Migrate
Shopify to Shopify Plus: What Actually Changes
This is not a migration. It is an account upgrade on the same platform — no data moves, the theme stays, the URLs stay. What changes is a finite list of thresholds, and for a lot of stores it does not add up.
Upgrading from Shopify Advanced
What breaks
Nothing breaks, and that is the honest answer to the heading. Upgrading to Plus is a change to your account, not a replatform: the database is the same database, the theme is the same theme, the URLs are the same URLs, and the apps you have installed stay installed. There is no export, no import, no redirect map, no launch window and no data migration. If anyone has quoted you a migration project for this, they have mis-sold you the work.
What does require real work is a short list of three things. Checkout customisation through checkout UI extensions and the Branding API is extension development — Plus unlocks the ability to customise the information, shipping and payment steps, it does not perform the customisation. B2B build-out is a build: below Plus you are limited to three B2B catalogs, on Plus they are unlimited and can be assigned directly to companies, but the catalogues, the companies and the price lists are still work someone has to do. And expansion stores, of which one main store plus nine are included, are separate instances — Shopify’s own documentation states that store settings, products, collections and inventory are not synced between stores. Keeping nine of them aligned is permanent operational work, and it is the line most often missing from the business case.
Two things that used to belong on a page like this are finished, and it matters that nobody sells them to you as urgency. Shopify Scripts was deprecated on 30 June 2026: any Scripts still published on a store were deactivated and no longer run, and editing them stopped on 15 April 2026. checkout.liquid is fully retired — the 28 August 2025 deadline passed, and from January 2026 Shopify began automatically upgrading remaining stores with thirty days’ notice, losing legacy checkout page customisations in the process. Every store on Shopify today is already on checkout extensibility, whether it chose to be or not. A proposal telling you to move before the deadline is describing a world that no longer exists.
And the part worth saying before any of the rest: often it is not worth it. Plus does not start paying because a store has grown — it pays when a specific threshold binds. Staff, catalogue, location and storefront counts either exceed the lower plans’ ceilings or they do not. Third-party gateway volume is either large enough for the lower Plus fee to offset a much larger subscription, or it is not. Checkout requirements either need extensions on the information, shipping and payment steps, or they can be met by a public app on any plan. And if the real motivation is looking like an enterprise, that is a branding problem, and Plus is an expensive way to solve it. Our calculator at /tools/shopify-plus-vs-advanced/ frequently concludes that Plus does not pay for itself, and this page is not going to disagree with it.
Data model differences
The data model does not change, because there is no second system involved. Same products, same variants, same customers, same orders, same metafields, same IDs. Shopify’s catalogue limits are plan-independent: 3 options per product and 2,048 variants apply on Basic and on Plus alike. So nothing about the shape of your catalogue gets easier by upgrading, and if a catalogue constraint is what sent you looking at Plus, Plus is not the fix.
What changes is a finite list of limits and access. Staff accounts go from none beyond the base allowance on Basic, five on Grow and fifteen on Advanced, to unlimited. API rate limits go from standard — with Advanced up to twice that — to up to ten times on selected APIs. Checkout customisation goes from branding only to full UI extensions plus the Branding API. Custom apps using Shopify Functions become available. B2B catalogs go from a ceiling of three to unlimited, with direct company assignment. The account gets one main store plus nine expansion stores, up to 200 locations with POS Pro included on the first twenty, and up to 50 markets. And it gets a 99.99% uptime SLA, Level 1 PCI DSS and SOC 2.
Read that as a set of thresholds rather than a feature list. Each line is a number you are either past or not past, and being close to one is the same as not being past it. The third-party gateway fee is the exception: it is the only line that scales with revenue rather than sitting at a fixed threshold, which is precisely why the money question is answered by /tools/shopify-plus-vs-advanced/ with your own revenue, your own current bill and your own gateway share, rather than by a figure printed here that would be out of date by the time you read it.
URL structure changes
None. URLs do not change, because nothing moves. There is no redirect map, no crawl budget event, no ranking risk and no cutover date — which is worth stating explicitly, because it is the single largest cost and risk on every other page in this family and it is simply absent here.
The one URL-adjacent thing Plus does change is the ceiling on the URL redirects table: 100,000 on standard plans against 20,000,000 on Plus. That matters only if you are migrating a large catalogue into the store from somewhere else — which is a different project, and one of the other six pages here.
Questions
Questions we get asked
Is Shopify Plus worth it for us?
Usually that is a number rather than an opinion, and often the number says no. Work it out at /tools/shopify-plus-vs-advanced/ using your own annual revenue, your own current Advanced bill and — the variable most published answers ignore — the share of your revenue running through a third-party gateway rather than Shopify Payments. That share is what decides it, which is why published breakeven figures for this question differ by roughly six times. If the calculator says no, we are not going to talk you into it.
Do we need to move before the Scripts or checkout.liquid deadline?
Both deadlines have already passed. Shopify Scripts was deprecated on 30 June 2026 and any Scripts still published were deactivated; editing stopped that April. checkout.liquid is fully retired, and from January 2026 Shopify began automatically upgrading the stores that remained, with thirty days’ notice, losing legacy customisations. Your store is already on checkout extensibility. There is no deadline left to beat, and anyone using one as a reason to upgrade is working from an old deck.
Does anything move? Do we need a redirect plan?
No, to both. It is the same store on the same database with the same theme and the same URLs. No products are exported, no orders are re-imported, no handles change and no 301s are needed. The work that exists after an upgrade is new work you choose to do — checkout extensions, B2B, expansion stores — not recovery work created by the upgrade.
Will upgrading make our store faster or lift conversion?
Not by itself, no. Plus raises API rate limits on selected APIs and adds a 99.99% uptime SLA; it does not change your theme, your images, your app load, or how your checkout converts. Performance work and conversion work are the same work on either plan, and doing them on your current plan costs less. If someone has presented an upgrade as a performance project, ask which specific limit is currently being hit.
Nine expansion stores are included. Should we run our markets that way?
You can, and it is one of the better reasons to be on Plus — but understand what an expansion store is before you plan around it. Each one is a separate instance, and Shopify states plainly that store settings, products, collections and inventory are not synced between stores. Nine stores is nine catalogues to keep aligned, forever. That ongoing operational load is usually larger than the build that creates it, and it is the reason Markets is the right answer more often than the store count suggests.
Is there anything the calculator leaves out that would change the answer?
Yes, and it works against Plus in our numbers, so it is worth naming. Above a certain volume Shopify moves merchants onto a variable platform fee, and it publishes neither the rate nor the threshold; the figures circulating online are third-party guesses that disagree with each other. We leave it out rather than guess, which means any calculation you see — ours included — understates the cost of Plus at high volume. POS Pro beyond the first twenty locations is excluded for the same reason, and that one understates Plus’s value for multi-location retail. Both omissions are stated on the tool itself rather than buried.
Weighing up Plus?
Run the numbers first — our breakeven calculator is free, ungated, and often says no. If it says yes, tell us about your store and we’ll scope the work.