The need for Multi Store eCommerce
No two customers are the same. So why would you serve them with the same user experience on your website? You may be dealing with multiple different audiences or want to move into new territories/ geographies with varying languages. You may have different products for different markets or customer segments. And you might even have a B2B offering as well as a D2C direct-to-consumer offering. It simply doesn’t make sense to have one website to try and meet all these needs and tick all these boxes. It wouldn’t work, and it would be a confusing mess.
So, what’s the solution? It’s all about multi-store eCommerce. Here we run through what multi-store is and why your business needs it.
What is multi-store eCommerce?
As the name suggests, multi-store eCommerce is the ability to manage multiple eCommerce storefronts from a single eCommerce platform. It brings the flexibility to launch more stores as your business grows.
Choosing a multi-store setup brings essential business flexibility
By opting for a multi-store eCommerce platform infrastructure, you can cater to a range of different business applications. Namely:
- Running multiple sites and brands – As an enterprise-level company with multiple brands, you can offer a unique shopping experience across each of your different branded websites without compromising on your centralised operation.
- Engaging with users through niche eCommerce websites- Multi-store enables you to create niche websites that are customer, category, event and promotion specific. You can activate your customer segmentation strategy and optimise your search and content for higher conversions. In fact, 94% of companies experienced a rise in conversion rates after personalising their websites. It’s an essential step to engage with today’s consumers.
- Managing multiple business models – With a single eCommerce platform and multiple eCommerce storefronts you can integrate different business models, whether B2B, B2C, D2C and run them seamlessly with a single backend eCommerce platform.
- Expand into new territories – A multi-store model enables you to move into multiple different territories/ geographies with fully optimised websites for each language, managed by a single platform. This gives you the flexibility to engage with multiple users across the world, whilst maintaining control in one place over essential elements, like pricing, stock levels, taxation, shipping methods, payment services and customer data.
What are the business benefits of a multi-store structure?
Whether you want to move into new territories, launch a B2B offering or run multiple brands, multi-store eCommerce brings a variety of benefits. They include:
- Serving relevant products to your audience – if you house your complete product offering on one website, it can quickly become confusing with complicated site navigation. By splitting into multiple stores, customers know exactly what they’re getting and will quickly find the right products for them, translating into more sales for your business. It’s customer-centric and efficient.
- Targeted marketing – now you can target your marketing communications based on a specific audience. Each brand will have a unique brand identity, tone of voice and will require bespoke marketing campaigns to engage users. Remember, 80% of consumers are likelier to do business with a company that offers personalised experiences. It’s down to you to give the users what they want.
- Centralised monitoring – managing the backend of your operations via one eCommerce platform means you can handle everything from one place. You can implement and update across all your storefronts at the same time or simply save an update for one of your websites. This also means that there won’t be any duplication of efforts, saving you time and expense.
- Reduced maintenance – by trimming down the number of systems and integrations your business relies on, you can decrease any ongoing maintenance. In the long run that means the opportunity to increase revenue across multiple websites whilst optimising the operational cost of the platform and provide fewer headaches for your internal teams.
- Data-driven decision making – having one unified data source means you can gain powerful insights from across all of your storefronts. This gives you the opportunity to analyse your business as one in a holistic way or look specifically at the performance of each storefront.
- Grow into new markets, smarter – whether new geographical markets, new product lines or a B2B offering, for example, you can grow and scale smarter with a custom eCommerce storefront experience for each new brand or market without additional work from your internal teams. It also brings the ability to test and learn and adapt your strategy to what you know works.
- Create different user journeys – a B2C user journey will be very different to those required to engage and ultimately sell to a B2B audience. By splitting the two, you have the ability to create bespoke user journeys, whilst still managing all your customer data in one place.
Which eCommerce platforms support multi-store eCommerce?
The benefits of multi-store eCommerce are all made possible by having the right eCommerce platform in place to support this capability. If you aren’t already working with a platform that supports multi store, this may require re-platforming. Please note that multi store is not the same. as operating multiple stores. They are very different things. The latter increases the amount of work a team needs to be able to undertake to trade and manage an eCommerce store. It also increases cost and complexity. Where as multi-store addresses these weaknesses head on and provides a platform optimised to build and run your online channels.
At DeeperThanBlue, we specialise in a range of eCommerce platforms that support multi-store commerce, including BigCommerce , Shopify and HCL Commerce. You can view our case studies working with these platforms and the rest of our eCommerce capabilities.
Get in touch with one of our specialists today to discuss the future of your business.