Best practice for member only shopping

I am getting set to start building a website for my company and would like to have it available for the general public to view, but only registered members to be able to shop the products. In the past I have created a “front end” website where people could view the site and then a link for them to log into the “member end” website, which was just a subdomain of the main site. It seems to work fine, but I am trying to push myself as a designer and site developer a bit and want to know if that is the best way to do things or if there is a better way. Any thoughts or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,