Why PIM is the Best BigCommerce Multi-Storefront Solution

What is Multi-Storefront in BigCommerce?

Can you host multiple stores on BigCommerce? The quick answer, yes!

BigCommerce’s Multi-Storefront provides top BigCommerce stores the ability to manage multiple eCommerce storefronts from a central BigCommerce admin panel.

What sets MSF apart is each storefront can have its own unique identifiers, such as product category, price list, email templates, unique domain, and much more. All of this makes it straightforward to tailor user experiences to different target audiences.

Whether you’re expanding into new territories, launching a B2B store, or running multiple brands, here are just some of the benefits of MSF:

• Facilitate bespoke and personalized shopping experiences: With MSF, every storefront can have a unique brand identity. After all, customers are more likely to engage with a brand offering a personalized experience.
• Easily access new markets: This might include a new territory, new product line, or a B2B offering. Custom storefronts allow you to grow and scale more intuitively, without the burden of extra work on your internal teams.
• Run multiple storefronts from a single backend model: This means, you can implement and maintain all your storefronts from a single place, saving you lots of time.
• Deliver relevant products to the right audience: By dividing your product offering across multiple stores, customers will be able to quickly find the right products to suit their needs.

Ultimately, a multi-storefront infrastructure enables you to grow your business more efficiently and with greater flexibility.

For an overview of how to set up a storefront, click here to access a video walkthrough from BigCommerce.

Maintain product data across storefronts from a central source of truth

A PIM platform like Pimberly is essential for multi-storefront BigCommerce merchants as it gives you total control over your product data. No complicated spreadsheets, no messy OneDrive folders, and no custom fields in your ERP. Instead, Pimberly becomes your trusted central source of truth.

When you’re managing thousands of products – and product variants – across multiple storefronts, you need a reliable depository of product data to power them.

Ultimately, Pimberly is a fit-for-purpose system, designed to handle large volumes of complex product data. Your product data management processes will be quicker and efficient, accelerating your time to market and helping you to scale your business.

Reduce duplication of work across storefronts

A huge challenge of managing multiple BigCommerce storefronts is the duplication of work. When you’re managing huge amounts of products, your time is precious.

To counter this, Pimberly comes with powerful tools and automation to save time and improve efficiency across your business. When your business undergoes BigCommerce store setup with our in-house delivery team, we’ll set up workflows to ensure the correct product data is pushed to the relevant storefront.

As a result, each BigCommerce storefront will become more customer-centric, leading to more and more customer conversions.

Push your data from Pimberly to the relevant BigCommerce storefronts

Once you’ve enriched the product information within Pimberly, the platform will then push it to the relevant BigCommerce storefront via the Pimberly-BigCommerce Connector.

The Connector – coupled with Pimberly’s powerful automation – ensures your products are pushed to the correct storefront. This way, you ensure each storefront contains the relevant elements of product information (product description & title, digital assets, localized data).

With Pimberly, enterprise merchants will have complete confidence in the accuracy of their BigCommerce multi-stores.

Streamline product data across multi-brand stores

If you’re a BigCommerce merchant managing an extensive brand portfolio, you can create a specific storefront for each brand you manage.

Enterprise BigCommerce merchants often have eCommerce websites for multiple brands. With that in mind, BigCommerce MSF makes multi-brand eCommerce more straightforward by allowing merchants to manage multiple sites and domains from a single log-in.

Although BigCommerce MSF alleviates some of the strain on merchants, multi-brand eCommerce means your product information and digital assets will quickly snowball.  Before it gets out of hand, Pimberly will streamline your multi-brand product data processes to ensure consistency across multiple BigCommerce stores.

Example: Multi-brand selling on BigCommerce with PIM

Let’s take the example of an online merchant in the fashion industry – operating across multiple and brands and storefronts – catering to different customer demographics.

Through each BigCommerce storefront, each brand tailors the shopping experience bespoke to their target audience. From high-end fashion enthusiasts, to retro and vintage fashion lovers, and streetwear-savvy sneakerheads.

However, as they grow across multiple brands, the merchant quickly discovers their product data is getting out of hand. By implementing a PIM like Pimberly, they’re able to:

• Manage huge volumes of product information (descriptions, images, specifications, SEO metadata) from a single source of truth.
• Enrich their product data with attributes specific to the target audience of each individual storefront.
• Ensure branding is consistent across each storefront with powerful data governance tools, workflows, and digital asset management capabilities.
• Expand their product collections and catalogs with efficient data management techniques, facilitating growth across brands.

Tailor your product data to B2C and B2B storefronts

BigCommerce’s Multi-Storefront allows merchants to open storefronts specific to different segments, including B2C, B2B, retail, and/or wholesale. This gives merchants flexibility to grow their brand and reach audiences they typically wouldn’t.

For instance, you might be an electronics distributor who manages the bulk of their sales through BigCommerce’s B2B edition. However, with BigCommerce Multi-Storefront, they’re quickly able to open a B2C storefront from which they can sell excess stock.

In a similar vein, a fashion retailer might want to explore the B2B market by offering their products in bulk to large businesses. This way, they can further diversify their revenue streams.

However, although BigCommerce MSF will handle a lot of the heavy-lifting, operating across multiple segments places huge strain on your product data management processes. This is because product information needs to be tailored differently for B2C and B2B audiences, even for the same products.

For instance, B2C consumers require product data to highlight features, benefits and emotional appeal of the products. However, B2B buyers won’t be as interested in this. Instead, they require more detailed technical specifications, performance data, and compatibility information to suit their specific business needs.

A PIM like Pimberly will ensure the relevant product data is pushed to the relevant storefront for the right target audience. Pimberly will tailor product information for each audience and build unique categories, enhancing the appeal of your products and driving successful conversions.

Expand internationally with localized product data across BigCommerce Multi-Storefronts

For brands with a presence across the globe, BigCommerce MSF enables merchants to set up storefront bespoke to each territory they sell in. However, doing so means you have to manage more product data. From translations, currencies, through to different sizing information.

Integrating a PIM will enable your international expansion, without drowning in the extra product data. Instead, you’re able to create shopping experiences that resonate with your target audience, irrespective of language and cultural barriers.

For a deep dive on how multi-store front BigCommerce and international expansion go hand-in hand-with PIM, click here to access our blog on the topic.

Key Points

• As you grow the amount of BigCommerce storefronts, the volume of product data will increase. PIM will power multiple storefronts with accurate, enriched, and consistent product data, customized for BigCommerce multiple stores.
• Improve the BigCommerce Multi-Storefront experience by giving your business total control of your product data from a single source of truth, ensuring the accuracy of your product data.
• Tap into new commercial opportunities and global audiences with a fit-for-purpose system to manage your product information more efficiently.
• A PIM will easily integrate with your tech stack to streamline operational efficiency, cutting down on manual processes, allowing your team to focus on selling.