How to make multiple Shopify stores to maximize your sales

Sellers will set up multiple stores with Shopify to expand their business, increase sales, and better serve their customers.

Unfortunately, you can’t set up multiple Shopify stores under one account. However, there is a solution. Shopify multiple stores refer to Shopify sellers who have more than one account, sometimes also known as a Shopify multi-store.

But, Shopify inventory management across different stores can quickly become confusing.

If you’re a manufacturer working this way, you will already know how confusing it can become managing several businesses on the go.

And with Katana, you can centralize your multiple Shopify stores when managing your business — especially if you’re selling products at different stores. For example, someone with consignment inventory will store products with another company and sell them directly to customers.

This article will look at how manufacturers can control their multiple Shopify stores and look into the Katana Shopify inventory synchronization feature, which is very important for accurate information on your inventory levels.

How many Shopify stores can you have?

The answer is that you can have as many Shopify stores as you want — it all depends on what your business needs.

There are various reasons as to why a business would have Shopify multiple stores. It could be that they sell vastly different products, or one store is B2B and the other a B2C.

Best practices when you have multiple Shopify stores

Running one store is a challenge in and of itself.

So, managing multiple Shopify stores only increases the pressure. That’s why it’s important to adopt certain methods of running your businesses. Otherwise, you’ll quickly get overwhelmed, and all your stores will suffer the consequences of poor business management.

To help you out, here’s a list of best practices for businesses running multiple Shopify stores:

1. Consolidate your customer support

Multiple queries from multiple Shopify stores can quickly lead to multiple problems if they come from different channels.

Consolidating your customer support system will allow you and your team to access queries from one place and ensure that no support tickets are left unanswered.

2. Using data to uncover hidden opportunities

It’s great taking the Shopify multi-store approach to selling because you can use each store’s analytics to discover untapped niches.

Take advantage of Google Analytics and other tools to find out information about the people who visit your store. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to see the demographics of people who make up your core audience and determine if you’re popular with a certain group. Once you have this information at hand, you can decide whether it’s worth refocusing your store, or investing in another store on Shopify, to better target this group.

3. Continuously work on SEO

To make sure you’re getting the most exposure for your Shopify multi-stores, you’re going to need to look into each store’s SEO.

Find a list of relevant high-ranking keywords on Google using free tools like Ubersuggest and target them across your websites on a landing page:

• Headings
• Meta-titles
• Image ALT descriptions

But, the key to SEO is to make this a continuous task to stay ahead of the competition. And be sure not to cannibalize your keywords by targeting them across different stores.

4. Centralize your order management

When orders start to pile up from your Shopify multi-store approach, you’re going to need to find a way to centralize your sales and manufacturing orders.

Otherwise, you’ll run the risk of losing track of orders, which will:

• Create bottlenecks
• Increase manufacturing lead times
• Ruin your business’s reputations

5. Take advantage of the Shopify App Store

Finding the right Shopify tools will help you centralize all your store and different departments.

The Shopify App Store comes with plenty of great plugins and integrations that will automate business processes for each of your stores. Just be sure to remember to find a tool that can also help you optimize your manufacturing.

Why having multiple Shopify stores is the right choice

Here are just a few reasons why it can be a lucrative decision for a manufacturer to set up multiple stores with Shopify:

1. Managing your brand’s value

This is the trickiest strategy to manage, and it’s why we want to talk about it first.

Some businesses with luxury brands have off-price or outlets to appeal to different audiences. This would be an ideal tactic for businesses with a brand that is a household name. The idea is to have your main store, but then open another store so that frugal customers can get something cheaper, without devaluing your other products.

An example of this theory in action is Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack.

2. Selling internationally

It could be that it’s time to open Shopify multiple storefronts to sell your products across the globe.

Even though you can show different currencies on one store, you can only receive payments in one currency, which is your store’s default. Depending on where you’re going to sell, there’s a chance you’ll be dealing with different tax rates and other regulations you’ll need to follow. Setting up a different store, even to sell the same products, allows you to ensure that your business is compliant.

The target audience in another country won’t necessarily be the same as the original store’s audience.

Each region should be treated as a different market, and you’re going to need to figure out how to attract that new audience.

3. Selling to different groups

If you are looking to sell your products to an international market, then you may want to tailor your store for different countries.

This may mean variating the language, currency, and even the design to attract each target customer group. Having different sites allows you to design your stores to attract different audiences. But this practice isn’t only limited to targeting different countries.

It can be used by businesses wishing to appeal to different customers and businesses separately.

How to set up multiple Shopify stores under one account

Sadly, you can’t have Shopify multiple stores on one account.

However, you can have multiple Shopify stores across different accounts. Alternatively, if you would rather experiment with managing multiple Shopify stores without committing capital, one solution is to create multiple shopfront experiences on one account. This would mean that you’ll have your main account and store, but subpages on your homepage or website will act as the other storefronts.

This is an affordable and easy solution to managing Shopify multi-store brands, but not ideal for handling your SEO for the different stores.

Challenges manufacturers have with multiple Shopify stores

Before we highlight the issues, manufacturers face selling products across multiple stores with Shopify. It should be mentioned that even though you might see your business in one of the above scenarios, you should evaluate if your business is ready to support another website.

But, if you decide that you’re ready to have Shopify multiple stores, you should be aware of the challenges that come with them and how you can overcome them. Let’s begin with the most crucial element and then break it down — having multiple Shopify stores means you’re going to have to deal with separate sales orders, production schedules, and inventory management.

1. Sales orders

As you’re dealing with orders from two or more stores, it can get messy quickly, especially when trying to fulfill orders or receive returned products.

2. Inventory

The same goes for managing your inventory. One little error, and you could end up storing dead stock or even delaying your production.

3. Products

The way you prioritize and showcase products across Shopify’s multiple storefronts can easily confuse you as you manage several stores at once.

4. Integrated inventory management software

It’s challenging to manage the inventory of several Shopify stores, so many other Shopify sellers use cloud inventory software to achieve this. However, most software on the market is either designed for big corporations or tedious to implement into your business.

Use Katana to manage multiple Shopify stores from sales to production

Katana is a cloud inventory platform that comes with inventory management features you can use to optimize your multiple stores with Shopify. Katana gives thousands of manufacturers more control over order fulfillment, inventory management, and production planning with the following features:

1. Live inventory management — Items and materials moving around your inventory are automatically saved in real time. Katana’s unique master planning features take your available materials and allocate them to your manufacturing orders.
2. Streamlined floor-level management — Have a clearer understanding of your production statuses with our visual platform. However, if you need to prioritize a newer order, our drag-and-drop system allows you to do so and even redistributes material to accommodate the new workflow.
3. Integrating your e-commerce and accounting software — By integrating your Shopify multiple stores and accounting services, such as QuickBooks Online, you will be able to receive orders or generate invoices all from one platform.

How to integrate your Shopify stores with Katana

Katana integrates with Shopify to make your inventory management and sales fulfillment effortless.

Check out our simple walk-through video to get started:

How Katana’s Shopify inventory sync works

Katana can give you correct inventory readings across both accounts based on these factors:

• The sync is triggered by changes to the quantity of a product. So, if a product is committed to a sales order and updated as delivered, this will appear on Katana and your Shopify inventory.
• The stock sync only works if items exist in both Katana and Shopify. Once your items have been imported from Shopify to Katana and the stock sync has been enabled, any new products created afterward will not be synchronized. These new products will need to be manually added to both accounts for the stock sync to work.

Katana can match Shopify products by their Shopify SKU (or variant code) and import the data.

But if more than one product with matching SKUs, it’ll only import the product with the latest created date. There is also a way to export your products from Katana onto Shopify, but you’ll need to export an inventory list as a spreadsheet and import it into Shopify.

Example of inventory and stock synchronization

A manufacturer sells leather handbags across two stores, B2C and B2B.

They imported all their Shopify data onto Katana and enabled stock synchronization. Currently, they have 20 bags in stock, so both B2C and B2B stores will display that they have 20 handbags in stock on Shopify. If a sales order comes in from each store, one bag for the B2C store and ten bags for the B2B store, the inventory (once marked as delivered in Katana) will be reduced to nine.

But, if a manufacturing order for 20 bags was marked as finished on Katana shortly after, the stock levels (on Shopify and Katana) would increase to 29.

This centralized point of inventory control means you don’t have to monitor two different inventory levels, saves you the trouble of manually updating the new and accurate inventory levels, and allows you to fulfill sales orders from one platform.

However, it should be mentioned that when a sales order is generated on Shopify, the inventory is immediately lowered on Shopify.

But, on Katana, it won’t decrease straight away.

Instead, it’ll allocate available products, which you can find under Committed and, the inventory on Katana lowers once the sales order is fulfilled. For the visual learners among us, below you can find a short video explaining the stock synchronization:

Get total control over all your Shopify stores

Now you know how to optimize your Shopify multiple stores or what you need to do to get them running.

But also know the importance of finding a Shopify inventory software that can communicate with your Shopify store — giving you an autonomous, correct, and up-to-date overview of your stock levels. Having a stock synchronization feature means you won’t waste any more time tolling through spreadsheets. Katana gives you a centralized point to monitor your inventory across multiple storefronts, fulfill sales orders on time, plan production, and get a clearer understanding of your production status.

Request a demo to see it all in action.