Online store owners in general, and Shopify merchants in particular, tend to expand their businesses to various niches in this digital world, thanks to the booming up of eCommerce.
To meet the demand for selling on multiple storefronts, Shopify launched the Shopify plus multiple stores as an excellent tool to assist professional sellers in achieving their objectives. As a result, if you want to leverage your online business by operating multiple eCommerce stores, a Shopify migration from your current eCommerce platform, such as Magento to Shopify Product Migration.
This article shows you several benefits, challenges, and helpful tips for managing Shopify plus multiple stores.
International Business
Languages and currencies are no longer the most formidable barriers to selling across borders, thanks to the advancement of global logistics. As a result, having a separate Shopify store for each country allows you to easily tailor your website to different countries’ habits, attitudes, and cultural differences.
For example, using a Shopify account, you can open a shoe store in the USA with a different design than the one in the United Kingdom. The prices are displayed in the currency of your customers.
Creating And Managing New Campaigns With One Hand
You can test the results before spending money on large promotion campaigns when launching new products or collections. To free up space in your warehouse, you could offer a generous discount on some obsolete products. Instead of launching a discount on your main website, you can create a separate outlet store to sell your products at heavily discounted prices.
Increasing The Number Of Niches And Target Customers
Another advantage of having multiple shopify stores is that merchants can quickly diversify their offerings to appeal to different types of customers. They can target other groups with different websites.
Easy Ways To Set Up Shopify Plus Multiple Stores
Separate Shopify Plans For Multiple Stores
Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify are the three plans that Shopify merchants are most familiar with. None of them, however, allow you to have multiple Shopify stores on the same account. If you already have a Shopify plan, such as Basic Shopify, the most straightforward way to add one or two more stores is to keep purchasing more plans.
Multiple Stores on Shopify Plus
Purchasing Shopify Plus is a better option. This plan is designed for high-volume businesses, with monthly pricing starting at $2000. After purchasing Shopify Plus, you will have access to a total of ten stores. For each additional store, an additional $250 must be paid.
Challenges When Managing Multiple Stores
While adding additional store instances to Shopify appears to be a simple process, the actual management of these Shopify plus multiple stores can give us a headache. Merchants must worry about separate orders, items, and inventory data when they have different stores. As a result, you’ll have to deal with a variety of issues:
Orders: It’s essential to maintain the order tracking on each site. When it comes to fulfillment and returns, this can become highly complicated.
Inventory: If you sell some products on both sites, you’ll need to keep track of inventory as customers buy and return items.
Products: If you regularly add new products to your catalog or categorize them into seasonal collections or price ranges, it’s not easy to do so across Shopify plus multiple stores.
Integration: When you have a lot of branches, you’ll have to put in a lot of effort to integrate the other systems you use, like ERP or POS, with each store you open.
How to Manage Multiple Shopify Stores Effectively
1. Optimize Each Website Separately
You must optimize each of them separately to make their content and offers relevant to the target audiences. A/B testing is always a recommended toolkit for evaluating different site designs, promoting country-specific offers, URL structure, and locally relevant content to determine a new site’s effectiveness and conversion rate. Hire a top-notch Shopify web development company to make things easier for you.
2. Centralized Order Management
One of the challenges of running Shopify plus multiple stores is fulfilling orders from different locations. You can easily manage orders across all of your sites by centralizing where you fulfill orders. You can use an integration platform to push all order data to a centralized system, including fulfillment, returns, customer service, and drop shipping processes, so that you can manage and track orders across all online sites in real-time.
Here are a few significant aspects to consider when looking for a reliable order management tool:
- Inventory syncing should be done regularly.
- Rules for distributing inventory across Shopify plus multiple stores and sales channels using automation
- The ability to automatically arrange orders and distribute them to fulfillment commands.
- Order fulfillment and syncing to the leading source from one or multiple commands.
3. Master Product Data In A PIM
Because product information management appears to be messy and inaccurate, running Shopify plus multiple stores is a time-consuming and challenging task. That’s why we need a product information management (PIM) system to help us avoid this struggle by centralizing and standardizing all of our product data and cleaning and updating it regularly across all of our stores.
4. Real-Time Inventory Updates
When the same products on a different storefront are overselling the items, you’ll have to deal with the hassle of informing customers. It means you won’t be able to send your customer a favorite item. As a result, when selling through multiple customer touch points, your inventory should update in real-time. The most effective way to obtain real-time inventory is to centralize inventory management. This allows you to keep track of inventory counts regardless of which store they were sold from.
5. Examine A Variety Of Shopify Stores
Analyzing business data such as conversion rate (CR), average order value (AOV), bound rate, audiences, and new niches is another essential tip for managing multiple Shopify stores. Tools such as Google Analytics and many others can provide you assistance in determining who your core audience is. As a result, you can create the best version of your stores and then optimize your niche-specific promotion campaigns.
Conclusion
In general, you have the option of managing multiple stores from various Shopify plans or purchasing a Shopify plus plan. If you’re not sure if Shopify is right for you, sign up for a 14-day free trial to see how it works.
In a nutshell, managing Shopify plus multiple stores is a difficult task. It is not, however, impossible if you follow our best practices. You can use the strategies that we’ve suggested above. Don’t be afraid to expand your business by pursuing more eCommerce opportunities. Hire a Shopify plus development company to provide you with a reliable source of information to help you realize your full potential.
Guest article written by: Patricia Smith is a content creator at suffescom.com. She’s a passionate young woman and an avid reader. Over the years, writing has helped her explore and understand the world and Technology as well as her own self.