Owning Multiple Shopify Stores – Everything You Need to Know
As the ecommerce space continues to evolve and grow, market competition remains fierce. As an ecommerce business owner, it’s the perfect time to diversify and expand your business on platforms like Shopify. But, how?
By owning and operating multiple Shopify stores, which can allow you to diversify and expand your potential reach and revenue systems. This method of business expansion on Shopify is a popular tactic, and can yield amazing results if managed properly. A key consideration here is your order or subscription management system. Working with a platform like Upscribe is an effective yet seamless way to centralize your order fulfillment process on Shopify, especially if you’re running multiple storefronts.
Let’s dive into how your ecommerce business can expand into multiple Shopify stores, why it should be your next business move, and how platforms like Upscribe can help you nail the transition.
What is Shopify Multiple Stores?
This is when you own multiple storefronts on the Shopify platform. It’ss a great way to expand your business, provide a better customer experience, and increase your sales.
Shopify, however, doesn’t allow for multiple storefronts to be run under the one account. This means, for every storefront you choose to open, you will need to create a different Shopify merchant account. How you choose to affiliate these separate storefronts is completely up to you and your business goals.
Why Shopify Multi-Stores are Important
You can establish localized marketing and selling
How your products sell in one country can be completely different to how they sell in another. Why? It all comes down to local cultural and social trends. That’s why implementing localized marketing techniques can really help build your brand in countries other than your native one.
By managing multiple Shopify stores, you can tailor each one to cater to a different country’s or territory’s market. By doing so, your stores will better accommodate the unique differences and needs of your different target customer groups, boosting international sales.
Managing Your Brand’s Value
If your Shopify business has a wide product-value range, it can be beneficial to create different storefronts for different value brackets.
For example, if your brand stocks both luxury or ‘upmarket’ products, as well as everyday goods, you can build a dedicated luxury storefront for your higher-value products. This allows you to effectively build your ecommerce branding across multiple product lines. You can build the value of your more luxury items, while simultaneously attracting the business of a more ‘everyday’ demographic.
Targeting Different Audience Segments
If your brand sells a wide variety of products, you can create different storefronts for different product types. This way, you can market, design, and display each storefront to better attract that product segment’s target audience.
Some Shopify multi-store owners choose to host these storefronts on subdomains kept under the primary domain umbrella that hosts your brand’s flagship storefront.
Challenges of Managing a Shopify Multi-store
Order Management
Each Shopify store will have its own order management system. This means you’ll need to treat the management of each storefront’s orders as separate tasks. For some, this can quickly become a complicated and overwhelming task, and may cause order delays.
A way to overcome this possible issue is to centralize your order fulfillment process. You can do this by syncing all of your stores to one central Order/Subscription Management System, allowing you to fulfill orders and returns for all of your storefronts on a single platform.
By implementing platform like Upscribe, for example, you can:
- Reduce churn by providing a seamless subscriber experience
- Customize every Shopify store’s checkout
- Personalize your customer subscription experience through data-driven metrics – no matter which store they’re shopping from
- Experience higher return customer sales through Upscribe’s ‘reorder’ functionality on all of your storefronts
SEO Challenges
Each storefront you choose to open will require special attention in regards to SEO. For each separate storefront, you’ll need to:
- Develop strong domains for each store
- Conduct ecommerce keyword research
- Develop a strong link-building strategy
- Implement store-personalized on-site SEO techniques
ERP Integration
For every store you choose to open on Shopify, you’ll need to integrate and manage your business’ ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning).
This is the system software every ecommerce business uses to manage and automate the day-to-day activities of their stores, including:
- Processing orders
- Shipping
- Billing
- Managing supply chain operations
How To Create and Manage Shopify Multiple Stores
Step 1: Create an Additional Store
As we’ve already mentioned, each new Shopify store requires you to create a separate Shopify account.
So, to create an additional store, you’ll need to manually set up your new Shopify account. The process will be the same as for your original store.
Remember to link this new account to the email address you used for your original store account.
Step 2: Optimize Each Site Specifically
How your additional store is set up will depend on the reason for its creation. If you’re selling different products in this store or targeting a different customer demographic, you need to optimize its content to match your business goals.
This means:
- Editing or re-writing product copy
- Organizing and grouping products
- Store color schemes and design
You’ll also need to optimize each store to their specific SEO requirements. This means:
- Conducting keyword research and implementing results in your copy
- Building strong linking structures throughout your store
- Conducting A/B testing to understand what copy and CTA prompts work well with the target customer
Step 3: Centralize Your Order Management System
Rather than working with multiple order management systems and struggling to keep track of your output, you should centralize all ordering activities to one system. This allows you to more easily manage orders across all of your sites, as well as:
- Returns
- Customer Care
- Drop shipping
- Subscriptions (if applicable)
Choosing a system that is built to seamlessly integrate with Shopify is key to smooth, customer-friendly ecommerce journeys. That’s why implementing a subscription management platform like Upscribe makes sense.
Upscribe’s features are inspired by the subscriber journey, with a focus on achieving Shopify checkout optimization. With Upscribe, your customers can re-order products, edit or gift their subscription or skip a shipment with a click of a button.
By simplifying and personalizing the subscription journey, Upscribe will help your business:
- Reduce churn
- Increase subscription revenue
- Automate key business activities
for all of your storefronts.
Step 4: Get inventory updates in real-time
Accurate stock information is critical to the smooth running of any ecommerce business. It’s even more important when you’re trying to keep track of multiple stores. That’s why implementing real-time inventory updates is so important.
By implementing a real-time inventory update tool, you’ll be able to:
- See inventory levels change in real time
- Update your stores with accurate stock numbers and protect your buyer experience
- Avoid overselling
- Better gauge production requirements
Step 5: Choose the right PIM system
A PIM system (product information management system) will help you track your product information across all of your stores. This will save you time, money and will help minimize product information errors.
This helps you create a unified information template that you can adopt across multiple stores. It keeps your interface looking clean and organized, and your data up to date and accurate.
Step 6: Consolidate Your Customer Service
Providing good and fast customer support is essential for any ecommerce business. With multiple Shopify stores under your belt, you’ll naturally see an increase in customer queries.
Adopting a unified customer support system across your stores will help you keep track and manage customer communications in one convenient place.
By centralizing this critical business management process, you can track customer feedback, collect customer data and incorporate your findings into effective customer experience and product developments.
Conclusion
If prioritizing growth is part of your 2023 ecommerce business plan, it’s time to expand to a Shopify multi-store. This business model can help you:
- Effectively market and sell your products internationally
- Target specific customer niches through selected product lines
- Segment your products to manage and drive your brand value
As each store will require a separate account, it’s imperative you streamline and centralize your business activities across your stores as much as possible. As a Shopify business owner, you should particularly prioritize implementing an effective order/subscription management system, like Upscribe.
A platform like this will support your order fulfillment process and elevate your customer experience across all of your stores. With extreme customer personalize-ability, your business will maximize subscription-based revenue and minimize customer queries, giving you more time to focus on business development.
Become one of the businesses that benefits from the $500 million in subscription revenue that Upscribe has helped generate, and join Upscribe now.
