How To Launch Your Multi Store Ecommerce Portal Easily

Do you have an online store or are you looking forward to build an online store?  

Do you deal with multiple product types and different audiences?

Do you want to increase your potential customers and online sales? 

Well, everyone wishes to have a successful business and gain huge popularity like Amazon eBay, multiple storefronts have been a super successful business model. Talking specifically about ecommerce business, Amazon has given a whole new meaning to the concept of the multi store model.

Wondering what a multi store ecommerce platform is? Don’t worry, we will let you in on everything you need to know about running multiple stores on a single platform.

Let’s start from the beginning.  

What is a multi store and why does your business need one?

As the name suggests, a multi store ecommerce portal allows you to launch and manage multiple stores for a variety of purposes. Most online businesses build their ecommerce site by putting all the eggs in one basket. But this approach is usually convenient for vendors as it is easier to manage everything in one place. But in this modern ecommerce world, this thumb rule does not hold strong for different audiences visiting the same store.

For example, there is a distributor running a store and providing healthcare products to many hospitals and clinics.  Now, instead of catering to all the hospitals from a single site, the distributor can create multiple stores for every hospital or clinic. The distributor can make changes to cater the individual requirements and personalize the offerings to every hospital or clinic accordingly. Well, it's not only the design but a multi store ecommerce platform can help you create offers that are exclusive to a particular store while the remaining stores are oblivious to it. 

Why choose an ecommerce site with multiple storefronts?

• Relevant products with multiple departments and verticals

• Target your marketing and promotions based on your audience and market

•  House multiple brands under one roof

• Centralized monitoring with a master portal

• Cater to different customer types, both B2B and B2C customers

• Leverage the platform to make more sales

•  Expand to new geographical territories 

Steps to launch your multi store ecommerce portal easily

1. Identify niche for each store 

Ecommerce market is hyper-diverse. Even giants like Amazon started as a niche retailer. So, it is important for ecommerce companies to identify the focus areas by conducting the SWOT analysis, understand the industry gaps, and customer persona analysis. 

At first, you might think that all the ecommerce niches are already taken but in reality, it is not true. With the targeted focus, you can build an online store by uncovering the unfulfilled consumer demands even within popular product categories. For example, there are plenty of options for toys. But some parents have growing concerns of exposing children to unsafe chemical compounds. Similarly, you have to cater to the niche requirement of the customers and target them with multiple stores. And it is much easier to manage multiple stores with a centralized dashboard with StoreHippo. It helps you to build and manage multiple stores without any technical or operational hassles.

2. Choose a headless ecommerce platform

When you know your business goals, now is the time to choose a pathway to reach the same. And choosing an ecommerce platform is the best path why? A headless platform ensures that multiple stores are managed according to customized geographies and target audience across multiple devices.

 It ensures that the content is consistent across multiple platforms and devices, including devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home.

And since headless commerce has gained a lot of traction, choose the right headless solution like StoreHippo to integrate multiple ecommerce capabilities for your multi store portal in one place. StoreHippo provides a SaaS-based decoupled headless solution with 300+ inbuilt ecommerce features. The platform lets online sellers create personalized online shopping experiences for customers in each target market.

3. Build your network or chain of sub-stores from a single dashboard

The reason for building a multi store ecommerce portal is to gain more profits but at the same time, you need to think about hassle-free operations. Obviously, you can’t manage multiple storefronts on different dashboards, have different logins, and waste whole of your time. Well, an ecommerce platform like StoreHippo can help you streamline all the processes and make the most of features and chain of sub-stores from a single platform.

StoreHippo allows you to manage multiple websites efficiently using a single dashboard. You can easily allocate products, deals, discounts, shipping, payments gateways to various sub-stores with a centralized dashboard.

4. Develop a master inventory and order management system

A major issue with the development of multiple online stores involves maintaining inventory databases. When you need to deal with separate inventories, stock level discrepancies are bound to happen. For example, if you build an online store with multiple storefronts and need to manually reconcile the inventory for every store, it will be a very hectic process. And also, there is a high risk of having inaccurate stock levels and mismanaged order management.

No worries, StoreHippo can handle it all for you. It enables you to keep a single master copy of the inventory database to save time and effort, while also avoiding problems with customers expecting an item that is no longer in stock.

5. Develop ecommerce SEO strategy with in-built SEO tools 

Managing search engine optimization (SEO) for multiple online stores is a huge challenge. You need to think about optimizing each and everything for your search engine. For example, optimization of title tags, header tags, meta description and so on for every online store.

But a multi store ecommerce portal does not have to come with all these hassles. With StoreHippo, you can easily create multiple sub domains or domains for your storefronts to ensure better marketing. Every URL helps you to create a better SEO strategy with different keyword sets for each storefront.

6. Use simplified marketing tools to attract, engage, and convert buyers

Just like SEO, marketing for different sites also works differently. It is important to ensure that the marketing message and tone used for different platforms are customized. Building a multi store business with StoreHippo helps you to use different keywords for each store and cater to target customers with ease.

But if you build an online store with StoreHippo. You can engage and convert your customers better by offering them diverse products through various storefronts on your multi store website. Storehippo provides a one-stop platform to plan your targeted marketing campaigns. The powerful discount engine helps you to offer personalized offers to customers, abandoned cart recovery feature helps you to boost conversions, email integration helps you to take regular customer follow ups and send personalized recommendations to customers. And there are many more tools that can attract, engage, and convert maximum customers.

7. Make it mobile-ready

Ecommerce is increasingly becoming more of m-commerce. Today, most of the online orders are placed on smartphones or other mobile devices. If you have to survive and succeed in the race your multi-store website needs to be mobile ready. If your customers visiting different stores visit your website on mobile devices or apps, it is important to be readily available there.

Having a multi store ecommerce portal with StoreHippo helps you build mobile ready solutions for multiple stores and leverage all the features like push notifications. It also allows you to build multiple mobile-ready stores, get iOS and Android mobile apps for your business, get mobile-ready themes for your multiple stores, and build PWA stores that look, feel and work like mobile apps.

Why is StoreHippo the best platform to launch your multi store ecommerce platform?

With the enormous benefits of multiple storefronts on your ecommerce site, this setup is ideal for brands looking for targeted marketing to tap new markets. To survive and thrive in this dynamic world of ecommerce and leverage the benefits of multiple storefronts, you just need a feature-rich multi store ecommerce platform like StoreHippo to help you roll out multiple storefronts easily and quickly.

StoreHippo offers the best ecommerce platform that can give your online business a new dimension. It comes with 300+ inbuilt features that help you grow your multi store business to new heights of success. Along with these features and tools, StoreHippo comes with a host of other features that help you rule the hyperlocal as well as the global markets.

Ready to build an online store with multiple storefronts? Schedule a free online trial store to explore the comprehensive multi store ecommerce solution of StoreHippo.