How To Manage Multiple Retail Stores: 10 Strategies for Growth & Efficiency

Managing multiple retail stores is an exciting endeavor. More square footage means more opportunities to reach your target market, host more in-store experiences, and increase revenue.

But expansion comes with challenges. Rather than simply duplicating what you’ve been doing already, you must shift your staffing, tech, and inventory-management strategies as you expand your retail footprint.

This guide explains how to manage multiple locations and outlines key factors to consider before expanding your retail business. 

What is multi-store management?

Multi-store management means overseeing daily store operations across two or more brick-and-mortar locations. Often, multi-store management also involves running an ecommerce site with national or international delivery options.

Operating multiple stores comes with additional responsibilities, such as managing more employees, offering new order-fulfillment options, and using enterprise-level technology to help you scale.

Benefits of multiple retail stores

If your retail store is doing well and you’re considering opening a second location, you have several reasons to take the plunge.

Reach more customers with an in-person experience

Even though online shopping is popular, shopping in a store is hard to beat. Customers can try before they buy and speak with brand representatives and product experts. 

With more stores, you can serve more customers, expand your customer base, reach new regions, and generate more revenue overall.

Grow your brand

Rent may very well be the new customer-acquisition cost, since storefronts act as billboards for your business. Your store’s signage and window displays boost brand awareness by luring customers in and enticing passersby to visit you online.

Plus, having multiple retail store locations builds brand credibility. It’s easier to build trust with customers when you can speak to them face-to-face, rather than being online-only.

Faster order fulfillment

With more stores, you can fulfill online orders faster. Customers can choose in-store pickup and get their orders from whichever shop is closest to them, and you can choose to fulfill online orders from the nearest store. 

Whether you are self-shipping your products or partially outsourcing, assigning the best location to ship orders from is critical to drive down costs, present accurate shipping fees and transit times to shoppers, and shorten delivery times.

💡Tip: With smart order routing from Shopify, you can automatically fulfill orders based on the closest location to the customer or the location with the most inventory. Brands like Element Brooklyn use this feature to save $1.14 in shipping costs per order on average, and reduce delivery time by an average of 1.2 days.

“Before using smart order routing in Shopify, getting to the point where we could deliver orders quickly within one day required a lot of messing around with the system’s configuration and manually changing the way orders were being handled,” says founder and CEO Andrew Nicol. “Now we can deliver over 94% of our orders in one business day.”

Considerations before expanding to multiple stores

Before you expand into multi-location retail operations, ensure you have the resources in place to operate several stores simultaneously. 

Market research and feasibility studies

Market research helps ensure you’re expanding into locations with sufficient demand, minimal risk, and strong growth potential. It relies on customer feedback, competitive analysis, and local economic conditions to find the best place for expansion.

When you think you’ve scouted the right location, use feasibility studies to determine how viable it is to set up shop there. This includes revenue projections, rent estimates, staffing costs, and break-even analysis.

For example, a retail coffee chain might initially plan to open a second location in a busy street. Further research shows that despite higher foot traffic, the area is already dominated by three major coffee brands. It might be more profitable to set up shop in a less crowded area—perhaps near a university or industrial park—where competition is less fierce, but people nearby still have money to spend on quality coffee.

Financial costs

Rent, fittings and fixtures, inventory—opening another brick-and-mortar store is no small feat. Studies estimate it costs $40,000 to open a retail store. Go back to your retail business plan to ensure you have the finances to fund an expansion. 

That said, opening a second location tends to be cheaper than your first because you can benefit from economies of scale. Leverage existing relationships with suppliers to place bulk orders and buy inventory at a lower cost per unit. Most cloud-based software vendors also offer multi-store discounts to reduce costs. 

Tips to manage multiple stores effectively

1. Choose the right multi-store POS system

An enterprise point-of-sale (POS) system is the command center powering your entire retail business. It’s more than just a tool to process transactions—the right POS software also tracks staff schedules, collects customer data, and initiates payments. 

But while most enterprise POS platforms promise multi-store management, they don’t unify your data. They rely on patchy middleware and integrations that don’t support real-time syncing. As a result, technical debt piles up and costs increase.

When all your sales data from each location and revenue stream flows into one system of record, you’ll gain visibility into your business. You can avoid mistakes, keep inventory in stock, and operate more smoothly. This is especially critical if you operate multiple channels alongside retail locations (ecommerce website, marketplaces, social media storefronts, etc.).

Shopify is the only platform to natively unify POS and ecommerce. It’s designed to give you one source of truth—you get a centralized business “brain” to sync customer, order, and inventory data wherever you sell.

A leading independent research firm found retailers using this unified commerce approach inside Shopify POS experienced:

• 8.9% uplift in gross merchandise value
• 25% lower annual software subscription and maintenance costs
• 22% lower total cost of ownership

2. Use roles to control staff permissions 

Check that your enterprise POS system offers customizable roles, each with its own permission levels and access settings. For example, you may want to configure roles so sales associates working in a store known to be targeted by serial returners require a manager’s approval to process a return or exchange. 

With Shopify POS, you can assign different roles and permissions to set boundaries on what store staff can do without manager approval, like changing a product’s price or applying a custom discount on a sale.

You can also equip store managers with POS permissions needed to best manage their location, such as accessing reports, closing cash tracking sessions, applying discounts, and authorizing returns or refunds.

3. Implement multi-location inventory tracking 

As you add more inventory to your shelves, it becomes more difficult to control. It can be harder to understand which items are popular at which stores, forecast demand accurately, or calculate sell-through rates per product. And with more products across more stores, you need more efficient ways to know what you have and when you need to reorder. 

Look for a POS system with multi-store inventory management features like:

• Real-time inventory tracking: With Shopify’s native inventory management system (IMS), your retail team can clearly see if inventory is available, incoming, committed, on hand, or unavailable at each location. Plus, shoppers can see available quantities at the five nearest stores when they opt to buy online and pick up in-store. 
• Low-stock alerts: Automatically flag when each location is running low so you can restock inventory before a stockout happens. Apps like Stocky can even raise purchase orders automatically when safety stock levels dip below a specific threshold for each store. 
• Stock transfers: If you sell out of one SKU at a particular location, automatically initiate a stock transfer to move inventory from one location to another.
• Demand forecasting: Different products may sell better at different locations. Demand-forecasting tools digest large datasets—including market trends, sales data, and shifts in customer behavior—to strike the right balance between having too much or too little inventory at each store. 

💡Tip: Shopify POS provides an overselling warning and confirmation if an item is sold out, committed, or not in stock. If that item is added to the cart, sales staff will be notified and can decide if they want to complete the sale or remove the item from the cart and create a ship-to-customer order instead.

4. Standardize retail operations

Operations might not be the most exciting part of running a retail business, but they ensure that no matter which store a customer walks into, they receive the same quality experience.

To standardize retail operations management:

• Share (and enforce) store policies. Invest time in creating customer service policies, safety and security procedures, store layout and merchandising guidelines, and an employee handbook plus a training manual to support a growing team. Make these accessible through an internal knowledge base and ensure that new employees review them.
• Create an opening and closing checklist. In the hubbub of opening the store or closing it for the day, small-but-crucial tasks, like activating the security system, might get overlooked. Document how to open and close the store, and share checklists with each store manager. 

💡Tip: Your choice of POS impacts how easy it is to manage multiple locations. Tomlinson’s, for example, migrated to Shopify to unify retail operations and automate discounts at checkout. As a result, the pet food brand cut training time on POS operations by almost a third. 

5. Create a staff training process

A larger retail workforce means you need to be more strategic in how you manage staff. By putting systems in place, you can spend less time on staff management decisions as each new location opens.

Create an employee training checklist for managers that helps ensure all staff members at every location receive the same training and can fill in for each other when needed. On the checklist, include topics like how to use your store’s technology, how to process inventory, how to restock shelves, and how to interact with customers—including handling customer complaints.

Continue building product knowledge and maintain compliance by standardizing training with a learning management system. By uploading courses and worksheets to this platform, retail staff receive consistent training regardless of the location they’re working out of. 

6. Optimize staff schedules

Managing staff schedules across multiple retail store locations can be complex, especially when dealing with varied store sizes, customer traffic, employee availability, and local labor laws.

To manage these differences:

• Use a retail workforce management tool. Shopify POS integrates with Easyteam to schedule staff shifts, automate shift reminders, and track commission per cashier for each POS location. The app also integrates with accounting software to run payroll efficiently. 
• Balance shifts with demand. A busy 2,000-square-foot store in Chicago will likely need more employees than a 500-square-foot location on the outskirts of town. Combine foot traffic levels with POS data to identify peak times for each store and plan schedules accordingly to avoid overspending on labor. 
• Customize roles and permissions across stores. For example, instead of letting sales associates log in only at one store, you can expand permissions to make it easier for staff to fill in if someone calls in sick at a nearby store.

7. Consider store security

Inventory shrinkage grows in severity as your retail footprint expands, especially if you’re managing locations from afar. Shoplifters might push their luck and target one store by stealing inventory or making fraudulent returns, for example, and move to another when caught. 

Keeping lines of communication open between stores, as well as technology that supports collaboration between stores can prevent this. For instance, cashiers at one location can flag bad actors inside the POS system, alerting all your stores to certain customers. Automated workflows in Shopify Flow can then block new orders or returns from that customer at any other store. 

Other ways to bolster store security when managing multiple locations include:

• Using RFID tags to track inventory movement—including transfers between stores
• Regularly conducting stock checks and inventory audits to monitor product theft
• Training employees on how to spot common types of retail fraud, like vendor or return fraud

8. Ensure a consistent brand experience for customers

The customer experience should be consistent across your brand, regardless of store location, or if customers are shopping in person or online. Consistency between channels helps reinforce your brand values and positioning, while giving shoppers the omnichannel experiences they expect. 

Standardized operating procedures help maintain brand consistency in visual merchandising, customer service, and promotional activities. Share planograms, store layout designs, upcoming promotions, and marketing calendars with each store in advance. This unified foundation ensures customers experience your brand consistently, without confusion.

Sometimes, things happen unexpectedly. Establish clear communication channels—for example, a company Slack channel or WhatsApp group—to help teams learn from each other. Encourage them to share wins and challenges, building team culture and ensuring consistency across locations. 

💡Tip: Allow customers to switch between channels with a POS system that lets them shop in whatever way is most convenient. It should enable you to offer in-store pickup for online orders, ship-to-customer fulfillment for in-store purchases, and buy online, return in-store for maximum convenience.

9. Unify data and reporting for all retail locations

Understanding the performance of each storefront—and how it compares to other locations—gets trickier the more stores you have. 

Your POS should allow you to view business performance as a whole or focus on individual locations. You need a way to isolate or combine store reports to compare and contrast performance based on venue, geography, and average store benchmarks.

With access to unified reporting, you’ll reach the right business decision faster. Shopify Analytics, for example, has over 60 prebuilt reports to:

• Compare sales performance between retail stores 
• Interpret cross-store data to identify trends, such as bestsellers by location 
• Benchmark data against key performance indicators (KPIs) from similar merchants 

10. Conduct regular store audits

Small differences in how things are run between stores can add up to a fragmented brand experience. Audits help ensure your standard operating procedures are followed and customer experience remains consistent across locations. 

Run periodic reviews—either by store managers or third-party auditors (such as mystery shoppers)—to ensure compliance with brand standards. Your goal is to answer questions like:

• Do product displays match the planograms shared with each store?
• Is the sales floor tidy and well stocked?
• Are staff greeting customers and offering a positive experience?
• Does retail signage reflect current promotions?
• Do staff follow standard operating procedures (e.g., closing checklists)?

To identify areas of improvement, combine your store performance reports with audits. Learn which stores are excelling and which are falling behind and do something about it.

For example, POS data might show your New York store has the lowest revenue per square foot. Maybe the audit reveals the location isn’t displaying current promotions in window displays like better-performing locations are. Knowing this information, you can make sure the promotions are in window displays, and thus increase sales, while also improving consistency between stores.

Manage multiple retail stores with ease using Shopify

Operational inefficiencies and fragmented customer experiences shouldn’t hold you back from expanding your retail footprint—as long as you have the right tool stack.

Shopify’s multi-store POS system has everything you need to streamline operations and reduce costs. From speedy checkout and hardware proven to check out customers up to twice as fast to unified data that helps cashiers to sell up to 20% more per order, it’s no wonder leading retailers like Brooklinen, Gymshark, and Alo rely on Shopify to power multiple retail locations.