Worked example: a $35M GMV DTC apparel brand, 15% wholesale, selling in US+Canada, with a 2-person dev team. Advanced or Plus?
Shopify Plus wins this profile, and the deciding factor is currency rather than GMV. Selling wholesale in US and Canadian dollars doubles catalog consumption, because a price list carries exactly one currency (shopify.dev, September 2026). Two tiers across two currencies is 4 catalogs against an Advanced cap of 3. The 2-person dev team makes the case stronger, not weaker.
The profile, scored line by line
| Factor | Reading | Points toward |
|---|---|---|
| $35M GMV | Above the band where plan fee is the main question. Roughly $2.9M per month | Neutral. See the volume-economics page linked below |
| 15% wholesale, about $5.25M a year | Material. Large enough to have its own terms, small enough that nobody has staffed it properly | Plus, weakly |
| US and Canada | Two currencies if you invoice wholesale in both. This is the binding constraint | Plus, decisively |
| 2-person dev team | Cannot absorb a custom pricing layer or a second pricing system | Plus |
Why the currency row decides it
A Canadian wholesale account invoiced in CAD needs a CAD price list. A price list has one currency and belongs to one catalog (shopify.dev, September 2026). So a brand with even two wholesale tiers selling into two currencies is at 4 catalogs against a cap of "up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets" (help.shopify.com, September 2026).
There is exactly one honest escape: invoice all wholesale in USD, including Canadian accounts. That is a commercial decision, not a technical one, and for apparel wholesale into Canada it is often unacceptable to the buyer. Test it with your two largest Canadian accounts before you use it to justify staying on Advanced, because if it fails you will have built a plan decision on a concession you cannot get.
Why the small dev team points at Plus, not away from it
The intuition is that a 2-person team cannot handle a platform migration, so stay put. Invert it.
The Advanced workaround for the catalog cap is a pricing app or a custom pricing layer. Our own record prices tag-based pricing apps at roughly $24.99 to $299 per month and a custom build at $12,000 to $35,000 upfront with 15 to 20% of build cost annually in maintenance (Deploi decision record, September 2026). A 2-person team that takes on a parallel pricing system has spent a meaningful fraction of its capacity permanently, and the reconciliation burden never ends.
Plus is a one-time migration followed by native catalogs that the team does not maintain. For a small team, native beats owned almost every time, and this is one of the clearest examples.
The number, honestly
Plus is $2,500 per month on a 1-year term and $2,300 on a 3-year term (shopify.com/plus/pricing, September 2026). Against Advanced at $399, the gross premium is $1,901 to $2,101 per month. On $35M GMV that is 6 to 7 basis points.
Whether that nets out depends on the payments question, which is answered on the volume-economics page and is not re-argued here. What this page adds: if the apparel wholesale program wants a buyer-facing storefront of its own, Plus includes it and Advanced charges $399 a month for it, which narrows the premium to roughly $1,502 to $1,702 per month.
When this answer flips to Advanced
- If all wholesale invoices in USD and there are two tiers or fewer. That is 2 catalogs. Stay, and revisit when a third tier or a CAD price list appears.
- If wholesale is genuinely one distributor on one price. One catalog. The 15% figure is doing no work.
- If the payments answer is decisive the other way. See the volume-economics page.
- If a replatform or an ERP cutover is already in the year's plan. Sequence them. Do not stack them.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Plus, on the currency arithmetic, not the revenue. The $35M number is the least informative fact in this profile. Two currencies against a hard cap of 3 catalogs is the fact that decides it, and it would decide it identically at $12M.
- What we’ve seen: The US-plus-Canada apparel profile is where the cap surprises people, because Canada does not feel like international expansion. It is a second currency, and Shopify's catalog model does not care how close the border is.
- Where we disagree: Small dev teams are routinely advised to delay Plus because migration is work. That advice ignores what the alternative costs them every month afterwards. A parallel pricing system is a permanent tax on a 2-person team; a migration is a one-quarter project.
- What this page adds: that the US-plus-Canada shape is the most common way a mid-market apparel brand breaches the 3-catalog cap without ever expanding internationally, and that the single escape route is a USD-only invoicing concession which should be tested with real accounts before it appears in a business case.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.
Where we worked this out
Our decision records