I’ve been working with Shopify Plus a lot over the last ~2 years, working on a wide range of replatforming projects for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Some of the bigger projects I’ve worked on include Bulletproof, Trotters, The Science Museum and Current Body – all of which are in a bracket where Magento Commerce or Salesforce Commerce Cloud could be considered more appropriate (for different reasons). We’ve also gone through scoping phases with Shopify Plus (architecting solutions etc) for a lot of other large, complex retailers who have ended up moving to a different platform – which has also helped us to learn about common limitations.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with a client and a couple of people from WeMakeWebsites (their development agency) to find (and validate) a solution to a requirement for advanced forms.

Over the last couple of years we’ve been working with Shopify Plus a lot – be it via functional discovery, hands-on replatforming support or project managing builds. One of the biggest things that needs to be ‘discovered’ with Shopify is the architecture of product data, particularly when you’re migrating from a platform like Magento or Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which have very different ways of managing attributes and fields.

Over the last 12-18 months, the demand for SaaS-based eCommerce platforms has sky-rocketed, with benefits in scale, cost-of-ownership, reduced platform maintenance & management overheads being some of the biggest drivers. Platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud have been a prominent SaaS option in the mid-market for a number of years, but in more recent times they’ve been challenged by the likes of BigCommerce and Shopify Plus. This article is focused on Shopify Plus and BigCommerce, which have both seen considerable growth over the last 12 months, in different areas.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been working a lot more with Shopify Plus – with a host of B2C brands. One relatively weak area of Shopify Plus is content management, with the core offering comprising of a standard WYSIWYG editor (for editing content pages and blocks) and sections, which provides a bit more modularity, but it’s still not brilliant.

I get asked for examples of stores that have achieved a specific area of complexity with Shopify and Shopify Plus all the time – so I decided to write a blog post on the examples I tend to give (that I can update over time as the platform and retailers develop).