Please note: This feature is currently only available to BigCommerce merchants on Contract with Shogun. If you are interested in accessing this feature, please reach out to our Success team to arrange a meeting at a time that's good for you.
Publishing to Multiple Storefronts
Once Multi-Storefront is enabled for your Shogun instance, whenever you go to click "Publish" after saving your changes you will be prompted to select which of your Storefronts to publish the changes to. To toggle a Storefront on or off, just click the toggle next to its name - grey means the changes won't be published to that Storefront.
Once you hit publish, this URL for the relevant storefronts will go live!
If you wish to view your live page, click the "Eye" icon to the right of the Publish button. You will then be given a choice of which storefront you wish to view.
You can also check which storefronts each page is published to at a glance by hovering your mouse cursor over the page's Status in your main Shogun dashboard
Multi-Storefront Product Inventory
When Multi-Storefront is enabled for your Shogun account, the app will sync all Product and Category Data from the BigCommerce account you installed Shogun on. In the editor you will be able to select all of your Products and all your Categories from all your storefronts to pick when adding Product/Category data to your Shogun Pages.
At this time, Shogun in not aware of which Storefront(s) a particular Product or Category belongs to, so its possible to create a Product Box or Category that will appear on a Storefront that its not available on.
What does this mean?
PRO: It means that you can put any Product Data on any page that is published to any storefront, no restrictions!
CON: If you accidentally publish a Product Box to a storefront where that product is not available, then that Product Data won't work and it will display as a blank box on the published page.
We recommend double checking any products you add to a page are available to the Storefronts you'll be publishing them to. If you need to, you can personalize the page to show and exclude Products and Categories for each individual storefront
Remember that BC Admin is where you control which Product or Category is available on each Storefront, so if you need to update these settings you can do so there.
Multi-Storefront & Variants, Personalized Experiences, and A/B Testing
Muti-Storefront is fully compatible with both Personalized Experiences and A/B Testing - just create a Variant following the normal workflows and and then publish it to any storefront you'd like it on.
Note that there is no individual limit for MTU Usage on Storefronts, and MTU usage across all your published Storefronts is cumulative. This means that if you use 2000 MTUs on Storefront A, and 3000 MTUs on Storefront B, that page will have counted 5000 MTU uses towards your limit.
Storefront Specific Variants
In some circumstances you may need to make a slight change to a page for each Storefront - for example, adding a specific banner, or changing a listed email address or form element. In these cases you can create a Personalized Experience where the Segments are looking for the "URL Contains" condition;
This URL should be the root domain for the relevant Storefront, and once it is set shoppers on that Storefront will be sent to that variant. An extra variant labeled "Original" will be created as a fallback state - any Storefronts that aren't specified in your segments will see this version instead.
For example, if we wanted to set it up so customers looking at getshogun.com
get Variant 1 and customers looking at getshogunmerch.com
get Variant 2, we would set up our segments to be;
If we then added a third Storefront - eg getshogunwholesale.com
- because customers visiting from that URL don't match segment 1 or 2 they would be sent to Version 3 instead.
Storefront Specific Styling
If you leave your fonts on the "Default" setting, Shogun will pull the default font styling from each Storefront and display it accordingly. If you set styling (Font family, size etc) within Shogun, this will be applied to all Storefronts you publish to and override your storefront's default settings for those pages.
If you want to adjust spacing, dimensions, or other similar settings for each Storefront, you can do so using the Storefront Specific Variant method above.
Multi-Storefront & Shogun Sync
If you have multiple BigCommerce instances, you can still move content between them using our Sync feature, available on certain plans.
Note that if you choose to publish your pages after syncing them they will be published to your primary storefront only. If you want them published to your other storefront, you will need to manually publish them using the methods outlined above.
Adding New Storefronts
All of your existing Storefronts are pulled through when you first set up Multi-Storefront for Shogun, but if you add a new Storefront and aren't seeing it in the list when you publish you may need to sync your storefronts again. You can do this by going to your Shogun Settings, scrolling down to Storefronts, and clicking Refresh. This will prompt Shogun to re-poll BigCommerce for a list of your Storefronts.
Known Limitations
Shared Homepage Metadata Between Storefronts
Currently, even with different Variants a page can only have a single set of metadata - this means that the metadata for a page using Shogun Multi-Storefront will be the same for all storefronts. In most cases this isn't an issue, but in the case of a Homepage it can cause issues.
In order to avoid this, we recommend publishing the pages through Shogun but not setting them as Homepage in the Shogun UI - instead, open the BigCommerce page manager and set them as homepage there. This will correctly set the metadata you have configured in BigCommerce instead of the ones from Shogun.
There are a few things to bear in mind about this method:
The pages will still be displayed as normal pages in Shogun, will be missing the "Homepage" icon that displays when a page is set as a Homepage, and you will still have the option to set them as Homepage
If the page is published again through Shogun (EG after you make some changes) then Shogun's metadata will overwrite BigCommerce's and you will need to repeat this process.
We are currently working on a long-term solution to this issue, but the above workaround will work until its ready. If you have any issues, please contact support at support@getshogun.com