Automate Your Shopify Store
Learn about the best ways to automate your e-commerce business and manage your inventory across multiple Shopify stores.
MultichannelBest Practices for Managing Multiple Shopify StoresConsumer 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.
Product organizationHow to Manage Inventory on Shopify With the Best AppsInventory management is the proactive and reactive decision-making process used to ensure that a company has the right amount of goods on hand to meet customer demand.
Why Is Inventory Management Important for Shopify?
Well, inventory management allows online business owners to keep track of the products they have in stock, how much inventory they have in reserve, and when they need to order more. Inventory management also allows business owners to track their profits and losses associated with each product.
To ensure your inventory management is running optimally, here are some tried and tested inventory management strategies and apps you can use to make managing your Shopify store’s inventory a breeze.
Best Inventory Management Strategies
1. Allocate Par Levels
Setting par levels for inventory items can be extremely helpful for a business' overall inventory management. By establishing desired quantities for each item, a company can plan its purchasing and stocking decisions more effectively. In addition, regular reviews of par levels can help to identify items that may no longer be needed or necessary, leading to less excess stock on hand.
2. Perform Regular Stock Audits
A regular stock audit is an important tool for inventory management because it helps ensure that the correct inventory is being tracked and that there are no discrepancies between the physical inventory and the accounting records. An audit can also help to identify any potential problems with the inventory system or with the way that the inventory is being managed.
3. Hone Your Demand Forecasting Skills
Demand forecasting is a tool used to predict future demand for a product or service. This information can be used to help with inventory management by helping to ensure that the correct amount of stock is kept on hand. Forecasting can also help identify patterns in demand so that managers can plan for fluctuations of demand in the market.
4. Outsource Inventory Management
One way that outsourcing inventory management to a Shopify app can help to reduce profit loss is by reducing the amount of time that is needed to manage inventory. By automating some or all of the tasks related to inventory management, a business can save time and resources that can be put towards more important tasks.
Additionally, using a Shopify app for inventory management can help businesses to better track their inventory levels and ensure that they are not overstocking or understocking items.
Best Apps for Inventory Management
1. Bestsellers reSort
Take the pain out of manually managing your inventory with Bestsellers reSort. With its automated online merchandising features, Bestsellers reSort will sort products into separate collections by revenue, sales, profit, tags, etc., without any input from the user.
Or, if you’d like to be more hands-on, with its simple and intuitive interface, you can set exact sorting rules that will organize products into designated categories. Additionally, with product tags, users can create a custom order of products. Simply import a CSV, and the app will do all the heavy lifting.
2. Out-of-Stock Police
With the Out-of-Stock Police app, you can effortlessly manage out-of-stock products to prevent overselling and lost sales. Out-of-Stock Police will automatically place out-of-stock items at the bottom of your collection pages. With this approach to out-of-stock products, your store can stay relevant in the SERPs, maintain site traffic, and minimize loss of revenue.
Or, if you’d prefer to, flexible settings will even allow you to hide out-of-stock items. The app also offers a variety of reports to help you track and analyze your stock levels. That way, you can keep your store’s sales sky-high while you wait on your inventory to be restocked.