How to setup BigCommerce Multiple Stores?

Opening a wide range of online stores seems to be a trend recently so that online businesses can have the opportunity to reach more target customers. This has led to the development of BigCommerce Multiple Stores, which designs for the specific reason.

BigCommerce has released a function of managing multiple stores from one control panel using the WordPress plugin. However, up to this point, this functionality has only been available for WordPress users. If you are one of them, this is a perfect solution for your store.

Today’s article will be talking about how BigCommerce multiple stores work, the pros and cons of using them and a tutorials of setting up BigCommerce Multiple Stores with the help of WordPress plugin.

What are BigCommerce Multiple Stores?

Multi-store is a mix of many separate stores, and with the eCommerce industry, multi-store means that one online retailer can manage their multiple stores only in a single control panel. BigCommerce Multiple stores feature will allow you to assign settings to all of your stores from a single account instead of creating a different account for each of the websites.

In case you are attempting to widen your eCommerce market and open another store, there is no need to sign up for a new BigCommerce account, the settings for BigCommerce multiple stores will be introduced right away. Keep reading to find out more!

Pros and Cons of using BigCommerce for Multiple Stores

Before heading right into the tutorials for how to set up the BigCommerce multiple stores feature, we will explain both the advantages and disadvantages of this setting. It is a pretty new definition for someone who is unfamiliar with the concept but it is advisable for online merchants to gain deep understanding about multistore.

No more beating around the bush; below are both the benefits and drawbacks of BigCommerce multiple stores management:

Pros

Better shopping experience

The majority of people go to your website knowing exactly what they are going to buy and what they are looking for and most are for comparison purposes. Therefore, try to make your online store the easiest for your customers to seek for their desired products. The more clicks they have to spend, the higher chance they would leave your site either way.

This is when BigCommerce multiple stores become more vital. Instead of spending time scrolling back and forth pages of categories, you can create different sites for each section of items. This helps to locate everything they need right in front of their eyes. You may think that this only makes a small difference in their time spent surfing your website but it could generate big profits. Try it and then you will see the result!

Moreover, a website for each category of products will gain you the ability to reach the target consumer of the products more easily.

Evaluate SEO in marketing

SEO or Search engine optimization is one of the most effective tools when it comes to eCommerce business. And BigCommerce multiple stores feature will help online merchants to make full use of it. It is stated that over one third of your customers come from SEO, which means if you focus on it your conversion rates will increase.

So how does this SEO work in an eCommerce multi-store? You can hardly make sure that your customers can find what they are looking for on your website. This is where they will use search engines to seek its location, and they will tend to click on the easiest alternative that appears on top of the page. But what if they have found the more relevant shop, they should be able to find the product easily. With this arrangement, they would have no option other than to keep scrolling the website.

People go to websites they click on, not pages they are assigned to. You will want to increase the number of websites leading to your material because your Search Engine Optimization thinks it’s useful. When you have more than one online store, you can use your own pages to increase the productivity of SEO.

Multiple pages will enable you to rank multiple locations with the same search query. The chances of doing this are greater because the pages are on separate forms.

Globalization ability

Managing BigCommerce multiple stores simultaneously gave you the possibility to widen your current market and start to expand to other countries across the globe. With each country, you can set up a new website with more appropriate content, images and currency, and the default language.

Using a location targeting strategy will be more effective. If you maintain separate online storefronts for each geographical area, the content may be tailored more accurately. This gains your store a benefit in standing out from the rest of the rivalries and quickly sealing the deal.

Cons

Difficulty in updating information

The more online websites you are building, the harder it is to manage and keep the information up-to-date at all times. In order to gain the highest profits, all online merchants want their customers to receive the latest information and products on their website. Conversely, they may have to spend much time updating all of them while uploading content, images, and translation into various languages. These processes could take up to days for them to be available.

Additionally, if you want to update an item’s status, such as sold out or restock, you also have to adjust all the websites in the shortest possible time. For this reason, it is best for online business managers to integrate specialized tools to fix the problems. But they may have to pay a certain amount of money for this act.

Duplicate catalog and content

The real reason behind extending more websites is to diversify your products and reach different groups of customers. Most e-tailers want each site to contain and provide a dissimilar amount of content, catalogs. This might be a stumbling block for them while managing BigCommerce multiple stores.

There will be a big duplication of content on the catalog or blogs for various online stores as they are sharing the same product inventory and control panel. It will be time-consuming when adjusting one by one.

Expensive

Setting up BigCommerce multiple stores indicates that you do not have to pay a monthly fee multiple times for every account anymore. But it still can charge you a large amount of money per month for every extension tool needed to keep the websites running effectively. The most costly thing is the hosting server as it is necessary to have a durable, stable and high-performing one.

If you are considering this idea, please assure that you have prepared enough money to keep your business running.

How to set up BigCommerce Multiple Stores

After knowing about how BigCommerce multiple stores work and what you would get after the experience, it’s time to set up this particular feature.

Just a small warning, BigCommerce have only offered its users the multisite through WordPress plugin, so if you are not having a store on WordPress, this may not apply to your business.

You need to use an API account to add more than one WordPress platform to your BigCommerce store. If you click on the “Connect your store” button using a BigCommerce application for the streamlined connection, your first WordPress website will lose its link to BigCommerce. Below are the instructions to getting your API credentials; your online stores can either have the same or different ones for each.

At your BigCommerce dashboard, go to Advanced Settings > API accounts, this is how your screen will look like:

Next, there is a blue button called “Create API Account”, click on it and move to the next step:

There is a pop-up screen for you to fill in your API account’s name and OAuth Scopes. It is recommended to use “WordPress” or anything that is distinct from your API accounts plus contains more than three characters:

With the OAuth Scopes selection, this is how you should set everything up:

Remember to ** “Save”** your changes. You succeed once you are provided with this information:

Setting up BigCommerce multiple stores on WordPress means that you must have an account for WordPress; it only takes you a few minutes to create one. At the control panel of your WordPress, you will see a ** “Enter your API credentials”** on the welcome screen:

Here is how your screen will continue to be:

Please enter in the three boxes with the given API credentials from the previous step, including the Client ID, Client Secret, and Access Token. If you are finished, click on “Connect using API credentials”

This means that you are ready to list out all of the products within BigCommerce and link them with your WordPress. You can also connect existing stores.

Apps for managing BigCommerce Multiple Stores

It might be a challenge to keep track of a plethora of BigCommerce stores at the same time; don’t worry these applications are born to solve your problems. We have picked out the top 5 best alternatives for you to choose from in the “Inventory & Order Management” section of BigCommerce Apps Marketplace.

On the basis of the productivity, cost and provided functions, these apps will clear your mind in managing BigCommerce multiple stores:

1. SKULabs

There are reasons why we put SKULabs at the top of the list. It comes along with many outstanding features that are considered super effective for multisite managers. For instance:

• Low stock warnings: you can’t always keep an eye on your inventory, especially the number of products you in the inventory. SKULabs will send a notification everytime it notices your products are running at a low number. Thanks to this, you can update them at the right time and your customers no longer have to wait for the restock status.
• Barcode scanning: with every assigned code for different products, it will fasten and decrease the chance of mistakes to happen during the encoding process. Barcode scanning is not only a time-saving tool but also can be help increasing customer satisfaction.
• Real-time synchronization: one of the drawbacks of BigCommerce multiple stores is keeping the information up-to-date. But SKULabs’s real-time synchronization will help retailers to update the inventory through all distribution channels automatically. Only if your shop and the catalogs are connected, product adjustments will be kept in sync.
• 24/7 customer support: You might run into difficulties while customizing your websites or simply need guidance on how to use any of their functions. The Customer Service team is willing to help at any time of the day. All you have to do is pick up the phone and dial the number. Super quick and easy, right?

2. BrightPearl

Receiving a 5-star rating on the BigCommerce App Marketplace, you can understand how much people love BrightPearl at the moment. Talking about inventory management, BrightPearl knows exactly what they are doing.

Handling BigCommerce multiple stores at one moment has the same meaning as processing a wide scope of transactions. BrightPearl can help you with their automated accounting system, in which all of your payment receipt, shipment and stock receive functions are updated automatically into the information store. In essence, any report is up to date, with no compilation done.

Besides, all campaigns and any other distribution outlets are synchronized in real-time, making it possible for BrightPearl to continually and effortlessly manage all sales volume. Through the addition of Brightpearl, merchants would be able to conduct all of their orders and monitor from one control panel and be more efficient in consolidating inventory.

If those are what you seek for at a BigCommerce multiple stores inventory management application, get in touch with BrightPearl right now!

3. Linnworks

Linnworks is pretty similar with SKULabs and BrightPearl from included features to the price. The one thing that makes Linnworks stand out is its advanced reporting and analytics software. Apart from the ability to customize reports based on selected groups, shop and date, you can keep track of customers demand for specific products. That gives you time to consider how your inventory requirements could change in the future and to make your decisions based on them.

The price for Linnworks membership varies from $0 to $1,000 a month.

4. Shopventory

Another potential choice you could put into your wish list is Shopventory. The great thing about Shopventory is that it takes advantage of POS so that you can have the best experience in administering BigCommerce multiple stores. And whether you are a small or huge size business, Shopventory is flexible for all kinds.

Shopventory is one of the quickest and easiest ways to synchronize your inventory. It works as a coordination center for all products and keeps all of your online websites updated. Other extra data reporting tools can be named inventory valuation reporting, dead and low stock reporting, vendor profitability reporting, etc.

All of this only comes with a price of $99 monthly, and you can get a chance to try out the free version for 30 days. What a deal!

5. Multiorders

If the first four is too expensive for you, the Multiorders might be a better option. Within only $24 a month, it will give you what you need for managing BigCommerce multiple stores, including both product inventory and shipment transactions on a single dashboard. Although Multiorders is not yet as advanced as the applications above, it is still possible for you to improve the brand’s performance.

You can totally sign up for the trial version of Multiorders lasting for 14 days in order to have an insight into what you can achieve from them.

Conclusion

To sum up, BigCommerce multiple stores feature provides online business to grasp more information about their potential customers and have diverse strategies to approach them. Setting them up only takes a few steps but can gain an unexpected profit in the long run.

More specifically, if you are managing a brand offering a wide variety of products can divide them into several websites, since this structure might bring back a better service for your consumers and adds to the business prospects.