Multi-Store eCommerce: How B2B Businesses Are Expanding into B2C Without Doubling Their Infrastructure
If you’re running a successful B2B operation and your end customers are already searching for your products online, you’re sitting on a massive B2C opportunity. Multi-store eCommerce lets you add a D2C channel alongside your existing wholesale business — same inventory, same admin, same team. Spree Commerce open-source was built for exactly this moment.
Your customers’ customers are already looking for you
Here’s something most B2B businesses already know but rarely act on: the people who buy your products from retailers are increasingly trying to buy directly from you.
D2C brands have proven there’s real demand for cutting out the middleman. Your end customers are searching for your products online right now — you’re just not the one selling to them.
And when you sell wholesale, retailers capture most of that retail margin. Even a small D2C channel can significantly improve your overall profitability. Plus, you get something wholesale can never give you — direct market insights from the people actually using your products.
The good news? You already have the hard parts figured out. You have supplier relationships, inventory systems, and fulfillment processes that were built to scale. The only question is how to reach consumers without blowing up what already works.
Adding B2C doesn’t mean starting from scratch
The benefits of expanding into D2C are hard to ignore. You diversify your revenue streams so you’re no longer dependent solely on wholesale accounts. Economic downturns that hurt your retailers don’t have to hurt you as much. Seasonal fluctuations in B2B can be balanced by consumer demand on the B2C side.
You also own the customer relationship.
Right now, your retailers own that data. With a direct channel, customer feedback comes straight to you — not filtered through distributors who have their own agenda. And the margins speak for themselves: retail pricing on the same product is significantly higher than wholesale, with no volume discounts eating into your profit.
There’s a strategic advantage too. You can test new products with consumers before pitching them to wholesale accounts. Use D2C data to understand which products resonate and why, then bring those insights into your B2B sales conversations. It’s a feedback loop that makes both channels stronger.
Separate systems sound logical — until you manage them
When B2B businesses decide to add a consumer channel, the first instinct is often to spin up a completely separate eCommerce platform. A separate store, separate inventory, separate admin. It sounds clean on paper.
In reality, it’s a headache.
Inventory doesn’t sync properly, leading to overselling or stockouts. Customer data is fragmented, so you lose the full picture of your business. Your team wastes time reconciling orders, stock levels, and reports manually. Two platforms means two sets of updates, two integrations to maintain, two vendors to manage.
Separate systems make sense in a narrow set of circumstances: completely different product lines with no overlap, separate legal entities that need full isolation, or dedicated teams for each channel with zero shared resources. For everyone else, there’s a much better path.
One admin dashboard, two storefronts, zero duplication
The multi-store ecommerce model flips the whole equation. Instead of running two separate platforms, you run two storefronts from one backend. One admin dashboard gives you full visibility across both your B2B and B2C operations.
Your product catalog is shared, but you set different pricing per store. Your wholesale buyers see their negotiated prices. Your consumers see retail pricing. Same products, different experiences.
Inventory syncs in real time across both channels, so you never oversell. And your single admin dashboard gives you consolidated reporting — one place to understand your entire business instead of stitching together data from two different systems.
Your B2B operations don’t need to change
This is the part that matters most to B2B businesses considering the jump: your existing wholesale operations stay exactly as they are. Customer segmentation and tier pricing for your wholesale accounts remain in place. Account management with credit limits, payment terms, and user roles continues working the way your buyers expect. Your existing B2B purchasing flows don’t need to change at all.
You’re not rebuilding your B2B business.
You’re adding a B2C storefront next to it — with its own domain, its own branding, and its own theme. Your consumer storefront gets what it needs: a mobile-first shopping experience optimized for conversions, consumer-friendly checkout with credit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, and integrations with tools like Stripe, Klaviyo, and other marketing automation platforms.
Each store is configured independently — from payments to shipping
The power of a multi-store setup is that you control exactly what’s shared and what’s separate. Payment methods can differ per store — net terms for your B2B buyers, credit cards for consumers. Shipping options and fulfillment logic can be configured independently. Tax and currency settings adjust per store if you need them to.
At the same time, the things that should be shared — products, inventory, customers, shipping methods — flow across both stores automatically. You choose what to share and what to isolate. New stores spin up in minutes from the admin dashboard, each with its own custom domain and branding. Your team manages it all from one place.
And because Spree is a headless, API-first platform, each store can have its own fully custom frontend — including a Next.js storefront if you want a blazing-fast, modern shopping experience for your consumers while keeping a more functional, workflow-oriented interface for your B2B buyers.
Spree was built for this kind of complexity
Spree is an open-source eCommerce platform that treats multi-store as a core capability — not a plugin or a workaround. It’s used by thousands of businesses, including brands like GoDaddy, Huckberry, and the New England Patriots.
Unlike SaaS platforms that charge extra for every additional storefront or force you into app ecosystems to get basic multi-channel functionality, Spree gives you native multi-store out of the box. No per-store fees. No revenue-based pricing. No plugin compatibility headaches.
And if your business grows more complex — say you want to add a marketplace alongside your B2B and B2C operations, or expand into new regions with localized currencies and tax rules — Spree’s composable architecture handles that too. B2B wholesale, multi-store, marketplace, multi-region — they all compose on the same platform without re-platforming.
Enterprise support from the team that builds the platform
For businesses running complex multi-store operations, the Enterprise Edition adds the layer of support and security that enterprise operations require. A dedicated success manager who knows your setup, not a rotating support queue. Guaranteed response times backed by SLAs. Direct access to the engineers who actually build the platform — via Slack, Teams, or email.
Enterprise-grade security that meets the standards banks and healthcare companies require. And 24/7 infrastructure monitoring so your team can focus on growing the business instead of watching dashboards.
Ready to add a B2C channel to your B2B business? Get started with Spree and see how the multi-store approach works — or book a call with our team to walk through your specific setup and expansion plans.
