Working notes on Shopify themes, apps, Plus and the odd opinion, written by the person doing the work, not a content team.
Shopify B2B is native on Plus now, and it's genuinely good, but native solves the plumbing, not the buyer experience. What native B2B handles, what it pointedly doesn't, and how to choose between native, a purpose-built theme, and a full custom wholesale build.
It isn't really a versus. Plus is the same platform with the ceilings lifted, for merchants who've hit them. A straight, capability-by-capability comparison of Plus against the standard plans, checkout, B2B, multi-store, scale and support, and how to tell which side of the line you're on.
The gap between someone who can install a theme and someone who can engineer your store is wide, expensive, and hard to see from a portfolio. How to vet a Shopify developer for how they think, not how they present.
Shopify Plus pricing for UK merchants, all in: the platform fee from £1,800 a month, the payment fees people underestimate, and the build as a separate line. Plus how the cost compares to Advanced and whether the price is negotiable.
Plus is a real step up in capability and a real step up in cost. The signals I look for before recommending a merchant makes the jump, and the ones that mean you should stay put and spend the money on the store itself.
I built the thing my last post described: an MCP server that lets Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity answer real questions about your store, across 20-odd data sources, read-only and encrypted.
Discounts, shipping rules, and cart logic can live in a Function, an app, or both. A practical decision framework, with the trade-offs I weigh on real builds.
Letting Claude or ChatGPT answer questions about your store is genuinely useful, and genuinely risky if you wire it up wrong. The MCP pattern I use to keep it read-only and audited.