Multi-Storefront is an exciting new featured debut by the SaaS online store platform BigCommerce, allowing merchants to design and manage multiple storefronts from a single shop.
This new feature is welcome news for store owners and developers making it possible to manage everything in a single master store. Merchants will have the flexibility to create different front-end designs for brands and regions while still managing product and order data in one backend.
The latest upgrade by BigCommerce mirrors what Shopify is attempting to do with Shopify Markets, where users can target geographic locations with different pricing, languages, subdomains, and advanced settings such as duties and taxes.
Creating a different shopping experience for your users will be an attractive feature for store owners. Being able to showcase your products in a unique “skin” where you can change colors, currency, and more to match your buyer persona will significantly affect conversion metrics. It goes even further by allowing you to set up different transactional emails, pricing, and different payment options. All of this means the merchants and their customers enjoy a better experience throughout the customer journey.
Additionally having one master store and separate storefronts will also help reduce costs and save operational time.
Interest in Online B2B/Wholesale markets is growing yearly, and this new feature will allow merchants to split their online shops into B2C/B2B multi-stores where you can tailor the experience to match the type of customers. For instance, Wholesale customers might not be interested in too many design frills and want a cleaner, faster way of ordering online. Your B2b multi-store can do away with many design-heavy features and focus more on speed, educating the buyer, and making checkout as fast and smooth as possible.
“Multi-Storefront marks a significant milestone in our platform's ability to serve the most complex use cases and is expected to be the most transformative of our enterprise product enhancements. This powerful new capability gives merchants the flexibility to grow their brand, segment and geographic scope within the scalable context of a single account.”
Brent Bellm, CEO at BigCommerce
Localization as a trend in e-commerce is growing, and BigCommerce has taken a big step in the right direction to empower its users to delve into this exciting new trend in online shopping.
Some of the key features of the new Multi-Storefront include:
- Manage multiple stores from a single location
- Create separate categories for each store
- Create category-level discount for customer groups
- Manage product availability across all multi-stores
- Manage all your customers and orders
- Track important analytics across your store and set up separate Google Analytics account for each
- Do A/B testing to see what designs work best for different regions
- Choose a default currency for each store
- Customize order emails
- Add customer pricing groups
- Add a domain for each multi-store
- Add a separate SSL for each store
Important Limitations to be Aware of:
- There is a limit of 10,000 products per storefront
- Every product can only have 70 variants(compared to Shopify's 100 variant limit)
- You can display up to 100 categories in navigation
- Each category is limited to 1,000 products
- Daily order limit is set up 1,000 orders per store
- You must use Stencil theme, Blueprint themes are not support for this feature
- You must use One-Page Checkout
- Your store must enable v3 Rest APIs for: Catalog, Customers, Redirects, Pages and Scripts
