Magento

I am looking to have multiple stores administered from one Magento back-end—which is potentially wonderful.  But I do have a question about how users check out and pay for items and the domain they would do that under…

Let’s say I have (for the sake of simplicity), two stores, both being managed by the same magento back-end, storeX.com and storeY.com.  The ‘main’ store here is ‘storeX.com’ which holds the ssl certificate, dedicated ip and the full catalog.  The other site, ‘storeY.com’ may or may not have a dedicated ip, ssl and also has a subset of the full catalog… it just happens to attract a customer that wants to purchase a widget.  Great.  When the customer starts the checkout process and need to login/checkout, what happens?  Can ‘storeY.com’ carry the customer the whole way through checkout and confirmation (email from storeY.com)?  I realize that this would require ‘storeY.com’ to have a dedicated ip and ssl cert also (which is fine), but I am just wondering if this is truly how Magento is handling the multiple store process.

If user goes to ‘storeY.com’, tries to checkout and gets shifted over to ‘storeX.com’, that would not be good.

Thanks for any input,
FloydR

The system seems quite flexible in this regard, and I don’t think there will be a problem to achieve what you want.  As you said, you will need an SSL for each domain if you want to stay on that domain for the checkout process, in fact I am not sure that you could use the same domain for checkout for stores on 2 different websites.

There are 2 concepts, ‘Websites’ and ‘Stores’.  Websites can have lots of things different (language, products, payment methods, design, etc) but can share stuff as well. Stores can also have things different (products, language, design, etc), but not as much as ‘websites’ (for example stores have to share the payment method). I think ‘websites’ would generally be on different domains, while ‘stores’ would probably be more suited to being on the same domain (eg. different language stores).

There are lots of different ways you could set it up.  Best thing to do is have a good read of the docs, and have a go with a test install.

See this:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/overview-how-multiple-websites-stores-work/

Cheers,
Ross.

@FloydR: All stores in same website share customer information, shopping cart, and all connected information.

Different stores in the same website can be on different domains.
HTTP and HTTPS for the same store can be on different domains. Magento will transfer session information as URL query parameter.

Hope this answers your concerns.

Moshe,

You say that having multiple domains with one website is possible.
You also say that each site could have its own Secure Cert.

I have one install of Magento with ded IP and UCC Cert on motherdomain.com
Within motherdomain.com public_html directory I have 2 add-on domains brotherdomain.com and sisterdomain.com (using cpanel)

All three domains should be able to have their own theme.
All three should be able to have their own products.
All three should have their own secure login and cart process. (shouldn’t bounce between urls)
All three sites should be able to share customers. (same login and pw for all 3 sites)
All three sites should be able to share the same product base and admin system.

I can’t get this to happen.  I have motherdomain.com working fine.  But brotherdomain.com is having issues showing the UI?  Is looking for files within brotherdomain.com and not in motherdomain.com.  So brotherdomain.com looks like it has no stylesheets or images.

Any ideas why this would happen?  We are very interested in the multi store abillity of Magento.  We currently have 12 OSC stores and want to convert them all to Magento with one admin.  Thanks for any help.

e.

Hi Eric,

There was a video about setting up multiple stores but I can’t find it now.

If motherdomain.com is your default store, you create a folder for brotherdomain.com which contains an index.php and .htaccess. In order for this store to use the default UI, line 26 of index.php needs to have the correct path to motherdomain.com’s app/Mage.php. For example:

Then you need to add the appropriate “Base URLs” for each website in Configuration-Web in the admin.

Hope that helps,

Séamus

seDev - 15 April 2008 04:42 PM

Hi Eric,

There was a video about setting up multiple stores but I can’t find it now.

If motherdomain.com is your default store, you create a folder for brotherdomain.com which contains an index.php and .htaccess. In order for this store to use the default UI, line 26 of index.php needs to have the correct path to motherdomain.com’s app/Mage.php. For example:

$mageFilename = '../app/Mage.php';

Then you need to add the appropriate “Base URLs” for each website in Configuration-Web in the admin.

Hope that helps,

Séamus

Can anyone elaborate on that a bit? For example, what you need by “Base URLs” etc.. I am facing the same problem, I want one magento installation for X amount of shops. I am looking to migrate at least different shops to it. But I can’t figure out how exactly the installation is shared.

If this is described in the docs/wiki/somewhere, please point me to it and apologies for asking. (Disclaimer: yes, I used the search, etc.)

Till

I’ve searched for HOURS myself and cannot find EXACT steps on how to set this up. Someone has setup my client’s multi store with a different host account for each. But a Varien guy said it can be done in 1 account/1 install. But I don’t know the steps for this. THANKS for anyone that can help us!