Multiple stores, one account

As your business grows you may start to consider creating more online shops and sell on several platforms. Why do so? For example, your number of items has increased significantly and it’s easier for you to promote a broad assortment by selling different product categories on different websites. Another reason is to use as many sales channels as possible, even with the same product catalog, — starting from a net of brick-n-mortar shops and ending with a net of online platforms.

With Ecwid you can add your store to several sites and manage all products and orders from a single account. Depending on your business goals you can:

add specific items for different sites
add all products at once to all sales channels such as marketplaces and social media to drive more online traffic and expand your business on different markets.

Let’s cut to the chase to see how to do so.

Selling the same products on multiple websites

Best way to use full potential of e-commerce is to sell across different channels. This includes:

websites
blogs
social media
marketplaces and so on

Selling on several sites gives you more online traffic which means higher chances for deals.

To sell the same products in multiple places, just add your Ecwid store to different sites like Facebook, Amazon and more. Your Ecwid catalog will be shown in all the different places and you will manage all the products and orders from one admin panel.

Here’s how the Kissed by a Bee shop sell its products on their website and on Facebook

📖 To learn more, see our guide about adding your store to different places.

You can adjust your store to your business needs by creating different rules for specific products. For example, you own a store that sells gifts and flowers. You ship gifts all across the country but flowers need to be fresh, so you need to set up local delivery and a pickup option for this particular category.

If your store catalog includes different kinds of products that need different settings, you can set up product-specific shipping rates or taxes for such items.

Selling different products on different websites

You can list different sets of products on different sites so you can use different selling approaches there or diversify your brand. Let’s say, you sell honey from your own apiary and you want to open a new store to sell honey-based cosmetic products. With Ecwid you can create one account for any purpose you need, divide your products into categories and then add certain categories to different websites. Having multiple e-commerce sites instead of one helps you diversify your product line according to your target market.

Alternatively, you can use the single product cards to add a selection of products to another site, for example, on your landing page or on your partner’s blog.

Visually, each website will have its separate store with different sets of products. Customers won't have the access to other categories of your store except for the one displayed on this website.

You will still manage the store from the Ecwid admin: add products, set up shipping and payment, configure taxes, view order details etc. Keep in mind that product categories will still share the same store settings, yet you can set up shipping methods and tax rates for each product individually.

Here is how you can sell different products on different websites:

Assign your products to categories according to the sites where you will be selling. Let’s continue with the honey business and create two categories — Honey and Bee’s honey cosmetics.
Add these categories as default to the corresponding sites: add the Honey category to the site where you will be selling eatable products, and do the same for the Bee’s honey cosmetics category. See the detailed step-by-step instruction in our article about setting a default category for your site.
You might want to hide the breadcrumbs so that your customers could browse only the category added to the site they opened. Hide breadcrumbs in the design settings of your Instant site, WordPress, or Wix.

Now that you have set the default categories for your sites, customers who open the site with honey products will see only jars with honey. The same goes for the site with the cosmetics.

You can use the same approach to add a store to different pages of the same website.

If your Ecwid store is added to a Wix website, you can add the store only to one page on the same Wix website. As a workaround, you can add store categories to the website menu so customers can get to the needed product category right from your site navigation.

Tracking which storefront an order came from

Whether you’ve added your whole store or only certain product categories to multiple websites, all orders come to your Ecwid admin. You can quickly check what site an order came from by looking into order details. For this, you should “mark” the Ecwid integration codes on your sites with different IDs (so-called “affiliated IDs”, which can be any words, for example, “Honey-food” or “Honey-cosmetics”). Tracking from which site each order came from helps you find out what site is more efficient.

Such tracking is available on Business and Unlimited plans.

Upgrade

This “code thing” can sound a little tricky to do by yourself. After all, you are a business person, not a developer. But it is actually quite simple.

All you have to do is add the line <script> xAffiliate("affiliate_id"); </script> between two other scripts in the Ecwid integration code. Remember to replace affiliate_id with the words that make sense to you to mark your store with.

Here’s an example of how the code will look for you:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://app.ecwid.com/script.js?STORE_ID" charset="utf-8"></script>

<script> xAffiliate("Honey-cosmetics"); </script>

<script type="text/javascript"> xProductBrowser("categoriesPerRow=3", "views=grid(3,3) list(10) table(20)","categoryView=grid","searchView=list","style="); </script>

Then you can easily check from which storefront an order came from:

You can open an order’s details in your Ecwid admin and check what site it was placed on:
You can download all your orders as a CSV file (it is compatible with spreadsheets) and see what orders are marked with what affiliate IDs.

Follow the detailed instructions on how to mark your stores on different sites and track where orders came from.

Discovering more options with Ecwid

Running a small business doesn’t mean you can’t expand it to new markets.

You can run two separate businesses like flower shop and hand-crafted tables.

Or you can sell to foreign markets. With e-commerce your store can be in the US but your buyers can be from Germany, Russia or the UK.

Let’s say you sell handmade cosmetics in Mexico and since your brand is eco-friendly, unique and consists of rare components, it’s popular among the US buyers. In that case you can create two different Ecwid online stores with fixed prices (higher for US customers, lower for Mexico shoppers), different payment options and currencies. That way you can sell the same product lines to different countries in their own currency and at different prices.

Either way, sometimes what you need to grow business is different shops for different brands. In that case you can open several Ecwid accounts for every separate store and set up the right delivery, payment options and currency in each. Having two or more separate stores can also help you with better promotion. Since you have several stores with different target markets, it’s easier for you to target your ads and paid promo in social media for a right audience and offer different kinds of discounts.

Although every Ecwid account requires a separate email login, you can bundle your accounts to easily switch between different Ecwid admin panels without relogin.