I sell goods to two completely different customer groups. Images, texts, product focus for one customer group do not work for the other. Therefore, I have to make changes.
I guess I have some choices like the following:
Two separate Shopify stores. What is cumbersome about this is that I have to have two agreements with suppliers, Stripe, two order logs etc. I understand there are apps that can synchronize products and orders? Does anyone have experience with that?
Create advanced landing pages with different URLs? But I guess the customer will quickly land in the wrong part of the webpage with wrong menus etc?
Are there any better solutions for two store fronts in a Shopify account?
Thank you for getting in touch and outlining your situation. Given the information you have shared, I believe the best solution for you would be to have two separate storefronts, as offering two different sets of products two varying customer bases is difficult to do with one store and not really what the platform is designed to do.
Shopify does allow merchants to cater for different customers on a regional basis through Shopify Markets, a new feature that merchants can use to target customers in different countries with regionalized preferences. For example, they can customize different currencies and languages for customers in different countries, as well as region-specific domains. However, in this circumstance the merchant would typically be selling the same or similar products across different borders, and would be targeting similar consumer groups.
There are apps that can help synchronize different Shopify stores, such as Syncio Multi Store Sync. This app would allow you to sync multiple stores using the app and manage inventory and product data between stores.
I hope this helps explain your options, but please let me know if you have further questions.
If customer accounts are required to view the site/layouts/products then this will be trivial by checking customer tags of signed in customers.
Yes this is done with sync apps, either found under “product sync”, “channel sync”, or “sku sync” ,etc ; though not all apps support cross-store sync. Some third party lowcode services like zapier, integromate can be leveraged for some things as well.
There are also automation apps like usemechanic that can be scripted to handle the sync business logic.
Create advanced landing pages with different URLs? But I guess the customer will quickly land in the wrong part of the webpage with wrong menus etc?
If customer accounts are required to view the site/layouts/products then this is trivial by checking customer tags.
There are apps like locksmith that can facilitate such access control https://apps.shopify.com/locksmith (made by lightward the same team that makes mechanic)
If accounts are not required then you can use unpublished themes as if you were a/b testing a large set of changes, a default live theme , 1 unpublished theme for group 1, 1 different unpublished theme for group B ;
3 themes to minimize the chance one group seeing the content for another group if they clear cookies they get a default “groupless” experience, etc.
Are there any better solutions for two store fronts in a Shopify account?
Use permalinks, checkoutlinks, or buy buttons to embed your products into a static website , wordpress, webflow, jamstack,etc.
Or if your on advanced shopify then even on another shopify store but with a much cheaper plan as you don’t need all the features you just need the online sales channel api so your frontend has similar architectures for making changes, effectively treating the other store like a psuedo sales channel for presentation only since all the products, inventory, apps, and checkout still happens on the main stores checkout phase.