How to Create and Manage Multiple Stores with Magento

How to Create and Manage Multiple Stores with Magento Platform, if you are a newbie to eCommerce world ? Magento is easy to install and configure eCommerce CMS, with Magento it is not much difficult to manage two or multiple Stores if you have some basic idea. For providing the basic idea this article on How to Create and Manage Multiple Stores with Magento Platform is written.

How to Create and Manage Multiple Stores with Magento Platform : Before We Begin

Magento is a platform for e-commerce and is among the most advanced platform available today and is distributed for Free. One of the greatest quality of Magento is the ability to manage multiple stores and multiple languages on the same backend. The backend is password protected control panel that allows the store administrator to configure products and purchase options, to manage orders and all other functions of the store.

The public part of Magento is known as frontend. The frontend is the part of the store visible to all those who use the Internet : products, categories and promotions; also is the possibility to the customer to place orders, pay and buy. But why should adopt a solution of multistore or more stores managed from a single platform?

The strength of MultiStore compared to a traditional e-commerce one store are many like Promotion costs can be divided. In fact, all resources would be channeled to promote a single portal but would benefit more stores. Having diversity of products or brands, in fact, makes a customer to enter the site for a product, then view other products and visit other shops that have other genres and categories.

The high number of stores and products, itself determines the success of a project of e-commerce because it increases their visibility on search engines and generate more traffic and more link-popularity. In our example will set Magento so that it can manage a multistore. Each store will have its own domain which we call magento1.com, magento2.com and magento3.com.

How to Create and Manage Multiple Stores with Magento Platform

We have published before how to Install Magento on Rackspace Cloud Sites. Except few points for any LAMP server with a webhosting control panel, the method by principle is the same.

Imagine a pyramidal structure, on whose top we find the concept of “Global”, represented by the installation of Magento on it. Any changes made at this level will be propagated at lower levels, or the “Websites”, the “Stores” and “Store Views”. We begin to build our multistore. First of all we will create our categories. The 3 sites of our example, share the same catalog. We will use the default root category in the menu ‘Catalogue> Categories> Manage Categories. The categories that we will create will be:

Computer
Internet
Web Hosting
Networking
Digital Photography

Categories should be set in the General Information tab as “Active” and in the Display Settings tab, so that they appear on the frontend of Magento shop. Since the sites do not share the same settings, you must create a Root category for each site.

So, given that there are 3 sites, there will be 3 categories with its subcategories in the Root. The products will be grouped into categories, which are displayed in the horizontal menu at the top of each page in the frontend site. Each product can be assigned to one or more categories. A customer can navigate through categories and related Subcategory through a drop down menu. Each Category or Subcategory will get a list of related products or a landing page that shows some products.

After creating the categories, it’s time to create sites for our 3 stores. The steps are to be carried out in this way :

Go to System> Manage Stores
Create Web Site
Name = magento2.com
Save the Site.
Go to System > Configuration > General > Web ; change the URLs accordingly.
It goes without saying that magento1.com is the domain where Magento is actually installed.