Running Shopify Expansion Stores From One Catalogue
Opening a separate Shopify store for another country means keeping two catalogues in line. Here is how to decide what each store shares, what stays local, and how inventory fits in.
Some merchants sell into new countries from one Shopify store. Others open a separate store per market, often to run a different domain, theme, language, payment setup or range in each. Those separate stores are usually called expansion stores.
The hard part is not opening the second store. It is keeping both catalogues in line afterwards, without overwriting the things you made local on purpose.
Decide what is shared and what is local
Before you copy anything, go through a product and sort each part into one of two lists.
Usually shared across every market:
- SKU, barcode and options, so the same variant is the same variant everywhere
- Images and videos
- Vendor, product type and category
- Weight, HS code and country of origin
- Status, so a product you archive at home comes down everywhere
Often local to each store:
- Title and description, if the store is in another language
- SEO title and description
- Price and compare-at price, set in the store’s own currency
- Tags used by that store’s collections or apps
Whatever lands on the local list is the store’s own to edit. Whatever lands on the shared list should come from one place: your main store.
Prices are not converted
If you copy prices between stores, the same number is copied. A product at £40 on a UK store becomes 40 in whatever currency the US store uses. For expansion stores that price in their own currency, leave price and compare-at price out of the sync and set them on each store.
Keeping the catalogue in line
With Bridgeful, the main store is the source for products and collections. You tick the parts of a product that sync, and every connected store follows those parts. A part you leave unticked stays each store’s own, so a French store keeps its French descriptions while new images and variants still arrive from the main store.
New products on the main store are created on each connected store, with everything or with only the parts you ticked. Products that exist only on an expansion store, such as a range made for that market, are left alone and never copied back.
When a product is deleted on the main store, its copy on each connected store goes to draft and is tagged. It is not deleted, so you decide what happens to it in each market.
Sharing inventory between markets
If your markets ship from the same warehouse, their inventory needs to stay in line too. Pair the warehouse location on each store (how inventory sync works), and a sale in one market lowers the available quantity in the others in real time. A location that serves one market only can stay unpaired, and it stays out of the sync.
Before you connect an existing store
If the expansion store already has products, they need to be matched to the main store’s before anything syncs. Bridgeful matches by SKU, then barcode, then handle. A product it cannot match waits on that store with the reason beside it, and nothing is created or written for it until you map it to an existing product, create it, or fix it in Shopify. That stops a half-built expansion store from filling up with duplicates.
What it costs
Bridgeful is priced by connected stores, with every feature on every plan: $29 a month for one connected store, $59 for up to three and $129 for up to ten. The main store pays, and there is a 14-day free trial.