Questions about Multiple Stores / Distributors possibly?

[sfj]

Hi,

Maybe you can shed some light on this. We are considering AbleCommerce for our roll out.

We have 2 stores currently, One based on Yahoo Stores, and one based on MIVA (One for the US, one for the UK).

We are about to launch a Canadian Version.

Each store has its own distributor and inventory, however all support, sales and administration is handled by the same team.

Will AbleCommerce allow us to have one store, but different inventories depending on which country the user is purchasing from?

Will this easily be a one stop solution for the entire storefront? Or do we need to have three separate storefronts.

Thanks

SFJ

[shp.jc2]

I think it depends on what you mean by storefronts.

Because you want the inventory to be separate, the stores would have to use their own data within AbleCommerce -- otherwise the inventory would be shared.

But there'd be nothing stopping you from using the same files on the customer site.

You would have three customer and order admin screens: one for each store.

But maybe you could use a package like Mail Order Manager to bring all those orders into one system. Options here would depend on your needs.

[AbleMods]

You'll have to do three seperate databases with three separate installs of AC7. That means three seperate admin consoles to manage orders. A common order management solution would be perfect for you, but it would have to be a custom programming job or third-party software solution.

AC7 won't maintain inventory levels between multiple warehouses - one warehouse and one inventory quantity per product. Only way around it is duplicating the product for each warehouse you have so inventory counts can be maintained seperately.

You could try to use themes to create different site appearances based upon the entry domain name and leverage a single install of AC7. But that won't keep sites 2 and 3 products from showing up in searches for site 1 without custom modification. And then again the one-warehouse-per-product issue would still exist.

There is support for multiple store instances from a single code base in the AC7 programming. However the last word that I heard was this is not yet supported as the functionality has not be fully tested.

[sfj]

Thanks for the tips, guys -

It is certainly something we may consider implementing or waiting until released in a stable version by AC.

SFJ