How Home Brands Can Use Shopify Plus to Launch & Scale

As a Shopify Plus agency partner, we aim to help every merchant get the most out of Shopify’s robust features. This powerful e-commerce platform can be leveraged to launch online stores in a fraction of the time compared to traditional enterprise solutions. Recently, we helped home goods brand Simmons Serta Bedding launch their first DTC website on Shopify Plus, which involved a custom ERP integration. Home goods brands that wholesale but are looking to expand into the DTC space are especially well-suited to benefit from Shopify Plus’ powerful enterprise e-commerce features.

Whether you’re a high-growth brand looking to scale your business or an enterprise company looking to go DTC, Shopify Plus can be a powerful e-commerce solution that meets your business needs.

Why Shopify Plus?

An online store that functions simply as an add-on to a suite of web tools isn’t comprehensive enough to provide a fully-featured customer experience. Shopify Plus lets you oversee the customer journey from start to finish, giving you extraordinary control over how customers interact with your brand.

Superb Checkout Design

Abandoned carts are a major problem for merchants offering big-ticket items. Shopify Plus provides several solutions:

• Comprehensive admin features let you review incomplete orders and send emails to customers with abandoned carts.
• Dynamic checkouts allow customers to buy directly from the product page with an accelerated one-tap system.
• Shopify Payments offers higher credit card authorization rates than other payment options.
• Pairing Shopify Payments with Shop Pay can increase conversion rates by up to 18%.

Shopify Plus also lets you customize the style of your checkout page with various aesthetic options and form fields, such as sign-up boxes for email newsletters. These e-commerce development solutions not only build your immediate sales, but also keep your customers engaged, encouraging repeat transactions and building long-term loyalty.

Full Integrations

A Shopify Plus agency partner can help you incorporate all the tools and systems your business currently relies on, including:

• Content management system (CMS)
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
• Product information management
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Warehouse management system (WMS)
• Integrated management system (IMS)

You can extend these integrations beyond your website, getting products in front of customers anywhere you connect with them — at brick-and-mortar locations, kiosks, smart mirrors, mobile devices, or even home show events.

Global Commerce Capabilities

Shopify Plus works with over a hundred global payment partners and an international fulfillment network to provide robust cross-border e-commerce solutions for your business. The platform lets you:

• Sell in multiple currencies from your primary store
• Target key markets with localized content in expansion stores
• Translate the content of your online store to multiple languages
• Learn about your target market and trends using global analytics and insights tools

The Avex team is experienced in working with Shopify Plus’ international sales management features. We even developed an ebook to help merchants get the most out of Shopify’s global commerce functions.

Reliable Servers

Slow servers mean lost sales. In fact, 79% of customers who feel dissatisfied with a website’s performance are less likely to buy from that site again. On the other hand, every 1-second improvement in your page load time correlates to a 2% increase in conversions.

Shopify Plus provides 99.99% average uptime and accelerated e-commerce site performance to keep your sales flowing and your brand looking professional. The platform is built to handle high traffic volume and promote online conversions by:

• Offering unlimited bandwidth, which keeps your website running smoothly
• Supporting four million hits per second, making downtime a non-issue even if your product or promotion is wildly popular
• Accelerating server-side performance by up to five times normal speeds using their Storefront Renderer infrastructure upgrade
• Processing over 10,000 peak orders every minute

Wholesale Capability for Home Brands

Your B2B customers expect the same feature-rich experience as consumers. Shopify Plus helps you deliver, providing an automated process that lets your customers purchase, track, and reorder easily. The platform simplifies how you track purchase orders and invoicing, and it also ensures easy customization of price lists and discounts.

Do you sell home goods to both wholesale and retail? Shopify lets you sync your B2B and DTC inventory, orders, and customers.

Comprehensive Support

Every Shopify Plus merchant is assigned to a success manager to guide them through their launch. Your success manager will:

• Help you learn your way around the platform
• Offer monthly updates on new features
• Answer any questions you have

Powerful Discounting Functions

A survey from RetailMeNot found that two-thirds of customers have made purchases they didn’t originally intend to make solely because of discounts or coupons. The same survey revealed that about 80% of consumers feel encouraged to make a first-time purchase with a new brand if they find a discount.

Shopify Plus takes full advantage of discounts by letting you set up:

• Product bundles
• Tiered pricing
• BOGO sales
• Free shipping
• Percentage or volume-based discounts
• Gifts with purchase

Robust Apps for Expansion

More than 1,100 developers have partnered with Shopify Plus to offer integrated apps with every function you might need, including:

• Inventory management
• Accounting
• Marketing
• Customer service
• Special offers
• Discounts
• Wholesale customers

Shopify’s team verifies each app to ensure your data stays safe and secure. A built-in star review system lets you learn about other businesses’ experiences with any particular app. High API limits allow you to incorporate multiple apps and set up connections in real time.

Mobile Functionality

More than 40% of online transactions now take place on mobile devices. To gain visibility and rank well on search engine results pages, your website must be optimized and responsive across all devices. Shopify Plus has a built-in checkout that guarantees safe and secure shopping on any device your customers choose. Mobile apps also allow you to manage your store on the go.

Seamless Data Migrations

Your Shopify Plus agency can safely migrate all your data into your new system, set up 301 redirects, and avoid any downtime or data loss for your site. Experienced developers can migrate your customers, inventory, and order history from Magento, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, as well as custom platforms.

Using Shopify Plus for Home Brands

Shopify Plus is the platform of choice for home brands like Simmons, Leesa, Brooklinen, Boll & Branch, Magnolia, and Leon’s. It has helped numerous brands like these get to market faster while keeping costs down — Just ask David Wolfe, the founder of Leesa Sleep, LLC.

Leesa sells luxury mattresses designed to fit in suitcase-sized boxes for shipping, which expand when unrolled. Wolfe was working on a custom e-commerce site, but he scrapped the project just before Leesa launched and decided to use Shopify Plus instead. He credits that decision with saving the company:

“Without Shopify, we would’ve run out of money before launching. Instead of selling mattresses, we would have been fixing bugs, but Shopify fixed the bugs for us.”

Leesa had $800,000 in sales in its first month using Shopify Plus and hit $30 million during its first year.

Even enterprise brands like Simmons choose to launch their online stores on Shopify Plus to take advantage of its streamlined backend systems and ease of use. Shopify Plus offers a scalable solution that works for high-volume brands like Simmons and new launches like Leesa.

Shopify Plus allowed us to take Simmons live within four months — a far more rapid go-to-market than that of other enterprise platforms.

Big-Ticket Purchases

Today’s customers expect flexible financing options from merchants, especially when they spend a lot of money.

Accepting credit cards isn’t sufficient. In a recent FuturePay poll:

• Three out of every four respondents said it was important to them that online retailers provide payment alternatives beyond credit cards.
• 15% of respondents had decided against buying a big-ticket item online because there weren’t any suitable financing options available.
• More than half of respondents said that if they were spending over $1,000, they would prefer to finance their purchase online.

Shopify Plus lets you meet customers’ needs with versatile payment plans through integrations like Affirm, AfterPay, or Klarna.

Multiple Online Channels

An omnichannel approach can make the shopping experience smoother while expanding opportunities to sell. In order to combine distribution, promotion, and communication efforts, your Shopify Plus agency can integrate multiple marketing channels, including:

• Amazon
• Facebook
• eBay
• Industry outlets like Houzz and Buzzfeed

You can even feature items on a shoppable Instagram feed.

With Shopify Plus, your inventory, suppliers, and fulfillment locations work together seamlessly across all sales channels — online and off.

Offline Sales

Shopify Plus’s point of sale (POS) and retail hardware systems can power pop-up shops, brick-and-mortar locations, and product drops with a unified customer experience. Inventory, products, and customer data sync across all of your merchandising so that you can personalize your marketing efforts and maintain a seamless brand presence.

Business Automation

Your Shopify Plus agency can help you automate your business workflows, saving your company time and money.

Shopify’s automation systems help you more efficiently manage customer rewards, merchandising, fraud-prevention, and more. You’ll also have the flexibility to experiment with marketing campaigns and strategies to increase your sales and customer engagement.

Use Shopify Plus business automation functions to:

• Tag and segment your customers by buying behavior. Manage your lists, make more sales, and build stronger relationships with personalized outreach.
• Track loyalty rewards. Turn your customers into superfans and encourage repeat business.
• Automate inventory management. Fully integrate your selling platform with your inventory system to better track and manage your items.
• Standardize merchandising and product organization. Manage your product lines in creative ways that help your customers find exactly what they’re shopping for.
• Track and reward customers based on lifetime spend. Leverage data to make sure you’re using your resources to impress your most valuable lifetime customers.
• Flag high-risk orders for review. Reduce your exposure to fraud, hackers, and other dangers by setting up automatic flags and rejections.
• Plan events. Automatically coordinate flash sales, product drops, and inventory restocks.
• Schedule promotions. Release cross-channel sales and promotions simultaneously.
• Automate discounts. Mark down your products and collections according to criteria you set, such as inventory volume.
• Add in-cart incentives. Enhance your shopping cart with BOGO promotions and tiered discounts that drive sales.
• Customize for the customer. Personalize every stage of the buyer’s journey to reduce checkout friction.
• Tailor your options. Offer shipping and payment choices that exactly match your customers’ needs.

Add a Direct-to-Consumer System

If your brand currently sells B2B or wholesale only, a Shopify Plus agency can help you bring a DTC e-commerce website online quickly. You’ll be able to:

• Integrate your current third-party logistics (3PL) provider and inventory management systems for a fast launch
• Sync your orders and inventory across both sets of customers so your DTC launch won’t disrupt your wholesale business
• Provide outstanding customer experience with robust and reliable customer support features
• Gather data about your customers and market directly to them

Tips for Migrating Your Home Brand to Shopify Plus

Migrating to Shopify Plus lets you rethink your merchandising and add new features to your online store. Here are some tips for optimizing Shopify Plus for home brands.

Offer Creative Navigation

Give customers more ways to shop. Make navigating your space fun for them. For instance, organize your products by room and item type to help shoppers think of brilliant ideas for their spaces.

Use Robust Filters

Customers often search for something very specific — like a “banana-yellow cotton oval 5x8 rug for under $200.” Simplify the search process by filtering your collections based on what people look for:

• Color
• Material
• Size
• Price

Cross-Sell

Inviting customers to complete their purchases with complementary items is helpful for them and for you. You get higher AOV and they get things they didn’t know they needed — without paying for extra shipping.

When customers search for dining room tables, for example, make sure your website recommends matching dining room chairs before they check out. A search for couches should trigger recommendations for rugs and coffee tables, and so on.

Upsell

Show customers higher-end products similar to the ones they’re browsing. Customers are often happier in the long run if they choose to upgrade to the highest quality they can afford.

If a customer is looking at a low-end mid-century modern sofa, you could show them some similar mid-range options that might entice them. If the customer is shopping for mid-range bedroom sets, your system could show them what an upgrade to the luxury line looks like.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

As a Shopify Plus Partner, Avex has helped build and optimize beautiful e-commerce websites for high-growth brands like Simmons, Zuri Furniture, KITH, O’Neill, Wolf & Shepherd, Ports V, Badgley Mischka, Marchesa, and many more. We’d love to help you brainstorm and grow your business using this powerful platform.

Contact us today for a free consultation.