Magento

I was reading over the documents on the multi-store support, and I’m a bit confused.

Can I have a single product catalog that, by default, spans all my stores?

In our case we have a number of markets that differ primarily in their mains power, either 220V/50Hz or 120V/60Hz. Of the 500 or so products in our system, this issue effects perhaps 150 of them. So I want to have a single catalog, and then tag the items with the standard (Euro or US) and have the stores either filter them out properly, or better yet, sort the correct one to the top (someone in the UK might still need to buy a 100V adaptor).

From the documentation I learned that “Products and Categories are managed on the store level.  A root category is configured for each store view group, allowing multiple stores under the same website to have totally different catalog structures.”

Ok, that’s *allowing*, but is it *required*? IE, are the products at the store level, the website level, or the global level?

Yes, you can have a single product catalog that spans multiple stores, products are at the global level and can be set for websites, specific values such as descriptions can be down to the store view level. You can create a separate website per country, region, type so that only those products are displayed on that site. Otherwise you can have a filter that they choose, however it is more customer friendly to have the filter by country rather than by voltage so you actually do the work for them.