Best Practices for Managing Multiple Shopify Stores

Consumer habits have changed considerably in the last two years, and as it stands, there are over 2 billion digital consumers worldwide. As e-commerce grows, you might want to expand your business into other markets and niches by selling on more than one Shopify storefront.

The task of running multiple businesses on Shopify presents its own set of challenges that can leave shop owners feeling overwhelmed if not handled correctly.

Fortunately, some methods can help you avoid this. This article discusses a few benefits, challenges, and tools to manage and grow multiple Shopify stores.

Why You Should Consider Creating Multiple Shopify Stores

Here are a few reasons why merchants would want to sell across multiple Shopify stores:

You're Selling Internationally

When you are looking to expand your business globally, you will need to tailor your shops to a region's unique needs and preferences. You can easily customize your website to satisfy the cultural differences of each target audience by having more than one Shopify store. Depending on the selling location, you can change languages, currencies, products, and even website layout and appearance.

You can also feature regionally-exclusive products that you know will resonate with a particular market.

You’re Targeting Different Customer Segments

Whatever your business model is, it's a good idea to create separate Shopify sites for each customer segment, regardless of whether you sell different types of products or separate B2C from B2B. By doing so, you will be able to better cater to the needs of each customer.

Additionally, you can have multiple Shopify stores under the one LLC, and you can use multiple subdomains per shop and keep them all under one domain umbrella.

You Want to Create an Outlet

Say you wish to offer certain products at marked-down prices to clear up some space in your warehouse or shift end-of-line products. The risk of doing this on your main site is that discounted products may not appeal to all audiences, thus undermining your brand's value. By creating a separate Shopify store as an outlet, you can target new customers without jeopardizing your brand.

Common Challenges With Managing Multiple Shopify Stores

While having multiple Shopify stores has its advantages, managing them can be time-consuming. Shopify sellers must be prepared to tackle problems such as these:

Order Processing

You'll have to manage orders on each unique site, which can make fulfillment and return processing more difficult and increase the risk of errors.

Keeping Track of Inventory

In cases where some products are sold on both sites, you will have to update and manage the inventory of multiple Shopify stores.

Managing Product Data

Your shops' structures may differ, making it difficult to organize product data across multiple shops. This includes product names, images, descriptions, pricing, and so on, all of which might affect your bottom line.

System Integrating

Integrating with other systems like ERPs and point-of-sale (POS) systems is more complicated.

How to Better Manage Multiple Shopify Stores

To make managing a multi-store strategy easier, use these best practices:

Optimize Each Site Specifically

Optimize each of your Shopify stores separately to ensure that their content and offers are relevant to the consumers they are aimed at.

This might include targeting local keywords, advertising country-specific specials and bargains, adopting a different site design or URL structure, and providing regionally appropriate content for your website visitors.

Implement Real-Time Inventory Updates

When selling through various consumer contact points, it's critical that your inventory changes in real-time, especially if you're offering the same things on several sites. Real-time inventory updates ensure that your goods are never oversold.

The most effective technique to accomplish real-time inventory is to centralize inventory management. This guarantees that you keep track of inventory counts regardless of where it sells.

Popular Shopify apps like Multi-Store Sync Power will link multiple Shopify stores and automatically update the inventory whenever there is a new order, refund, or cancellation.

Centralize Order Management

A centralized order management system can be useful in keeping track of all orders that come into your stores.

Use an integration platform to send all order data, including fulfillment, returns, customer support, and dropshipping processes, to a centralized system that allows you to manage and track orders across all online stores easily.

Use a Product Information Management (PIM) System

Odds are if you have multiple Shopify stores, your product information is structured differently in each shop.

A product information management (PIM) system can prevent this by centralizing, cleaning, and standardizing your data so that it can be published to your different Shopify stores as needed. Try our Multi-Store Sync Power app as it can alleviate managing inventory for multiple Shopify stores through reliable real-time sync and easy-to-understand configuration, or head to our Shopify developer page to see our other inventory management and automation apps.