Designing a Multi-Tenant Storefront With Wildcard Subdomains

At my workplace, I worked on an ERP platform used by fashion businesses to manage customers, body measurements, products, orders, invoices, inventory, staff, and other day-to-day operations. Each business also had a public storefront where customers could browse products and check out. The storefront started as a simple sharing feature. Businesses could publish products, copy a link, and send it to customers outside the main workspace. That worked well because the storefront was mostly a product catalogue, and most of the sales process still happened after the customer contacted the business. As the platform evolved, the storefront became much more than a catalogue. Customers were discovering businesses through shared links, browsing products, placing an order, and tracking orders directly from the storefront. That introduced new technical requirements around branded storefronts, SEO, server-rendered metadata, public checkout, pricing, and analytics. This article explores how I designed the storefront around wildcard subdomains, immutable shop identities, server-side shop resolution, and a scalable analytics pipeline. Table of Contents Giving the Storefront Its Own Identity Business Names, Reserved Names, and Subdomains Resolving a Storefront Active and Inactive Storefronts Location and Currency Product Pages and Share Previews Storefront Event Ingestion Processing Raw Events Counting Unique Visitors With HyperLogLog Domain Routing and Local DNS 1. Giving the Storefront Its Own Identity The original storefront was fairly simple. It was a React application that fetched a business and rendered its products. Beyond that, there wasn't much to it. There were no branded storefronts, analytics, subdomains, or even a separate identity beyond the business itself. Introducing those capabilities meant the storefront needed its own data model. I introduced a dedicated shop entity to represent the public storefront. The business remained the source of operational data such as cu