About This Project
An outlet store alongside the main shop, or a specialty store focused on a single category — as an EC business grows, the moment comes when you want more than one site. The straightforward route, however, means one Shopify contract per site, with product registration and inventory management duplicated two or three times over. The moment you register the same product in separate admin screens, forgotten price updates and mismatched stock counts become a matter of time.
This project was designed to run multiple EC sites on a single Shopify contract. Products and inventory live in one place, while each site freely controls which products it displays. The implementation was built in dialogue with an AI agent (AI-powered development support), which made it manageable even for a non-engineer team.
The Challenges
- Contracting Shopify per site multiplies both monthly costs and admin work
- Registering the same product in multiple admin screens invites price and stock mismatches
- Inventory should be shared across all sites, yet each site needs its own product lineup
The Solution
We used Shopify's sales channels — a feature that lets you register multiple "storefront windows" for selling. Within one account, you create a channel per site and choose, per product, which windows it appears in via checkboxes.
Each site (a front end built with Next.js) connects to Shopify with an API token (a connection key) dedicated to its own channel. Because the key and the channel are tied one-to-one, only the products published to that channel appear on that site. There is no need to build any product-exclusion logic on the site side.
The Benefits
- Centralized product data: registration and edits are done in one admin screen
- Shared inventory: stock counts are common to all sites and decrease automatically wherever a sale happens
- Per-site lineup control: all products on the main store, a subset on the outlet — controlled with checkboxes alone
- Lower running costs: add sites while keeping a single contract
Learn More
Sales Channel Control
How sales channels let each site display a different product lineup.
Multi-Warehouse Inventory Management
How multiple inventory locations, such as domestic and overseas warehouses, are managed.
Architecture
All product data managed in one place (inventory, prices, images)
In one sentence: products live in one place, channels act as the sorting gate, and each site displays only its own share.
Technologies Used
- Shopify Sales Channels
- Shopify Storefront API (per-channel tokens)
- Shopify Admin API (product and inventory management)
- Next.js (multiple sites)