Bets practise for 2 domains?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A Shopify merchant operates a single store with two markets (New Zealand and Australia) using separate domains and inventory per region. The core issue: product detail pages (PDPs) don’t reflect market-specific stock levels—Australian customers can add out-of-stock items to cart and only discover unavailability at checkout.

Problem: Shopify doesn’t natively handle market-level inventory visibility on PDPs.

Solutions being explored:

  • Keep single store and use apps or custom code to gate “Add to Cart” based on market stock
  • Split into two separate Shopify stores for accurate regional inventory
  • Leverage Shopify Plus features

Suggested approach: Use variant metafields (e.g., “Available in AU”/“Available in NZ”) that update automatically with inventory changes, then customize theme code to control PDP availability. However, this requires significant custom development and complicates theme updates.

Alternative recommendation: Split into two stores and manage cross-domain SEO (hreflang tags) via an app—considered simpler than extensive theme customization.

The discussion remains open with no definitive solution implemented yet.

Summarized with AI on October 24. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hi,

We run one Shopify store with two markets/domains (.co.nz and .com.au) and separate inventory per market. The problem: PDPs don’t respect market-level stock. If an item is OOS in Australia, the AU product page still allows Add to Cart, and customers only discover it’s unavailable at checkout after entering delivery details. Not ideal.

From what I can tell, Shopify doesn’t handle this out of the box at the PDP level. Looks like it needs an app or custom code.

Question for anyone who’s solved this at scale:

  • Did you keep a single store with Markets and use an app/custom code to gate Add to Cart by market stock?

  • Did you split into two stores (NZ/AU) to keep PDP stock accurate per region?

  • Or go with Shopify Plus/advanced features to manage this cleanly?

  • Any app recommendations or implementation gotchas?

Goal: If AU stock = 0, AU PDP should show OOS and block Add to Cart, while NZ remains purchasable. Looking for best-practice architecture and practical solutions. Thanks.

2

Yeah, unfortunately.

Two stores would require custom handling of hreflangs (there is an app for this though).

Technically, you can have a metafield on each variant, like “Available in AU”/“Available in NZ” and update it automatically with each inventory change.
And then use it to control availability on the PDP instead of native variant.available
But that’s a lot of custom code to add to your theme (and makes theme updates complex).

If your theme is already custom/edited, this would be less of an issue, but using an APP to manage your hreflangs would be easier IMO.