Research ·
How to Tell if a Store Is on Shopify Plus
There's no public badge for Shopify Plus. The signals that point to it, which ones you can trust, and why the honest answer is sometimes "we don't know".
You can't confirm a store is on Shopify Plus just by looking at it, because Shopify doesn't show the plan anywhere on the storefront. What you can do is look for features and setups that only Plus stores have, such as a checkout on the brand's own domain, several country storefronts on separate domains, or a wholesale channel. Two or three of those together make Plus very likely. None of them alone is proof, and for many stores the honest answer is "no signal either way".
What Shopify Plus is
Shopify Plus is Shopify's plan for larger merchants. It costs more than the standard plans and adds features aimed at brands with high volume, several markets or a B2B business: more staff accounts, more control over checkout, automation tools, expansion stores and wholesale. Because the plan is priced for bigger businesses, "is this store on Plus" is often a stand-in for "is this store big enough to be worth selling to".
Why there is no simple test
The plan is a billing arrangement between the merchant and Shopify. A Plus store and a store on a standard plan run the same storefront software, serve files from the same CDN and use the same themes. The differences show up in specific features, and a store can be on Plus without using any of the visible ones. The reverse also happens: some features that used to be Plus-only have become available on other plans over the years, which turns old rules of thumb into false positives.
The signals, from strongest to weakest
Expansion stores on separate domains
Plus includes extra stores, often used for separate countries (example-store.com, example-store.co.uk, example-store.de) each running its own Shopify store. If you find several country sites that are each separate Shopify stores with their own myshopify.com address, Plus is very likely. A single store with several languages and currencies is weaker evidence, because Shopify Markets offers that on other plans too.
A wholesale or B2B channel
A login area for trade customers with its own price lists and payment terms is a feature Shopify sells to Plus merchants. A link labelled "Wholesale" or "Trade login" that leads to customer-specific pricing is a good sign. A wholesale page that only shows a contact form is not.
Checkout customization
Plus merchants can change the checkout more than other plans: custom fields, extra content blocks, checkout extensions from apps that only work on Plus. If the checkout looks noticeably different from the standard Shopify checkout, Plus is likely. Treat this carefully, because Shopify has extended some checkout options to all plans, and a branded logo and colors are available to everyone.
Job posts and agency case studies
A brand advertising for a "Shopify Plus developer", or an agency case study that names the brand as a Plus migration, is a public statement about the plan. It can go out of date if the brand later moved platforms.
Size and spend
A store with high traffic, a large catalog, many paid apps and a busy ad account is more likely to be on Plus. This is a correlation, not evidence. Plenty of large stores stay on standard plans, and some small brands sign up for Plus early.
Signals that don't prove anything
- A myshopify domain in the source. Every Shopify store has one, on any plan.
- The theme. Plus stores use the same themes as everyone else, including free ones.
- Multiple currencies. Available on standard plans through Shopify Markets.
- "Powered by Shopify" missing from the footer. Any merchant can remove it.
Why three answers beat two
Because the evidence is often thin, a useful Plus check has three outcomes: yes, no and unknown. "Unknown" is a real answer. If your tool marks every store without a clear Plus signal as "not Plus", your "not Plus" bucket fills up with large stores that simply don't use the visible features, and you mis-prioritize them.
ShopLens returns isShopifyPlus on every store profile with exactly those three states: true for Plus, false when the store is known not to be on Plus, and null when there is no signal. Treat null as unknown in your scoring rather than folding it into false.
A store like the example above, with no Plus signal but large traffic and catalog, deserves a manual look rather than a "no".
A quick scoring rule
If you check stores by hand, score them so different people on your team reach the same answer. Give two points for expansion stores on separate country domains, two for a wholesale login with customer pricing, one for a heavily customized checkout and one for a public job post or case study that names Plus. Three points or more is a confident yes, one or two is "possible", and zero is unknown rather than no.
Checking a list of stores
For one store, the manual checks above take ten minutes. For a list, the question usually turns around: instead of "is this store on Plus", you want "give me the Plus stores in this category". The GET /shops search takes shopifyPlus=true together with country, category and sales filters, so you can pull only the stores with a positive signal.
Search costs one credit per store returned. The full set of filters is in building a list of Shopify stores by country and category.
When the plan matters and when it doesn't
The plan matters when your product only works on Plus, for example a checkout extension that needs Plus features, or when your pricing assumes the merchant has an enterprise budget. In those cases, filter on a positive Plus signal and accept that you will miss some Plus stores marked unknown.
For most other uses, the plan is a weak proxy for what you actually care about, which is size and fit. Sales and traffic estimates, covered in how to estimate a Shopify store's sales, and the store's category and country usually sort a list better than the plan does. And before you check the plan at all, it is worth confirming the site is on Shopify in the first place: see how to check if a website is built on Shopify.