Running more than one Shopify store sounds simple until you realise every product update has to happen two or three times. A tweak to a description, a new image, a metafield change. Miss one and the stores drift apart.
The approaches I see most often with multi-store merchants:
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Manual copy-paste between admins. Works up to around 200 products. Falls apart fast after that.
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CSV exports and imports. Better for volume, but fragile with media and metafields.
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A dedicated Shopify-native PIM as source of truth. More overhead to set up, but scales.
We have been helping Shopify merchants with multi-store setups for a while, and a few things seem to help regardless of the approach:
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Pick one store as the source of truth early, before drift sets in.
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Standardise SKUs and metafield keys across stores from day one.
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Keep media in a single library with consistent filenames.
After seeing the same pain show up again and again, we ended up building Peak PIM (our app is now public on the Shopify App Store). The idea is straightforward: one central catalog, Shopify-native, with multi-store sync built in. You edit a product once and push the changes to every connected store. Metafields, metaobjects, and media are handled the same way. No CSVs, no connector project.
Curious what is actually working for other multi-store merchants and partners. What tools, what processes? How are you handling metafields and media specifically?
And of course, happy to give a shot if anyone wants to try it.