Hi all, Dan here from Web Development Brisbane, in this article I am going to give a quick overview of what Magento’s multiple stores features is all about.
One of the cool things about Magento is the ability to have a bunch of different ‘store fronts’ all powered by the one Magento installation. This is a really powerful feature, where previously you would have to set up multiple stand-alone installations of shopping carts on different domains, with Magento you can have as many stores as you want but only install and administer once from one location. No more maintenance issues with different sites, no more need for multiple hosting accounts etc.
Typically how it would be used is you would pick out products from a particular category and then register a domain just for that category. Then you can set up the multiple store in Magento and set the products from that category to display in both stores.
The really cool thing is this second store can be configured in it’s own unique way. All of the general Magento settings can either be inherited from the main store or you can choose to use customer ones for this new site. Where this is most powerful is the design section where you can have a completely different theme for the new site so it looks totally different. You can also obviously have different products, different prices, different checkout rules etc. But you can have the one central database of products, customers, orders etc.
And then you can set up as many more duplicate sites as you want. You just register the domain, install it as an add-on domain on your hosting account and configure Magento to use it for your store.
It’s powerful stuff and one of the reasons why Magento is growing so rapidly.
