Best Way to Set Up Multi-Zone Selling with Subdomains on Shopify?

[ganguramonline]

Hi Shopify Community,

I am looking for advice on the best and most cost-effective way to set up my Shopify store. My plan is as follows:

• I will have one main domain (brandname.com) that serves as a landing page, providing information about our brand and what we sell.
• There will be two subdomains (local.brandname.com & national.brandname.com), each catering to different delivery zones:
  • Local Zone (local.brandname.com) – for customers within a specific region.
  • National Zone (national.brandname.com) – for customers across the country.
• On the main landing page (brandname.com), customers will select their delivery zone and be redirected accordingly.

My Concern:

To achieve this, I initially thought I would need two Shopify plans (one for each subdomain) while managing orders and inventory from a single admin dashboard. However, it seems like I would also need a third Shopify plan just for the main landing page, which increases costs significantly.

My Questions:

1. Is there a way to achieve this setup while keeping costs minimal?
2. Would Shopify Markets or Shopify Expansion stores help in this case?
3. Are there any third-party solutions or workarounds to handle inventory and orders centrally while keeping the subdomains separate?

I would appreciate any insights or alternative solutions from those who have managed a similar setup. Thanks in advance! 😊

[EcomGraduates]

If you’re trying to run both local and national zones with different product availability, pricing, or shipping rules, Shopify Markets can help a little but not fully. Markets is mostly about international selling and it uses domains or subfolders, but it doesn’t split your inventory or order flow between two subdomains like you’re talking about. You’d still be working under one storefront and wouldn’t get that true subdomain separation.

Expansion stores are usually what big brands use on Shopify Plus when they need multiple front-ends like that, but yeah, that gets expensive fast and only makes sense at scale. 

Use just one Shopify store for now and use geolocation logic or a zone selector popup on the main domain. When someone selects local or national, you show or hide products, collections, or even pages using Shopify’s native location-based inventory or custom Liquid conditions. So instead of a subdomain for each, you use Shopify’s backend to control what they see—like filtering products based on tags or locations and using cookies or local storage to remember their zone.

If you're really set on using subdomains and want separate design, branding, or layout per zone, then yes it’d require separate storefronts which means more plans. But if it’s mostly about separating inventory and delivery logic, you can absolutely do that from one store with some clever setup.