You are paying for apps that do what Shopify Plus would give you natively, or you have been told that upgrading to Plus unlocks specific tools you need. The question is whether the features actually justify the cost jump from the Advanced plan at £399/month to Plus at $2,500/month.

Here is a clear account of every Plus-only app and feature, what each one actually does, and how to work out whether any of them has a financial case for your store.

Launchpad

Launchpad is the most operationally useful Plus-exclusive feature for merchants who run regular sale events, product launches, or promotional periods.

What it does: Launchpad lets you schedule future events in your store with a defined start time and end time. An event can include:

Automatic price reductions across a selected set of products
Publishing previously hidden products at a set time
Switching your store to a different theme (for example, a sale-themed variant)
Adjusting inventory visibility
Reverting all of the above automatically when the event ends

Without Launchpad, executing a timed flash sale requires manual intervention: someone stays up at midnight to change prices, remembers to revert them 48 hours later, and hopes nothing gets missed. Launchpad automates the entire sequence.

Who needs it: Merchants who run four or more timed promotional events per year. If your sale events are quarterly or more frequent, the operational saving from automating the start and end of each event is significant. If you run one or two sales per year and are comfortable with manual execution, Launchpad alone is unlikely to justify a Plus upgrade.

What it does not do: Launchpad is not a full personalisation engine. It cannot serve different prices to different customer segments. It is purely time-based scheduling.

Script Editor (Legacy, Now Retired)

Shopify Script Editor was a Plus-exclusive tool that let you write Ruby scripts to customise pricing, shipping, and payment logic in the cart and checkout. It was powerful and widely used.

Script Editor has been retired. The functionality it provided is now handled by Shopify Functions, which is the recommended approach for custom checkout and cart logic going forward. If you were relying on Scripts for complex discount logic, you need to migrate to Shopify Functions. The core use cases are covered, but the migration requires development work.

Bulk Account Inviter

What it does: Bulk Account Inviter lets you send account activation emails to a large list of customers in one action, rather than sending individual invitations one by one.

When it matters: This tool is primarily useful during a wholesale migration. If you are moving from a separate wholesale platform or from a third-party wholesale app to Shopify Plus B2B, you will have an existing list of trade accounts who all need to activate their new login. Sending 200 or 500 individual invitations manually is impractical. Bulk Account Inviter handles this in a single import.

Outside of migration scenarios, most merchants use this rarely after the initial setup.

Transporter

What it does: Transporter is a Plus-exclusive app for importing large volumes of data into Shopify: customers, orders, products, and inventory. It handles data at a scale and with an error-tolerance that the standard Shopify import tools cannot match.

When it matters: Transporter is useful during platform migrations (coming from Magento, WooCommerce, or another Shopify store) when you need to import historical order data, large customer lists, or complex product catalogues. For day-to-day store management it is rarely needed.

Gift Card Generator

What it does: Generates bulk batches of unique gift card codes for distribution. Common use cases include corporate gifting programmes, loyalty redemption, promotional campaigns, and employee gifting.

The standard Shopify gift card tools require creating gift cards individually. Gift Card Generator lets you produce hundreds or thousands of unique codes in one batch, export them to a spreadsheet, and distribute them as needed.

When it matters: Relevant primarily to merchants with corporate gift card programmes or those running large-scale promotional campaigns where gift cards are the incentive.

Checkout Blocks

Checkout Blocks is a third-party app (by Arpu Inc.) that is technically available on all plans at a basic tier, but its full functionality is unlocked exclusively for Shopify Plus merchants who can use Checkout UI Extensions.

What it does on Plus: On Shopify Plus, Checkout Blocks gives you a drag-and-drop editor for building checkout customisations without writing code:

Post-purchase upsell widgets
Custom field additions (gift messages, delivery notes, VAT numbers)
Trust badge displays
Countdown timers and urgency elements
Loyalty point balance display

Pricing: The Plus-compatible tier starts at around $99/month.

When it matters: Checkout Blocks is one of the most directly revenue-linked Plus features. If you can improve your checkout conversion rate by 1% using trust elements and reduce basket abandonment with a targeted upsell, the ROI calculation is straightforward.

Rebuy on Shopify Plus

Rebuy is a personalisation and upsell engine that works on all Shopify plans, but its checkout upsell features are only available to Plus merchants who can use Checkout Extensibility.

What it adds on Plus: Rebuy's Smart Checkout upsell widgets appear within the checkout flow (not just post-purchase) using Plus's Checkout UI Extensions. These widgets use your order history data and product relationships to serve relevant recommendations at the highest-intent point in the purchase journey.

Pricing: Rebuy plans start at around $99/month and scale with store revenue. Enterprise tiers for high-volume Plus stores are priced custom.

When it matters: Merchants with high AOV products and complementary items in their catalogue (for example, skincare with accessories, furniture with protective products, or equipment with consumables) typically see the strongest results from checkout upsells.

Other apps that become more powerful on Plus

Beyond the strictly exclusive apps, several third-party apps unlock additional functionality specifically for Plus merchants:

LoyaltyLion: Its enterprise tier with advanced B2B loyalty features and API access is designed for Plus merchants. Standard plans work on non-Plus stores but with fewer integration options.

Yotpo: Higher review volume processing, SMS marketing at scale, and loyalty programme depth are all more relevant and accessible at the Plus level. Yotpo's enterprise features (custom pricing) are specifically targeted at Plus merchants.

Klaviyo: Klaviyo works on all Shopify plans, but Plus merchants with more complex segmentation needs (B2B contacts, wholesale customer journeys, multi-store flows) can leverage the Shopify Plus API access to build richer automations.

Gorgias: Gorgias's advanced automation and customer service features scale more naturally with the Plus merchant profile (higher order volumes, more complex fulfilment operations).

ROI calculation: does app access justify upgrading to Plus?

Here is a worked example for a merchant on the Advanced plan (£399/month) considering Plus at $2,500/month (~£2,000/month):

Additional monthly cost: approximately £1,600/month (£19,200/year)

Revenue from checkout customisation (Checkout Blocks/Rebuy):

Current checkout revenue: £100,000/month
Estimated conversion lift from trust badges and custom fields: 0.5%
Incremental revenue: £500/month
Annual value: £6,000

Revenue from post-purchase upsells (Rebuy):

Monthly orders: 2,000
Upsell conversion rate: 4% (industry average for well-targeted offers)
Average upsell value: £25
Monthly incremental revenue: £2,000
Annual value: £24,000

Operational saving from Launchpad (if running 6 events/year):

Time saved per event: 3 hours of developer or manager time
Cost per hour: £75
Annual saving: £1,350

Total quantified annual benefit: £31,350 Additional annual cost of Plus: £19,200 Net benefit: approximately £12,150 positive

This example is illustrative. The actual numbers depend on your conversion baseline, catalogue, and how much you use each feature. The key point is that the financial case for Plus based on app access alone is strongest when you can directly attribute revenue to checkout customisation features that are exclusively available on Plus.

Key actions to take now

List every third-party app you are currently paying for that Plus replaces natively: Launchpad, wholesale apps, automation tools, and bulk data tools may all be covered. Add those monthly costs to the Plus vs Advanced cost comparison.
Estimate the revenue impact of checkout customisation: Take your current monthly checkout revenue and apply a conservative 0.5% conversion lift. If that number exceeds the monthly cost difference between Plus and your current plan, checkout customisation alone may justify the upgrade.
Check whether Launchpad applies to your business: If you run four or more promotional events per year with timed price changes, calculate the staff time currently spent on manual execution and compare it to the Plus cost increment.
Evaluate whether you are close to a data migration: If you are planning to migrate from another platform to Shopify in the next 12 months, the Transporter and Bulk Account Inviter tools may have practical value during that transition.
Request a Shopify Plus trial environment: Shopify's Plus sales team can give access to a development store with Plus features enabled so you can test Launchpad and Checkout Blocks before committing to a contract.
Do not upgrade for features you will not use: The ROI case for Plus requires actively using at least two or three Plus-exclusive features. If your analysis shows you would only use one feature, build a financial case specifically around that feature's measurable impact.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Checkout Blocks free on Shopify Plus? No. Checkout Blocks is a third-party app with its own subscription cost (from around $99/month for Plus merchants). The difference is that on Plus, you can use the full Checkout UI Extensions functionality that Checkout Blocks offers, whereas on standard plans only a limited set of features is available.

Does Shopify Script Editor still work? No. Shopify Script Editor has been retired. Custom discount, shipping, and payment logic previously built with Scripts needs to be migrated to Shopify Functions. If you have active Scripts, audit them and build an equivalent implementation using Functions before they stop working.

Can I use Launchpad without Shopify Plus? No. Launchpad is a Plus-exclusive app and is not available on any standard Shopify plan. Third-party apps like Bold Discounts (around £20/month) offer partial scheduling functionality for sale events on non-Plus stores, though with less native integration.

What happens to my Launchpad scheduled events if I downgrade from Plus? Any events scheduled in Launchpad will no longer execute if you leave Plus and lose access to the app. Before downgrading, review and either cancel or manually execute any scheduled Launchpad events.

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