Scaling your Shopify business can exponentially increase your reach and growth.
To reach that goal, many brands add additional stores to accommodate new markets and demographics, but doing so also increases the number of sales touchpoints you have to manage, which can be a challenge.
To help you get started, we cover how to open multiple Shopify stores to scale your brand effectively and then discuss some tools that simplify managing multiple Shopify stores.
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Launching multiple online stores is a large undertaking, so you may be wondering why merchants even bother.
Along with the expansion benefits, multiple stores can protect your brand image and add new product lines.
If you want to grow internationally, you’ll need to consider all the different challenges, shopping habits, and behaviors of those markets.
Having a separate Shopify store for each country makes it easier to optimize your website and offerings for their respective audiences.
You’ll also be able to host websites in your target market’s native language, showcase offers unique to certain regions, and display your product prices in your customers’ native currency. Shopify Markets can help get you part of the way there but doesn’t allow for distinct customization for each storefront.
Regional stores also help to simplify fulfillment, allowing you to bucket inventory for separate locations to ensure fast shipping for customers and easy logistics for merchants.
For example, wallet company The Ridge highlights free shipping and returns for their customers in the US.
They display a different banner for their EU customers, along with the appropriate euro billing currency.
If you sell a variety of products in your Shopify store, multiple stores will allow you to cater to each of your customer segments more personally.
Even if your entire customer base shares the same geographic location, you may want to separate your audience into other demographic categories.
In this case, another store will help you preserve your original brand while adjusting the wording (and sometimes even pricing and product availability) for your new segment.
For example, a clothing brand that sells both men’s and women’s clothing might launch separate stores for each gender.
A common strategy is for brands like Haxtec dice (pictured below) to have alternative stores for wholesale to target a different market.
Besides selling directly to consumers, brands may also opt to build a website dedicated to selling to merchandisers and retailers.
In the image above, dice seller Haxtec showcases their dice on their retail website.
Below, Haxtec has their own wholesale website as well for larger orders.
Perhaps you want to offer a deep discount on some of your inventory to get rid of stock.
Showing too many discounts on your website can risk devaluing your brand and giving a perception of always being on sale. Showcasing deep discounts may even train bad shopping behavior, encouraging them to wait until the item they wanted is on sale before making a purchase.
To avoid this, create an outlet website that displays your biggest deals and discounts.
Plenty of big-name clothing and footwear brands have outlet stores, including Tommy Hilfiger, J.Crew, and Reebok.
Retailers like Nordstrom also take advantage of outlets to cater to the price-conscious segment of their audience.
Adapting this approach, Klean Kanteen offers student discounts for their UK audience, which is highlighted in the menu of their relevant website.
However, their other regional websites make no mention of a student discount, emphasizing the exclusivity of the offer.
Some merchants want to design spin-off lines or a secondary brand under the same company umbrella.
This can be helpful when launching a product that appeals to an audience outside your usual consumer base.
For example, you might have a luxury brand, then launch a secondary brand with other entry-level products that are more moderately priced.
Although running multiple Shopify stores comes with many benefits, it also introduces greater complexity into your operations.
With multiple stores, you receive orders from other sales channels where you have to monitor inventory and make sure you’re on top of current stock.
Additionally, orders from each website need to be processed separately. This can become extremely complicated when it comes to fulfillment and return processing.
Your policies will likely vary for different markets and audiences.
For example, your maximum purchase limit could be 10 items for your main store, but your wholesale store might have a minimum purchase of 100.
These variations will require your support teams to be able to pinpoint where the query comes from and know the differences in those customers/accounts.
It may even require training a separate support team, such as one for wholesale and another for DTC. Not to mention, if you’re opening a site in another language, you’ll need to bring on a team that speaks that language.
If you only sell a few items, managing your product catalog isn’t difficult.
However, if you regularly add new listings to it (e.g., at monthly or quarterly intervals), it can become challenging across multiple stores.
You’ll also need to update all of your products and information in each place.
For example, if you forget to change the price on one store, you risk selling too low and losing profit or too high and losing conversions.
Perhaps the biggest issue most businesses with multiple stores run into is managing inventory accurately and effectively across all sales points.
This is especially true if their inventory is stored in various warehouses and third-party logistics providers.
More stores mean more moving pieces to incorporate.
Integrating the other systems you use (such as an ERP or POS) can become increasingly difficult with each new store you add.
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Launching multiple Shopify stores is less complicated than many think. We’ll quickly break down the process for each Shopify plan.
Shopify’s standard pricing plans include Basic, Shopify, and Advanced.
Every new store on these plans will need its own account, so complete the signup process for each one.
It may seem tedious, but according to one Shopify staff member, you can register these new accounts and stores under one email address.
You can also navigate between them via the store switcher in your Shopify admin.
With the Shopify Plus plan, adding Shopify expansion stores is much easier.
You can make one through the Shopify organization admin, which is exclusive to the Plus plan. Below are the steps for it.
Set up your store’s basic information and URL:
Take note that your chosen URL can’t be changed, so triple-check it before moving on.
This step is optional, but you can choose apps to preinstall on your new store. Later on, we’ll discuss some specific ones that are great for running multiple Shopify stores.
To complete this step, follow these instructions:
Afterward, do the following:
All that’s left is to click Create Store. You can now log in to your new store, add the necessary details, and customize it as you see fit.
Multiple Shopify stores can make logistics and management more tricky, but it comes with plenty of rewards when done well.
Here are a few best practices we recommend if having more than one store makes sense for your brand.
Whether you’re trying to expand to new geographies, different demographics, or any other new market, you’ll need to optimize your different stores to tailor to that audience.
Everything from the website content to your featured items and offers should be tailored to your intended audience.
To learn what works, you might test different offers to see which get the most clicks.
Or, you could do location-specific keyword research to learn about the buying habits of consumers in those areas.
Consider tweaking your website designs if your audience is drastically diverse, and curate any specific SEO content on your additional stores.
The Ridge, for example, has different domains for each country they serve. Here’s a quick look at their Canadian website.
Below is what you see when you visit their UK store.
Both sites present a different selection of wallets to visitors, and their currencies adjust to their respective geographies.
Pro tip: The Ridge uses Shogun to sync content across their various websites to ensure each regional website has the latest updates.
Also, a widget for changing regions (visible on the page’s right-hand side) displays the appropriate flag.
The Ridge websites use region-specific URLs as well: The Canadian site uses “ridgewallet.ca,” while the UK site uses “ridgewallet.co.uk.”
To manage your inventory across multiple stores accurately, consider implementing real-time inventory updates.
This means you should see your inventory levels change almost immediately as items are purchased, replenished, and returned.
Real-time inventory updates help to facilitate smooth fulfillment and logistics, prevent overselling, and protect your buyer experience.
If you work with more than one warehouse or with multiple 3PLs, invest in a centralized hub that can synchronize orders and inventory across all sales channels and fulfillment partners.
Fulfilling and keeping track of all the orders that come through your stores is a cumbersome task, but a centralized order management system can help shoulder that burden.
When searching for your ideal order management system, you should ensure it has:
Multiple Shopify stores also means their product information may be structured differently, and managing them all can become very difficult and time-consuming.
Additionally, this increases the risk of disorganized and inaccurate data.
A product information management system (PIM) helps you avoid these issues by centralizing your product data.
This, in turn, lets you standardize, clean, and keep that data up to date across all your stores.
A PIM system tracks the information your business manages and distributes it to your channels effectively, resulting in unified information that’s updated in real time.
Keeping track of customer support tickets across multiple stores is a lot to juggle.
This is especially true if you need to localize your customer support to sell internationally.
Having a customer support system that works across all your different websites helps to keep your team organized and prevents support tickets from falling through the cracks.
With a cohesive system, you prevent confusion within your customer support team, which improves shoppers’ experiences and, in turn, can increase customer retention.
Although you can manage multiple Shopify stores on your own, technology makes it simpler.
In this section, we’ve listed some apps from the Shopify App Store that can take on the heavy lifting of multi-store management for you.
4.7 stars out of 5 (1,286 reviews)
HelpCenter is an all-in-one customer support solution. It offers user-friendly features that improve customer experiences across your stores.
With it, you can:
Price:
4.4 stars out of 5 (537 reviews)
Gorgias offers a unified customer support platform that manages concerns from various channels, including email, live chat, phone, SMS, social media, and more.
It improves the customer experience for your stores to ensure they keep coming back.
It enables agents to support shoppers in real-time while offering a mix of self-service and automation to cut down on repetitive issues, saving you time and resources.
Gorgias can also integrate with numerous apps to provide centralized customer service.
Price:
4.8 stars out of 5 (2,966 reviews)
Shogun Page Builder is a popular landing page builder that makes it easy for merchants to design, build, and optimize their store pages.
To assist with running multiple Shopify stores, Shogun lets merchants create templates so they can easily duplicate their pages, no matter how many sites they want to launch.
The Advanced plan lets brands sync content across stores, so multi-store store design is drastically simplified, letting brands get on with scaling their business without the repetitive work.
The app provides numerous conversion elements, including video, carousels, forms, tabs, and more.
Price:
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5 stars out of 5 (1,126 reviews)
Report Pundit is a comprehensive reporting app for tracking crucial metrics across your stores. You can see detailed breakdowns of:
The app has the flexibility to create and automate both simple and complex reports that fit your needs and adjust your strategies according to your business’s performance.
You also receive a centralized source of data, which greatly simplifies management.
Price:
4.5 stars out of 5 (359 reviews)
Vela lets you manage your stores’ content, such as your product descriptions, photos, and more—all in one place.
You can also edit your product listings, along with relevant details, such as variants and price, in bulk.
Overall, Vela makes management much faster and more convenient.
Price:
4.7 stars out of 5 (162 reviews)
Syncio can sync inventory, product attributes, and order information from multiple Shopify stores in real-time.
The ability to keep data accurate and up to date in one place greatly simplifies management.
It also saves a lot of time so you can focus on other aspects of your multi-store business, like growth.
Price:
4.7 stars out of 5 (1,382 reviews)
Langify is a user-friendly app for translating your shops into multiple languages.
Selling in shoppers’ native tongues lets you reach more of them, which can increase your stores’ traffic and improve SEO.
The app boasts a simple translation process, which it can do automatically. This is a great asset to help you sell globally.
Price:
4.9 stars out of 5 (297 reviews)
Matrixify lets you import, export, update, and migrate data in bulk for your:
With it, you can feed data to your store from any of your sources, as well as transfer it to your other ones.
Matrixify saves you time and accurately updates data across all your stores, significantly simplifying data management.
Price:
4.9 stars out of 5 (134 reviews)
Katana is a manufacturing ERP that allows businesses to monitor their inventory and production in real-time. This visual platform:
With Katana, manufacturing businesses can seamlessly oversee multiple aspects of their operations in one place.
Price:
4.8 stars out of 5 (921 reviews)
Rewind Backups performs secure, automated backups of your Shopify stores and allows you to undo unwanted changes.
It ensures all your data is safe and retrievable at any moment to give you peace of mind.
The app saves time by removing the need for manual backups, which is a major advantage for those with multiple stores.
It can back up every type of data connected to your store, including:
Rewind Backups also encrypts your data and allows you to restore it—by individual item or group—within minutes.
Price:
3.8 stars out of 5 (92 reviews)
With Rewind Staging, Shopify merchants can create a test copy of their store to experiment freely with new features such as:
It’s highly useful for merchants with multiple stores, as they can construct staging copies for each one, then test whatever changes they want before going live.
Rewind Staging has no restrictions on how much you can copy, and it automatically keeps your stores in sync, saving you the time and effort required to do so manually.
Price:
To cap off this guide, here are answers to some possible leftover questions.
Shopify Plus users can create unlimited stores on one account with their plan. Merchants on other plans can create one store per account.
Because of fulfillment logistics or setting up new legal entities, some merchants may want to set up separate accounts for multiple storefronts.
Learn more in our guide to syncing content across stores.
No. You can use the same email address to create different Shopify accounts and register new stores under those accounts.
Yes. In fact, one Shopify staff member says you should be able to create as many accounts as you want.
With Shopify Plus, including your main store, you can launch up to 10 stores.
They’re all part of your platform fee, which starts at $2,000. For each store exceeding that limit, you’ll need to pay $250.
For regular Shopify users, though, each new store’s cost will depend on the plan you choose for it:
Basic: $39/month
Shopify: $105/month
Advanced: $399/month
Let’s say your main store uses an Advanced plan, and you want to create a second store that uses the Basic plan.
Your cost for both stores would amount to $438 a month.
You can easily navigate between Shopify stores using the store switcher.
It contains the Shopify stores with accounts under the same email. For Shopify Plus users, they’re grouped by business according to Shopify contracts.
There are no concrete sources that state whether or not you can have multiple stores under one business, but a Shopify partner says any restrictions that prevent you from doing so are unheard of.
Upon signing up, your Shopify store will be given a “myshopify.com” URL by default.
In addition to that, a regular Shopify merchant can add up to 20 domains or subdomains to their store. For Shopify Plus users, that number goes up to 1,000 domains or subdomains.
Learn more about changing domains and store names in our detailed guide.
Creating multiple Shopify stores is a powerful way to scale your brand. It may seem complex on the surface, but it’s easy once you learn the steps.
Managing these stores can be difficult, but following best practices and implementing the appropriate applications will help you stay on top of them.
Remember what we’ve talked about, and the process should go smoothly, leaving you with the fruits of your efforts rather than the headache of mismanagement.
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