retailQ has just launched! Our app is now available on the Shopify App store.
Operating multiple Shopify stores is surprisingly common. There are many reasons why merchants run more than one shop:
- Agencies running stores on behalf of clients
- Merchants selling B2C (to consumers) and B2B (wholesale, to businesses) on another
- Different geographic markets, because in many situations Shopify's built-in Market functionality is not flexible enough
- Separate brands with a different theme or target market
- Subsidiaries that have been acquired
However, doing so is an operational challenge and adds significantly more complexity than running a single store. Here are just some of the pain points we've heard from merchants:
- Keeping inventory, product listings, and prices in sync across stores is difficult, often leading to overselling - which means awkward conversations with customers and refund fees
- Apps are more expensive. Multi-store operators often need to pay for one app subscription per store, which adds up to hundreds or thousands in monthly cost for the basics like customer support or bundling apps
- It's hard to track what's working and what's not without spending hours each week manually reconciling data. Many large operators end up implementing custom data warehouses, and smaller companies waste time in spreadsheets
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Most merchants operating multiple stores are also selling on multiple platforms, like Amazon, Walmart, eBay or Etsy.
There are 20-30 good apps already out there which solve the inventory and product listing sync problem. See Stock Sync, Sumtracker and Feedonomics for example, or search the many recommendations on Reddit or the Shopify help forums. Most merchants can find one of these which suits their needs.
There are far fewer apps which help multi-store merchants grasp their data and create analytics, dashboards and reports across all their stores. This is what retailQ does.
RetailQ's has a few specific features purpose-built for merchants operating multiple stores. For example:
- Automatic currency conversion. No matter what currency your store operates in, we use daily exchange rate data to convert it into your base currency.
- Merge product listings. If you sell the same product across multiple stores, it will show up in Shopify's analytics as two separate entities. That makes it hard to find your bestsellers or track current inventory. In retailQ, you can merge product listings together to solve this.
- Local timezone support. When you run a report in Shopify, times are converted into your organization's main time zone. That's a pain when you run multiple stores across timezones. Using the local time for each store makes it much easier to easily find orders and refunds, and you can drill down into which times of day are busiest for your stores to optimize staff rosters.
Starting today, we're aiming to be the best analytics platform for these merchants. We've begun with Shopify, but are quickly adding support for Amazon and Walmart soon.
