Shopify Dev Stores Questions

Shopify Plus

Topic summary

A developer is seeking best practices for setting up development environments to support multiple production Shopify stores, each with distinct themes, products, and apps. Their goal includes managing both B2B and multiple B2C stores.

Key Questions Raised:

  • Whether to use one dev store per production store or a single dev store for all
  • How other merchants handle similar multi-store development workflows
  • The differences between Shopify Partner dev stores and regular stores used as dev environments
  • Whether dev stores can be partitioned to maintain separate instances for data continuity

Current Status:
A responder has asked for clarification on the specific development work involved (theme development, app development, API integration, checkout extensions, etc.) to provide targeted guidance. They note that Shopify doesn’t offer out-of-the-box data persistence between stores, suggesting API/webhook solutions would be necessary for data synchronization.

Summarized with AI on October 26. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hello,

I’m hoping that someone can assist me by answering a few questions below. We are trying to find the best practices, on how to setup a dev environment where you have multiple prod environment’s with different themes?

What would be the best practice for having Dev stores? One Dev store per Prod store or can we have a single Dev store for multiple prod stores? (Each store will have different themes, products and apps. Our end goal is to have a B2B store and multiple B2C stores.)
2. How are other customers managing this? Is there anyone we can talk to?

  1. What’s the difference between a “Shopify Partner Dev store” vs using a Shopify store as a Dev environment?

  2. Can we parse out our Dev store so each Prod store has its own little instance? (For data continuity)

Thank you for assistance.

DD

2

You’re seeking best practice on how to make use of a development store. Could you elaborate on what your use case is. What are you developing. Is it theme development, app development, API work, checkout extensions, etc.

There’s no OOB way to persist data between 2 stores. You’re looking at making use of API/Webhooks.

1 Like