Ecommerce Growth
WooCommerce Multisite: Boost your Sales and Expand your Ecommerce Business
- Written by Lea Haagen
What is WooCommerce Multisite?
Let’s start at the beginning. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, which I’m sure you all know. WordPress has a multisite functionality - WordPress Multisite - which allows you to have multiple, independent sites, with just a single WordPress installation. WooCommerce is multisite-compatible. This means, essentially, that you can build an entire network of individual stores. You run and manage these sub-stores independently of one another - but they’re all kept under one roof.
SEE ALSO: 18 Experts Reveal the Ecommerce Trends Set to Fuel Serious Sales Growth in 2020
Multiple Businesses
Multisite is great if you have more than one business. You want to maintain these businesses separately, but still want to manage them all in one installation. This includes the management of your plugins. With WP Multisite, all your plugins are stored in one location - so when you update the plugin in your Network Admin, all your sub-stores are automatically updated too.
International Businesses
Multisite also comes in really handy if you’re selling into more than one country - say for example the UK, the US and Germany. It allows you to sell different products in each country and lets you set the appropriate currency in each store. This way, your orders are kept nicely separated, which makes it easier to manage and track all your different orders.
Common Problems Online Retailers Face
To reiterate: all of your stores will be completely independent of one another. A blessing for some, a curse for others (maybe). This means if you upload products to one store, they will only be available in that store. This makes sense if all your sub-stores sell different products. However, if you want to sell the same product in various sub-stores, this can become a bit of a hassle. Another issue for ecommerce retailers is that there is no aggregated view of customer orders across your different WooCommerce stores. This makes it fairly difficult to stay on top of all the orders coming in, especially when you’re growing quickly. It also makes it more challenging to keep your inventory levels up-to-date (if you’re selling the same product across your various stores) and can very easily lead to oversells of stock - which makes for unhappy customers (and who wants that?!).
Order Management Systems: The Unsung Heroes of Ecommerce
An external order management system might therefore be the answer to your prayers. Rather than chasing up orders across your various stores, let technology do the work for you. There’s a lot of different order management systems out there, some focusing purely on the order management side of things, others offering a wider range of services, including things like listing tools for marketplaces and inventory management. The one I’m going to highlight here, naturally, is Veeqo. Our software handles order management across all your online stores and marketplaces - and since very recently supports WooCommerce Multisite.
That’s great, but what’s in it for me? You might rightfully ask. Allow me to wow you (drumroll please).
With Multisite you can assign a specific currency to each sub-store in WooCommerce. When fetching all orders from your various sub-stores, Veeqo will automatically convert all these back into your base currency, i.e. GBP if you’re based in the UK. You can also filter all orders by sub-store in Veeqo - at the click of a button. Now you can see all of your orders from all of your WooCommerce sub-stores at a glance. What’s more - if you’re into your analytics (which hopefully you are) you can monitor the sales performance of each sub-store in your Veeqo Reports.
These things quite literally pay for themselves...
... especially when you’re a multichannel e-retailer. How so? Once you start selling on multiple stores, it becomes harder and harder to stay on top of all your orders and stock levels. Got a marketplace or two in the mix too? Then things get even trickier and you end up wasting a lot of resources (human and financial) on pulling together your orders across various channels, updating inventory levels in each of them, and so forth... I’m sure you know the pain. Implementing a software that does all of this for you therefore saves you a lot of time that you can invest in more important, and frankly more exciting, areas.
On top of all this, LearnWoo provide a great list of useful plugins for WooCommerce multistore management.
If you want to find out more about how to grow your ecommerce business with Veeqo and WooCommerce MultiSite start a free trial today!
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