Do you keep wholesale and retail in one Shopify store or split them?
My wife and I run a small clothing store on Shopify, and we’ve started getting more interest from local boutiques. It’s not huge volume yet, but it’s becoming enough that I need to decide whether wholesale should live inside the same store or be separated before we make a mess for ourselves.
Right now the retail side is simple. People come to the site, buy one or two pieces, and everything runs through the normal product pages and checkout. Wholesale is different. A boutique might want 12 units across sizes, different pricing, different payment expectations, and sometimes a cleaner way to reorder the same items later. I can handle that manually for a few buyers, but I can already see how it could get annoying once more stores are involved.
My first instinct was to keep everything in one Shopify store because inventory would stay cleaner. I don’t really want to manage two catalogs, two sets of product photos, two stock counts, and two admin workflows. But the downside is that wholesale pricing, buyer approval, minimum quantities, and product visibility all have to be handled very carefully. One wrong rule and either a retail customer sees the wrong thing or a wholesale buyer has a confusing checkout.
The other option is a separate wholesale store. That sounds cleaner for buyers, but it also sounds like more maintenance. Updating products twice, syncing inventory, keeping collections consistent, and making sure both stores do not slowly drift apart sounds like its own headache.
For people who run both DTC and wholesale on Shopify, which route did you take?
Did you keep wholesale inside the main store, or did you eventually separate it? I’m less interested in app names and more interested in the operational problems that showed up later. Inventory, checkout confusion, buyer approval, minimum orders, duplicate product work, tax, payment terms, whatever ended up being more annoying than expected.