales and promotions) | No | Yes |
| API rate limits | Up to 2x on select APIs | Up to 10x on select APIs |
| Headless storefronts | 1 | 25 |
| POS Pro | $89 a month per location | First 20 locations included |
| Reports | Full library, custom reports, predicted values | The same, plus organisation analytics and ShopifyQL Notebooks |
| Selling by market | Theme, checkout and customer account pages tailored per market | The same, plus Managed Markets |
| Support | Enhanced 24/7 live chat | Priority support |
Transaction fees apply only to orders paid through a third-party gateway; with Shopify Payments they are waived. Card processing rates fall as you move up the plans and are lowest on Plus, but Shopify publishes them per country, so check the pricing page for yours.
What is no longer a reason to upgrade
A lot of Plus vs Advanced advice still online describes the platform as it was in 2022. Four of its standard arguments no longer hold:
- Shopify Flow. Flow is a free app on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. The send HTTP request action works from Grow upwards; only tasks from custom partner apps are Plus-only.
- B2B. Every plan can sell B2B with up to three catalogs. Plus is for wholesale programmes that need more catalogs, per-location pricing or deposit and partial-payment terms; our B2B apps guide covers what the lower plans can add.
- Reports. The report library, custom reports and attribution models are the same on every plan. The differences are staff access, predicted values and multi-store reporting, set out in Shopify reports by plan.
- Legacy checkout access. checkout.liquid and Shopify Scripts are gone for everyone, Plus included. Custom checkout logic now runs on checkout extensions and Shopify Functions on every plan that is allowed to use them.
The 12 differences that decide it
1. Price and contract
On yearly billing the gap is $2,001 a month, a little over $24,000 a year. Plus is sold on one- or three-year terms, and you can cancel when the term ends rather than at any time. Shopify also offers a variable platform fee instead of the fixed price for more complex business structures; ask for both quotes before you sign.
2. Checkout customisation
On Advanced you can brand the checkout in the checkout editor and add app blocks to the Thank you and Order status pages. On Plus you can customise every step of the checkout, including the information, shipping and payment steps, and run different checkout flows for B2B and DTC buyers. This is where Plus most often pays for itself: upsells in checkout, delivery-date pickers, custom fields for gifting or B2B purchase orders, and payment and shipping rules that depend on the cart. With average documented cart abandonment at roughly 70% in Baymard Institute’s long-running benchmark, a measured checkout improvement on a store doing several million a year can cover the price gap by itself.
3. Custom Shopify Functions
Functions replaced Scripts as the way to change discount, shipping and payment logic. Every plan can install public apps that use Functions. Only Plus can deploy its own custom app with Functions, which is the route when the logic you need is specific to your business and no app sells it: tiered B2B pricing, bundle rules with exclusions, shipping rules by product attribute.
4. Expansion stores
Plus includes up to nine expansion stores for other regions, brands or a separate wholesale store, all managed from one organisation. On Advanced every extra store is a separate subscription. Before counting stores, check whether Shopify Markets would do the job from one store; for many brands selling into a few countries it does.
5. B2B depth
Advanced covers simple wholesale: up to three catalogs. Plus adds unlimited catalogs, catalogs assigned directly to companies and their locations, deposits, partial payments and payment requests per fulfilment. If your wholesale customers negotiate their own price lists, Plus is usually where B2B stops needing workarounds. See our B2B commerce service for how we set it up.
6. Launchpad
Launchpad schedules sales, product releases and promotions to start and end automatically. On Advanced the same launch is either an app or someone in the admin at midnight. It matters most for brands that run frequent drops or a heavy BFCM calendar.
7. Staff accounts and permissions
Advanced allows 15 staff accounts; Plus is unlimited and adds custom user groups, so permissions can follow roles instead of being set person by person. Agencies and freelancers can be added as collaborators on both plans without using a staff seat.
8. API limits
Shopify lists Advanced at up to 2x the standard rate limits on select APIs and Plus at up to 10x. You feel this with an ERP, PIM or 3PL syncing a large catalogue or high order volume in near-real time. A store that syncs nightly rarely hits the standard limits.
9. Locations and retail
Advanced allows 10 inventory locations and Plus 200. POS Pro costs $89 a month per location on Advanced; Plus includes the first 20 locations. A retailer with ten shops pays $890 a month for POS Pro on Advanced, which closes almost half of the price gap before any other feature is counted.
10. Headless storefronts
Every plan includes one headless storefront; Plus includes 25. If you are building on Hydrogen or another custom front end with several storefronts, for regions, brands or a B2B portal, this limit matters. Our headless development page covers when headless is worth it at all.
11. Reporting
Both plans get the full report library, custom reports and predicted values. Plus adds organisation analytics across stores and the ShopifyQL Notebooks app. For a single store the reporting difference is close to nothing.
12. Support
Advanced comes with enhanced 24/7 live chat; Plus with priority support. During a launch or a payment problem on a sale day, the speed of that line is the difference you notice.
Is Advanced worth it over Grow?
Grow is $49 a month billed yearly, Advanced $299. Advanced earns the difference when at least one of these is true:
- You need more than five staff accounts.
- You ship heavy or irregular products and need live third-party carrier rates at checkout.
- You sell into several markets and want the theme, checkout and customer account pages tailored to each.
- You use a third-party payment gateway at volume: the fee drops from 1% on Grow to 0.6% on Advanced in the US.
- Your integrations need more API headroom.
If none of those applies, stay on Grow and spend the difference on the store.
Where the costs cross
On yearly billing Plus costs about $24,000 a year more than Advanced. If you take payment through a third-party gateway, the fee falls from 0.6% to 0.2%, a 0.4% saving that covers $24,000 at around $6 million a year processed through that gateway. On Shopify Payments the third-party fee does not apply at all, and the saving comes from lower card rates, which vary by country. So fees alone rarely justify Plus below several million in revenue. The features do: checkout, custom Functions, B2B depth, multiple stores, retail locations.
Our rule of thumb
Stay on Advanced if you run one store, sell mainly into one market, have no checkout logic that apps cannot cover, and your team fits in 15 accounts.
Move to Plus when one of these has a number attached that beats about $24,000 a year:
- A checkout change you have measured or can model.
- B2B that needs more than three catalogs, per-location pricing, deposits or partial payments.
- A second store you would otherwise pay for separately.
- Six or more retail locations on POS Pro.
- Integrations that already hit API limits.
If you expect to need Plus within about six months, upgrade once rather than building workarounds you will remove later.
What upgrading involves
Moving from Advanced to Plus is a plan change on the same store: products, orders, customers and your theme stay where they are. The work comes after the contract: replacing workarounds with Plus features, building checkout extensions, moving custom logic into Functions, and setting up expansion stores or B2B catalogs if you need them. Our Shopify Plus development team does that work, and our Plus packages show what a fixed-scope build costs.
Sources: Shopify pricing, Shopify Plus pricing, the Help Center pages for the Advanced and Plus plans and Shopify Flow, and Shopify’s developer changelog on the Scripts retirement, checked 6 October 2026. Plans, limits and fees change; confirm them for your country before you decide.
