How to run multiple stores from one admin

Merchants add a second store for a handful of reasons:

• A second brand. A coffee roaster launches a tea brand with its own name, domain and look.
• Wholesale. Business buyers get their own site with their own prices, away from retail shoppers.
• Another country or language. Shoppers in another market see translated pages, local prices and local shipping.
• An outlet. End-of-line stock sells on a separate site so it does not undercut full-price pages.

Running each one as a separate platform account means separate catalogs, separate stock and separate logins. Every product edit happens twice, and stock goes wrong as soon as both stores sell the same item. Running them as websites in one store avoids that.

Magento, the open-source commerce engine, organizes multiple stores in three layers. The same ideas appear under other names on other platforms.

1. Website. The top layer. A website usually has its own domain, and it can have its own customers, its own prices, its own currency, and its own payment and shipping methods.
2. Store. A website contains one or more stores. Each store has its own root category, which decides which part of the catalog it shows.
3. Store view. A store contains one or more views. A view is usually a language: the same products and prices, with translated names, descriptions and pages.

The catalog itself sits above all three. You create a product once, then choose which websites sell it, and translate it per store view.

List what differs between your stores, then pick the lowest layer that handles it. Lower layers are simpler to run.

A common mistake is creating a website for something a store view handles, like a translation. That doubles the setup for every payment method and shipping rule, for no benefit.

Decide whether one customer account works on every website, or each website keeps its own customers. Both are common, and the choice is hard to undo.

• Shared accounts suit brands that cross-sell. A customer signs in once and sees their orders from both shops.
• Separate accounts suit wholesale and retail, or brands that should look unrelated. A retail shopper never lands in the wholesale account by mistake.

Newsletters follow the same choice. In the EU and UK, consent given to one brand is not consent for another. Wherever you sell, keep subscriber lists separate unless the customer agreed to both.

Each website can offer its own payment methods and shipping rates. A country store may need a local payment method and local carriers. A wholesale site may accept bank transfer and skip free shipping.

Tax follows the customer’s location and the product, so it is usually set once for the whole account. Check it anyway when you open a store in a new country, where prices may need to include tax rather than add it at checkout.

Each website can have its own domain, such as yourtea.com next to yourcoffee.com. Language views often share one domain, with the shopper choosing a language in the header.

When one product appears on two sites or in two languages, help search engines:

• Link language versions of a page to each other with hreflang tags, so each market sees its own version in search results.
• Write different descriptions for the same product on two brand sites, or set a canonical URL that names the main one.
• Give every domain HTTPS, and redirect old addresses when you move a page.

Catalog. Share products where you can. A product that sells on two websites is one product with two website assignments, so an edit to its photos reaches both.

Stock. Decide whether websites share stock or keep their own. Shared stock is simpler and avoids holding the same item twice. Separate stock suits a country store that ships from its own warehouse.

Currency. Each website charges in one base currency. You can still show prices in other currencies with a switcher, converted at a rate you set. When shoppers in a market expect to pay in their own currency, give that market its own website.

Two brands should look like two brands. Give each website its own logo, colors and fonts, and its own home page. Language views of one store keep the same design and swap the words.

Reuse what you can. A size guide, a returns page or a care page often works on every site with small edits. Build it once, copy it to the second store, and change the parts that differ. Keep a short list of which pages are shared, so an update to one reaches the others.

1. Write down every store you want in the next two years, not only the next one.
2. For each, list what differs: brand, domain, language, prices, customers, payment, shipping, tax.
3. Map each difference to a layer with the table above.
4. Decide which products each website sells, and whether stock is shared.
5. Decide who on your staff runs which store, and who signs off on shared products.

The plan takes an afternoon. Moving products and customers between websites after launch takes much longer.

With the plan on paper, the build is a short list. Do it on a quiet week, and keep the first store running exactly as it is while you test the second.

1. Create the website, store and store view, and connect the domain.
2. Assign the products it sells, and set its prices if they differ.
3. Set its payment methods, shipping rates and order emails.
4. Build its home page and menus, and copy the shared pages across.
5. Place a test order on each website, and check stock, prices and emails on both.
6. Point the domain at the new site, and watch the first week of orders closely.

When the second store is stable, the third one is easier. Most of the work above becomes a copy of the second store with a different domain and design.