Headless Shopify: Multiple storefronts without Shopify Plus

You can create multiple headless storefronts without Shopify Plus.

Headless Shopify implementations use the Shopify APIs to source data, and a decoupled frontend to display it. Nothing stops you from utilizing the same data — from a single store — to build out multiple headless storefronts that display certain products based on explicit parameters.

To achieve this, you'll populate all of your products into a single Shopify store, regardless of the headless storefront you're aiming to display them on. This approach is best suited to businesses that sell similar products (or the same products) via multiple storefronts, because things could get a little disorganized if populating a single store with products that are completely unrelated. Still, it's possible to do. 

Another use case is where you want to create different headless storefronts for different user segments, such as a B2B portal, wholesaler storefront, and end-user/D2C storefront. Potentially, even multiple D2C or B2B storefronts, targeting different user groups.

In order to segment the products displayed on each storefront, there needs to be some differentiating factor between the types of product and what's intended for each storefront. One way to achieve this is via Collections, in which case certain collections would display on certain storefronts. A more reusable way could be via Tags. The cleanest approach, however, is to use a custom Metafield/MetaObject which would allow you to explicitly define the storefront for which each product is intended.

When your headless storefronts source data from Shopify, only the products relevant for that store would be selected, based on the defining parameter set via Shopify (such as the value of a custom Metafield).

Does Shopify Collective work with Headless?

A few of our headless Shopify builds do indeed make use of Shopify Collective to sell products from partner stores via their headless storefront. These have worked well and didn't require any extra "special" implementations from us in terms of the headless storefront - things worked pretty smoothly out-the-box. Whether you have the same experience or not will depend on how your headless setup is architected.

Can we populate a single headless storefront with data from multiple Shopify stores?

Yes, we can build a single storefront for you which sources data from multiple Shopify stores.

The trickiest part to this kind of setup is the checkout. How big of an issue that is depends on your reliance on the Shopify platform overall for (mainly) checkout and inventory, and whether you're open to augmenting the entire backend operation of storefront checkout, or not.

Shopify’s native checkout is not going to allow customers to cross-purchase product from a different Shopify store (unless utilizing Shopify Collective) and thus would require a custom-built implementation strategy that makes sense for your business model. 

Shopify Collective is one great way to achieve a functional implementation without development complexity, and is a feature that can work well with headless setups.

However, in the absence of Collective, you would need to build a custom checkout that retroactively posts the orders to each relevant store (after transaction success), split up based on the origin of each purchased product. The end user wouldn’t be party to this segmentation of the order, but it’s something that would need to occur at the code level in order to achieve cross-store purchases without some middleware (like Shopify Collective) synchronizing products to a single Shopify store.

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