Pro contractor vs DIY-pro consumer, same store or split brands?

Three common patterns:

• Same store, different customer groups. Contractors see trade pricing (cost + 18%); DIY consumers see retail (cost + 35%). Magento customer-group price rules handle this cleanly. The DIY consumer never sees a trade price, but the SKU pool is shared. Pattern works for ~80% of yards I’ve worked with. Cost-effective, single catalog, single SEO surface.
• Same store, dual-brand presentation. One Magento instance, two store views, contractor.yardname.com (trade focus, branch tools, project POs) and yardname.com (DIY focus, retail UX, will-call only). Different navigation, different homepages, different category emphasis (commercial roofing on contractor, deck-stain on DIY). Same backend.
• Separate stores. Pro yard + DIY yard as totally separate brands. Common when the DIY arm is a recent acquisition or when the leadership team is split. Operationally expensive, double the work for marginal SEO gain. Only justified above ~$20M GMV when the brand strategies diverge enough.

The pattern I default to: same store, different customer groups. Default-visitor experience is DIY (cleaner UX, retail pricing, will-call-only). Logged-in contractor experience switches to trade pricing + Net-30 + flatbed + project POs. The customer-group switch happens on login; everything from product visibility to checkout payment methods flips with it.

Most retail Home Depot Pro shoppers are actually small contractors logging out and shopping as consumers because the Pro UX is worse than the consumer UX. Don’t make that mistake, the contractor experience should be better, not worse.