Multi-Store Shopify Development for Meroda Cosmetics

About the Project

Meroda Cosmetics is a Dutch DTC beauty brand founded in 2021, built on a cruelty-free, “beauty without boundaries” positioning. It sells makeup, complexion, and skincare-adjacent products, led by its flagship Changing Foundation — a shade-adapting complexion formula that won Foundation of the Year at the Marie Claire Prix d’Excellence de la Beauté, alongside houses like Chanel, Dior and Lancôme. The brand serves more than a million customers and sells beauty and cosmetics across the EU, the UK, the US, and beyond through a network of country-specific storefronts.

Meroda Cosmetics came to SPLIT Development — a boutique Shopify agency for beauty, cosmetics, and DTC brands, based in Tallinn, Estonia and Sacramento, CA — through Upwork, looking for a long-term development partner to take over ongoing work and implement new solutions on a large, fast-moving Shopify Plus estate. What began as help with day-to-day tasks became a full rebuild of the storefront and a ground-up re-architecture of how a beauty brand runs multiple stores across multiple markets. This is a development-only engagement: Meroda’s team owns the design, SPLIT owns the implementation.

The Core Challenge

Selling beauty across Europe without the estate collapsing under its own weight

A beauty brand selling across the EU rarely sells into one clean market. Meroda runs distinct storefronts for different regions, each with its own market rules, languages, currencies, and merchandising — and Shopify does not natively connect separate stores to one another. Left unmanaged, that becomes nine parallel stores drifting apart, duplicated SEO signals, and shoppers landing in the wrong region with no clean way across.

When SPLIT took over, Meroda was running nine separate Shopify Plus stores. On calls we made the case that several of those markets didn’t need a whole store — they needed Shopify Markets inside a consolidated store. The client agreed, and we rebuilt the estate down to five stores (WW, NL, UK, DE, CH), redistributing the rest as markets. That single move cut at least four Plus stores at roughly $2,000/month each — saving the client a minimum of ~$8,000 per month — while making the whole setup easier to maintain.

Development Solutions

The storefront was rebuilt from the ground up on the Dawn theme. The previous theme carried a lot of non-best-practice code that dragged performance and made scaling across markets painful, so the decision was made to replatform onto a clean Online Store 2.0 base and re-implement the entire site as new custom sections, pages, and solutions. The full rebuild — with testing and staged rollout across countries — took a little under two months.

Custom hreflang / alternate-links architecture across unconnected stores. With separate markets, correct alternate links matter for international search. Shopify generates them automatically inside a single store’s markets — but it does not link separate stores together, and Meroda’s business genuinely needs separate stores. We built a solution baked into our themes that is aware of every store in the estate and generates correct alternate links across all of them, so each region ranks and resolves correctly for users based on their location. This is technical internationalization, not a marketing SEO service — it’s the plumbing that lets a multi-store beauty brand behave like one coherent international presence.

Custom cross-store geo-routing with our own logic. Because the stores can’t see each other, off-the-shelf “switch region” popup apps don’t work here. We wrote our own. If a shopper from Italy lands on the UK store, the system recognizes that Italy belongs to the WW store and offers a one-click move to the right storefront — or the shopper can decline, and a cookie remembers the choice so the prompt doesn’t reappear. A store selector in the navigation lets users move deliberately at any time.

27 markets on a single store. The largest storefront, WW (world-wide), now runs 27 active markets. After extending it well beyond Europe it was renamed from EU to WW. Content, pricing, and merchandising are tuned per market on Online Store 2.0.

Multi-language with per-language product galleries. Alongside the English default on WW, we’re running FR, IT and ES, with translations configured cleanly. One solution worth calling out: for international markets we built a dedicated product-gallery metaobject, so each language — and each selected variant — can display the correct gallery, with the right on-image text, without sacrificing site speed.

Custom private apps for discount logic and fraud control. A large share of the work sits in bespoke private apps we built ourselves to handle discount and promotion logic that Shopify can’t do natively. Among them: solutions that limit the number of free items allowed per order, closing off a common promo-abuse vector. These directly reduced fraudulent and problematic orders on high-volume promotions — a class of problem most beauty stores quietly absorb.

Seamless multi-store operation via Git. Every store’s theme is connected to Git, so changes are tracked and understood per store. Combined with tight client communication, that’s what keeps five stores on different themes working as one coherent system rather than five drifting forks.

Tech stack: Shopify Plus with a customized Dawn theme and Shopify Markets, Klaviyo for email, Trustpilot for reviews, Intelligems for A/B testing, Sendcloud for shipping, and a set of custom private apps built in-house for discount and promotion logic.

Client Result

Meroda Cosmetics runs a beauty estate that behaves like one brand across every market it sells into. The store count went from nine to five, saving the client a minimum of roughly $8,000 per month, while the remaining stores gained 27 markets, correct cross-store internationalization, and merchandising that adapts per region and per language. Promo-abuse and fraudulent orders dropped after the custom discount-logic apps went live, and the site runs as a stable, high-throughput commercial operation behind a premium beauty front.

With a delivery base in Tallinn, Estonia and Sacramento, CA, SPLIT supports the estate across EU, UK and US timezones. On real-world Chrome user data, the rebuilt storefront passes Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment on desktop, with a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.3 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of 100 milliseconds, a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.01, and a First Contentful Paint of 2.0 seconds. For a beauty brand of this scale — a million-plus customers, award-winning products, and constant promotional activity across markets — that combination of international depth, operational control, and stable delivery is exactly what running beauty across Europe actually requires.