You would think it would be easier to manage multiple Shopify stores from a single login. While Shopify has certainly made progress in this regard, it’s still not easy.
Logic Inbound manages dozens of stores for clients, as well as 3 of our own e-commerce stores. Today we’re sharing our knowledge on how we handle so many stores with minimal friction.
Before we talk about what we do, and why we do it, let’s quickly recap the issue.
Shopify Only Allows One Store Per Username
Ideally, you would be able to manage multiple stores from a single login. Signing in and out of accounts all day isn’t fun, and can feel like a frustrating waste of time.
Unfortunately, this feature isn’t yet available – although Shopify knows it has been an issue as far back as 2013.
Shopify customer Khan Von sums up everybody’s frustration nicely:
Maybe one day, Khan, maybe one day.
How Does Shopify Allow You To Manage Multiple Stores?
The closest we can get with the default Shopify functionality is to have one login email address and multiple stores associated with that email. For security reasons, you should use a unique password for each store; for pragmatic reasons, many users will reuse the same password. It’s tough to remember multiple passwords and keep track of which one is for which account.
To avoid this problem, we suggest using a password manager, like LastPass. This allows you to store and quickly fill login screens with unique & secure passwords without needing to remember them yourself.
So, How Do I Manage Multiple Shopify Storefronts?
This is the easy way. Depending on your need, third-party apps can help cover this functionality. If your stores are completely separate verticals and aren’t sharing inventory you can use this method.
- Log in to your store fronts
- Favorite the pages you land on immediately after signing in (https://yourshopname.myshopify.com/admin)
- Organize your favorites
- Download LastPass
- Try to Login
- Wrong email/store selected
- Correct store/email
- Attempt to login
- Got it!
3rd Party Apps to Manage Multiple Shopify Stores
There are more than a few 3rd party app developers who saw the demand from customers for a solution to their multi-store management woes. The lack of action from Shopify prompted developers to take care of it themselves.
Rewind
This app doesn’t allow you to manage multiple stores directly, but it plays an important part in the process.
When you are logging in and out of Shopify accounts all day, it can be easy to lose focus and modify the wrong store. Depending on the action taken while not paying attention this could lead to an unintended removal of data.
Shopify doesn’t have any concept of ‘undo’ or ‘recycle bin’, meaning anything modified or deleted in Shopify is permanently modified or deleted.
To mitigate potential disaster, or avoid many tedious hours of cleaning up the disaster you created, you should check out the Rewind App in Shopify’s App Store.
Rewind is a completely automated backup system that allows you to retrieve deleted or lost data. It’s great insurance against human errors, especially when dealing with multiple stores.
Stitch Labs
One of the biggest headaches from managing multiple stores is managing your order flow from each store. Stitch Labs provides a centralized order management dashboard to help you manage returns, fulfillment, and drop shipping.
As a Shopify store grows, most business owners will delegate the tedious, lower value work like order fulfillment and returns to an employee or contractor. Your team has a cost associated with the work they do, and they can only do so much work in a day. Leveraging an app like Stitch Labs allows you to multiply their efficiency, handling more order fulfillment than they could without it.
Increasing the size of your team adds cost, risk, and administrative overhead, so if you can empower a team member to do more, you should. It’s easier than hiring an additional person to do the same tasks.
nChannel
nChannel is similar to Stitch Labs in enabling you to manage multiple store fronts, but it takes it a step further by covering multiple platforms. nChannel’s centralized dashboard allows you to manage your Shopify, Amazon, Ebay and New Egg stores.
Once you’ve deployed nChannel to consolidate your inventory and push it to multiple e-commerce platforms, you’ll probably begin to realize you need help in other areas such as accounting integration, supply chain management, and vendor management.
nChannel has you covered with functionality there too.
For drop shipping businesses, nChannel reconciles the payment and shipping info to make sure your orders are legitimate. It helps you with real-time invoicing and shipping notifciations, and lets you manage sales and supplier channels from the same place.
Supply chain management can be a difficult task particularly for entrepreneurs without a large staff. nChannel helps you split orders to multiple fulfillment locations, work with multiple suppliers to ensure the most efficient sourcing, and automatically route your orders to the best supplier available.
Managing vendors is easier as well. nChannel makes it easy to integrate several suppliers on one platform, route orders intelligently, and keep data flowing between suppliers, distributors, and wholesalers in real time.
There are even more features the further you delve into this app. nChannel is an important part of any process for managing multiple Shopify stores.
What is The Best App To Manage Multiple Stores On Shopify?
As you’ve no doubt heard before, the devil is in the details. Your business is different than ours or our clients’. Your best bet to really find the best fit is to contact each organization’s pre-sales teams to set up a time to walk through a demo and discuss your specific pain points. They’ll be happy to explain how their solution could solve your problems.
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The post The ULTIMATE Guide to Managing Multiple Shopify Stores in 2018 appeared first on Logic Inbound.
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