A dealer hub, built once and run across every region

An electric utility vehicle brand sells through a network of dealers as well as direct, and runs a separate Shopify store for each region. Dealers needed their own space inside those stores, a logged-in hub with the pricing, ordering and resources that aren’t for the general public. The catch was that whatever we built for one region had to work the same in all of them, without being rebuilt from scratch four times over.

What we did

We built the dealer hub once, as a self-contained set of theme components, then ported it across the regional stores so each one runs the same portal. A dealer logs in and sees their world, the public sees the normal storefront, and the difference is handled in the theme rather than by a separate app. Because it’s one build reused, a change to how the hub works is made in one place and rolled out to each store, instead of being maintained separately in four and slowly drifting apart.

The result

Every region gives dealers the same experience, the brand owns the whole thing as theme code, and adding the hub to another store is a port rather than a fresh project. When the hub needs to change, it changes once.

What to take from it

If you run more than one store and you’re about to build something for one of them, it’s worth deciding up front whether it’s a one-off or a pattern you’ll want everywhere. Building it to be portable costs a little more the first time and saves you rebuilding and re-testing it every time you add a region. The version that hurts later is the one where the same feature exists in several places and no two of them behave quite the same.