For high-growth merchants already on Shopify Plus, Shopify Plus expansion stores are one of the more useful and underused features. They're additional storefronts tied to a single Shopify Plus account that let a business serve different regions, audiences, or product lines without standing up a separate platform. This guide explains what expansion stores are, the benefits of Shopify Plus that support them, how they enhance a business, and how to set one up.
What are Shopify Plus expansion stores?
Understanding Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus is the platform's plan for high-volume, high-growth merchants. Beyond a storefront, it's a toolkit for scaling: selling across many online and social channels and in numerous countries, with the customization, support, and infrastructure larger operations need.
The concept of expansion stores
Expansion stores are additional storefronts associated with a Shopify Plus account. They let a merchant curate content for different audiences, serve specific regions, and tune SEO market by market. Common uses include entering new markets, separating brick-and-mortar from online sales, creating member-only stores, managing wholesale, testing new themes, and launching new product lines.
Key features:
- Additional storefronts: a Shopify Plus account can add up to nine expansion stores.
- Curated content: tailor each store to the needs of a specific audience or region.
- SEO tuning: region-specific stores can improve relevance and rankings in target markets.
- Flexible use cases: new markets, separate sales channels, member-only stores, wholesale, and more.
For existing Shopify Plus subscribers, these additional stores come at no extra cost up to the plan's limit. Managing multiple storefronts does take time, so each new store should add clear value before it's launched.
Benefits of Shopify Plus for high-volume merchants
Advanced customization and scalability
Shopify Plus offers deep customization, especially around checkout. The older checkout.liquid approach is being deprecated, but Plus merchants can build branded, customized checkouts through checkout extensibility. On scalability, Plus supports unlimited staff accounts so teams can grow without added per-seat cost, and it allows multiple themes to be added for testing and staging new designs.
Dedicated support and specialized apps
Shopify Plus includes access to the Shopify Plus Partner Program, a network of vetted service partners for integrations and projects, along with specialized tools for high-growth businesses such as the B2B wholesale channel and Launchpad for scheduling timed events like sales and product drops.
Multi-channel selling and integration
Organization Settings let a merchant manage all their stores from one place, and Shopify Plus offers expanded API resources for integrating custom apps and tailoring functionality — useful when a store needs capabilities beyond the defaults.
How expansion stores enhance a business
Curating content for different audiences
As an audience diversifies, expansion stores allow content to be tailored to language preferences, cultural nuances, or specific product interests, creating a more relevant experience for each group.
Targeting regions and optimizing SEO
Region-specific stores are useful when expanding into new countries. Localized content improves the user experience and can strengthen SEO, making the brand more visible to a targeted audience.
Expanding to new markets or currencies
Expansion stores make it easier to enter new markets or support different currencies, offering localized content, local shipping options, and local pricing — all of which tend to improve conversion.
Separating brick-and-mortar and online sales
Shopify Plus can also run in-person point of sale. A dedicated retail expansion store keeps in-store and online sales organized separately, giving a clearer view of sales and inventory across channels.
Member-only stores and wholesale
Member-only stores can provide fixed pricing and specific product information for a defined group — for example, offering employees products at cost. A wholesale expansion store makes B2B ordering easier for distribution partners.
Testing new themes or updates
An expansion store can act as a sandbox for testing new themes, code, or brand updates before rolling changes out to a live store.
Serving new product lines
When introducing new product lines, an expansion store can differentiate them cost-effectively — a home-goods retailer expanding from kitchen faucets into sinks, for instance, might give the new line its own store.
Setting up a Shopify Plus expansion store
Access and store type
Setup starts with Store management access, which allows managing all stores in the organization, creating new ones, and approving any additional fees. When creating a store, you choose its purpose — an Expansion store for different languages or currencies, a Retail store for in-person sales, a Members-only store, a Wholesale store for B2B, and so on.
Store details, themes, and staff
Creating a store requires details like name and URL, and themes and staff can be imported from an existing store in the organization — but only during the creation process. Note that hard-coded file references in an imported theme still point to files in the original store, so deleting a file there will break the link in the new store.
Limitations and costs
If a requested store exceeds the contract's limits, a trial store is created instead and an extra fee must be approved. Running multiple Plus stores also calls for more technical know-how, so it's worth weighing whether each new store is worth the added management. For a deeper look at the economics, see whether Shopify Plus is worth it.
The value of expansion stores
Used well, expansion stores deliver a tailored experience to each segment of an audience, the scalability to test themes and serve new product lines without disrupting an existing store, and simplified multi-store management through shared themes, staff, and inventory. They're best understood as strategic assets for growth rather than just extra storefronts — most valuable when each one is launched with a clear purpose. First Pier is an ecommerce agency in Portland, Maine that builds and optimizes Shopify and Shopify Plus storefronts, including multi-store expansion. For help, get in touch.
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