13 Mar
Running multiple storefronts helps ecommerce entrepreneurs expand their brand, increase their customer base, and improve the customer experience. But entrepreneurs who have tried it know that managing multiple Shopify stores can either be a breeze or a nightmare depending on the tools you use.
Unfortunately, Shopify doesn’t come out of the box with many features that help with this task. For instance, it’s still not possible to manage multiple shops under one login.
How to create multiple shopify stores
Creating additional stores on Shopify can be a bit of a logistical nightmare but it is possible just by using the same email address when setting up a new store. There is no way to unify the admin sections of all of your Shopify stores and no way to quickly transition between the stores either.
It can be a real pain logging in and then logging out when switching between accounts. We, therefore, recommend a tool like Last Pass for secure storage of identities. It really does save a lot of time when managing lots of stores.
Why should you consider building multiple shopify stores?
1. You’re selling internationally
If you are looking to expand your business to sell internationally, you need to look into the habits, attitudes, needs and problems differ among consumers from different countries.
Having a separate Shopify store for each country, will make it easier to optimize your website and offering for each specific audience. You’ll also be able to display each website in your target market’s native language, as well as show your product prices in your customers’ native currency. This will help you bring more traffic to your site.
2. You’re targeting different customer segments
If you sell a varied assortment of products in your Shopify store, you may want to create multiple stores to cater to each of your customer segments more effectively. For example, a clothing brand that sells both men’s and women’s clothing might want to create separate stores for men and women.
3. You’re creating an outlet
You might want to offer a deep discount on some of your inventory in order to get rid of stock. Instead of launching the discount on your main website and potentially risking devaluing your brand in the eyes of your main target audience you can create a separate outlet store where you sell your products at deeply discounted prices.
Challenges with managing multiple shopify stores
While running multiple Shopify stores for your business has its benefits, it also comes with a number of challenges:
- Adding new products to your catalog: If you only sell a few different products, managing your product catalog isn’t difficult. However, if you regularly add new products to your catalog (e.g., at monthly or quarterly intervals), it can become challenging to do so over a number of different stores.
- Managing inventory: Perhaps the biggest issue most businesses with multiple stores run into is managing inventory accurately and effectively. This is especially true if all the inventory is stored in the same warehouse.
- Processing orders: Orders for each website need to be processed separately. This can get extremely complicated when it comes to fulfillment and return processing.
- Systems integration: Integrating the other systems you use (such as an ERP or POS) becomes increasingly difficult with each new store you create.
Perhaps the biggest drawback to the multi-store approach is that it makes managing your inventory and orders more difficult. Customers placing orders on the same pool of items from different sources can lead to confusion, delays and errors.
Another issue is that manually creating multiple sites and duplicating content when necessary can be a very time-consuming process. This is more than just frustrating; it pulls you away from all the other tasks you must complete to keep your business running smoothly.
Best practices for managing multiple shopify stores
Managing multiple stores can be difficult. However, it isn’t impossible. Here’s what you should keep in mind when dealing with multiple stores.
1. Optimize each store individually
If you’re using multiple stores to target different international markets or sell to different customer segments, you’ll need to optimize each store individually to make its content and offers relevant to the intended audience.
This might involve targeting local keywords, promoting country-specific offers and deals, using a different site design or URL structure, and creating locally relevant content for your website visitors.
2. Implement real-time inventory updates
If you want to manage your inventory accurately across multiple stores, you should consider implementing real-time inventory updates. This will prevent overselling and a number of other fulfillment nightmares that can make you lose money, ruin your brand’s reputation and create angry customers.
A real-time inventory management system can help improve your customers’ shopping experience significantly by ensuring you always have enough product in stock. You’ll want to centralize your inventory management so you’re able to keep track of your inventory regardless of which store sells a particular product.
3. Centralize your order management
Keeping track of all the orders that come through your stores can be difficult. This is where a centralized order management system can help. By centralizing your order management, you’ll have an easier time fulfilling and keeping track of orders and returns.
Here’s what you should look for in an order management system:
- Inventory syncing in regular intervals
- Automation rules for distributing inventory across different stores and sales channels
- Order aggregation and distribution to fulfillment nodes
- Order fulfillment from one or multiple nodes and syncing to the main source
4. Use a product information management (PIM) system
If you have multiple Shopify stores, there’s a good chance your product information is structured differently in each of them. Product information management can become very difficult and time-consuming for businesses that run multiple stores. This can result in messy and inaccurate data.
A product information management (PIM) system can help you avoid this by centralizing all your product data. This, in turn, enables you to standardize all your data, clean it and keep it up to date on all your stores.
A PIM system tracks all the information that’s managed by your business and distributes it across all your channels effectively, ultimately resulting in unified information that’s updated in real time.
5. Create a unified customer support system
Keeping track of customer support tickets across multiple stores can be very complicated. This is especially true if you need to localize your customer support to cater to international customers.
A unified customer support system allows you to keep all your customer queries and order information in one central inbox from which your customer support team can deal with all the issues quickly and effectively.
Implementing such a system will help you avoid confusion among your customer support team members and result in an improved customer experience, which, in turn, will lead to increased customer retention.
Best shopify apps for managing multiple stores
1. nChannel
It is very important to keep product data well-organized and formatted, especially for retailers who plan to grow their business. Synchronizing inventory counts across multiple eCommerce stores is also very important. nChannel is the perfect tool for all of this.
It is a cloud-based Product Information Management system that allows you to control all of the product data that’s relevant to your multiple Shopify stores, and then standardize, organize, clean, and publish it from one place, saving you lots of time and effort in the process.
2. Stitch Labs
Another must-have app is a multi-channel inventory manager like Stitch Labs.
Stitch’s technology helps to streamline inventory and operations across multiple Shopify storefronts. With Stitch, you can:
- Simplify order management
- Automate inventory control
- Easily manage online and offline channels
- Sync inventory availability across all your sales channels
This kind of tool will help you keep your returns, customer care logs, fulfillments, and dropshipping processes well-organized by centralizing your order management.
Take control of your growth with advanced inventory and order management.
3. Veeqo
Displaying the correct amount of available products is critical, and any mistakes could lead to a disaster. Sales would be lost if inventory of a product is listed as zero online while still available in the warehouse.
Conversely, listing that a product is available when it is not would result in orders being left unfulfilled, potentially leading to a loss of customers. Veeqo provides a solution to this problem.
Veeqo has a multichannel inventory management system that allows retailers to sync inventory across multiple Shopify stores, channels, ecommerce marketplaces and warehouses in real time, helping ecommerce entrepreneurs ensure that their products are never oversold or undersold. The software integrates with a large number of marketplaces, shipping solutions, 3PLs, POS systems, accounting and helpdesk solutions, as well as marketing tools. Veeqo’s pricing starts at $195/month.
4. Skubana
Skubana is a software solution that allows you to unify your operations by connecting and importing orders from all your sales channels, as well as synchronizing inventory across stores, warehouses, 3PLs and distribution centers. It enables you to automate rate-shopping, order splitting and routing, and stock reordering, thus helping you prevent overselling, unhappy customers and market suspension.
Skubana can help you uncover seasonal trends and create sales forecasts that will allow you to stay on top of inventory and ensure that you’ll have enough stock to meet demand. The software integrates with marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon and Walmart, as well as a number of shipping providers, including DHL, FedEx and UPS.
Skubana doesn’t offer fixed pricing, but plans typically start around a few hundred dollars a month.
5. Rewind Backups
Rewind automates backup of your Shopify store so you don’t even have to think about it. You can also run a specific backup anytime, like right before you edit theme code.
Having access to your own Shopify backups means that you and your team can all make changes to your online store without worrying about what will happen when someone makes a mistake. Rewind allows you to undo mistakes by rewinding a single item, multiple items, or your entire account to a previous point in time. It’s like having a magic undo button.
With the amount of time it takes to build not one, but multiple Shopify stores, you do NOT want to be rebuilding them from scratch if something were to go wrong. The app offers a free seven-day trial, and a free plan for stores generating up to 20 orders/month. Paid plans start at $9/month.
6. Replay
Replay is a Shopify app that helps you easily create multiple stores by duplicating your existing store. It allows you to instantly copy products, collections, themes, pages and blogs, thus relieving you from having to perform time-consuming manual data imports and exports. The app offers two different plans:
- Pay-as-you-go: Instead of paying a monthly fee, Replay allows you to pay $0.10 for every item copied with a minimum of $0.50. This is very affordable if you need to do a one-time duplication of a store.
- Unlimited: For those who need to copy data between stores regularly, there’s an unlimited plan that costs $59/month per store.
Conclusion
Running multiple Shopify stores requires a little more preparation than a single store, but once your back-office operations are set up correctly you can enjoy the benefits of selling the right products to the right customers on the right e-commerce store, and manage them all in one place.