Shopify Plus offers a fully hosted SaaS solution built to handle any level of volume allowing high-volume merchants to focus on their business, not their IT. Shopify Plus is built on the same infrastructure that supports over 350,000 Shopify merchants, ensuring that flash sales, Black Friday, or heavy daily volume can be handled with ease.

Existing clients are encountering flash sale peaks in the thousands of concurrent checkouts. Offloading concerns around scalability and performance allows you to focus time on energy on value-added pursuits such as marketing and user experience.

Both Magento Enterprise and Community have many examples of clients that operate at super high scale. In fact, Magento 2.0 is designed with scalability in mind but this scalability comes at a cost. On-premise deployments require that you architect your solution to accommodate the single highest peak in traffic. This means building out and managing an infrastructure that you may actually only use for a single day every year. Any time you roll out a change to production you risk impacting the scalability of the overall architecture.

Strong brands require a relationship built on trust. Clients must feel safe and secure when transacting with your brand. For this reason, security is fundamental to ecommerce. PCI Compliance is our industry’s way of verifying security standards for organizations that handle any online payments. PCI Compliance goes well beyond the software itself; it creates dependencies on how the software is managed, deployed and hosted.

While Magento provides the ability to deploy PCI Compliant storefronts, you as the vendor are responsible for ensuring that your site is safe and secure. Ensuring PCI Compliance is costly and time consuming. Since the burden of securing the data on the server is entirely yours, it creates headaches that distract you from your business.

As an open source solution, Magento is also prone to malware. Security breaches to the software itself are a regular concern. Magento is forced to play defense and regularly releases security patches throughout the year. As an example, over 10,000 Magento sites were victim to the Guruncsite malware in 2015. Google was forced to blacklist over 8,000 storefronts in the first 90 days of the breach alone. Magento has been responsive by releasing security patches when threats are identified —10 of which have been released since January 2015. However, every security patch takes time and resources to deploy and test.

Shopify Plus is the most cost-effective platform for ensuring security. With Shopify Plus, your site will be hosted and protected as Shopify is Level 1 PCI DSS compliant. Shopify Plus also takes care of various compliance assessments and risk management, making sure your site is secure, without the need for you to manage a regular assessment of your site.

Shopify Plus provides a free site-wide SSL certificate to all clients. Most ecommerce websites use SSL encryption technology to protect a shopper’s personal information during the checkout process, but Shopify covers the entire shopping experience. Once your certificate is activated, all traffic will be redirected from HTTP to encrypted HTTPS.

Hosting and managed services are specialized competencies that require a great deal of care and attention. As a licensed, on-premise solution, Magento does not include either hosting or managed services with its licensing. Magento clients are required to pay a reliable hosting provider to host an architecture that can accommodate peak traffic. Beyond the additional cost, the focus on "keeping the lights on” can take your eye off your core business.

Magento also requires installation, setup and configuration. This is challenging across a distributed architecture. A significant portion of every Magento deployment is dedicated to ensuring performance and scalability rather than focusing on your core requirements.

Shopify Plus clients benefit from Shopify’s massive architecture. Shopify Plus gives high growth, high volume merchants the scalability, reliability, and flexibility they need, without all the hassles, long timelines, and expense of an on-premise solution. Many Shopify Plus clients are coming to the platform just accommodate the massive loads associated with flash sales. These flash sales often see thousands of concurrent checkouts at peak. Migrating to Shopify Plus means never having to worry about infrastructure, hosting, networking or load testing ever again.

Save tens of thousands of dollars every year by switching to Plus. Minimize your overall infrastructure cost with the ability to scale up and down based on your growth. Improving your websites performance by switching to Plus, will help you save on ongoing developer costs, hosting, maintenance and so much more.

Shopify Plus removes the need for upgrades, patches and point releases. The platform is designed to allow retailers to consume new features as they become available. Retailers can choose to consume new capabilities via the Shopify Admin as they become live. This saves the retailer from distracting software deployments and saves the time and money associated with upgrades and patches.

It’s become increasingly more important to go to your customers and early adopters, instead of waiting for them to come to you. As a result, Shopify has deployed a suite of capabilities to ensure that we can enable ecommerce on any 3rd party marketing site, blog, social network or marketplace.

Shopify’s Sales Channel SDK allows you to add commerce to any mobile app, marketplace, or website. You can connect your users to millions of products right where they are. Shopify handles the hard parts — like payments, shipping, taxes, inventory, analytics, and more.

Shopify customers can also deploy commerce capabilities to Facebook and Pinterest immediately after starting their store — entirely from within Shopify. Other 3rd party integrations include popular marketplaces like Amazon, houzz, Ebates and Wanelo.

Shopify’s Buy Button strategy allows retailers to add ecommerce to any website using only a snippet of code. Embedded products, collections, and even an on-site shopping cart can be added in only a couple of minutes. The JavaScript Buy SDK is a lightweight library that allows you to to retrieve products and collections from your shop, add products to a cart, and checkout.

Shopify Plus recently announced scripting capabilities, which frees up developers to write their own customizations. Shopify Scripts allows developers to ‘enter’ Shopify’s servers and create their own customizations to the shopping cart.

By utilizing custom scripts, you can greatly reduce the time and costs associated with building shopping cart customizations. Scripts give you advanced custom functionality without compromising flexibility or maintainability.

Shopify Plus also enables developers to build their own platform customizations in the form of private apps, which can be developed using the client’s preferred development language. An Embedded App SDK allows individual clients extensions to appear directly in the Shopify Admin.

Magento is an open source platform, and clients can access and modify all of Magento’s core modules. This provides endless freedom when designing and customizing your website, but building out customizations in Magento can be challenging without a standard of code. You can hire a developer to build a customization for you, but since you are running everything on your own server, you are on your own to manage, support, and scale any extensions or customizations. You also need to worry about how future customizations and upgrades will impact the existing code base. This can create risk puts greater dependencies on QA and load testing.