add another store

[chipbom11]

I already have a store live. Now i want to add a new store with the database and management like the previous. The old and the new store have the same database. How i must do ?

[mazhar]

AbleCommerce 7.0 (standard edition) doesn't support multiple stores within single database.

[chipbom11]

which version support multiple stores??

[mazhar]

Its another version of the application which is currently under development.

[Brewhaus]

Is there any reason that two stores cannot utilize the same db if both stores use the same item list? We have two stores, one offering product set 'A', and the other offering product sets 'A' and 'B'. Could we not use the same db and simply set up the two stores to display separate category lists in our Content and Layout / Sidebar code?

Are there any drawbacks to this? Both 'stores' actually are under one set of books for accounting purposes, so they do not need to be separated for accounting purposes.

This may at least suffice until the new version with multiple store capability is functional.

[mazhar]

Yes I think this possible and all you need to have are two different license keys.

[AbleMods]

Are there any drawbacks to this? Both 'stores' actually are under one set of books for accounting purposes, so they do not need to be separated for accounting purposes.

Yes. The search routines in both stores will pull from the entire catalog. You would have to make several modifications to all the search routines and any/all ConLib controls that display products to limit their search/selection capabilities.

[jmestep]

I ran into that situation trying to have certain products available for users of one group only. I made separate display pages for those categories/products and conditional code on those pages to check the user group and to then display the content or not. I thought I had it all set, then ran into the search problem. Bummer. So what I ended up doing was making those products hidden, but changing the code on those category and product pages to show hidden products- I think one tweak on each page did it. Then they didn't show up in searches, etc.

[Brewhaus]

I realized that there will be one other issue- featured items. Would it be possible to create a second 'Featured' table that we manually modify when we make a change, and have the second store pull its featured items from that table? I would expect that this would require very little coding change.

The other issue would be the page layouts, but again I would expect that this would all be pulled from the second stores' ConLib folder, so the style sheet, etc., from the second folder would still be in control of the layout of the second site (ie. only the items list, customer list, and other DB items would be shared). Ultimately, aside from the search issue (which I had already considered, and may just have to live with) they would run as two separate stores, just sharing the same customer list and items.

Am I missing anything? Ultimately, this would be a relatively simple way to run two stores with shared inventory, and aside from the search issue, things should run smoothly.

Incidentally- Mazhar- would there be much difference between this and what Able is working on regarding running multiple stores on a single DB? And, is that version still a long way off, or would it be worth waiting just for simplicity sake?

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hello,

is that version still a long way off, or would it be worth waiting just for simplicity sake?

This version is in the 'planning' phase, so I'd not recommend waiting around for it.

[jmestep]

One thing that might be a problem is checkout with Google or Paypal if you have to put the full URL in for those transactions to return to. If you can use just a folder/page URL then that should be a problem. I found this out in Able 5-- we had two domain names on the same store and it worked fine except for the CardinalCommerce VerifiedbyVisa configuration because we had to hardcode a return URL that included the domain name. We then set up the site to use one URL in checkout pages, but that caused problems when some customers switched from the other domain name at checkout- their basket disappeared in some cases.

[Brewhaus]

Right now we use a single PayPal account and on both sites (different URL's and even different software powering the two sites) when a PayPal payment is made it recognizes the payment when it is completed and shows in our Admin interfaces that the order has been paid. Now, that is just using PayPal as a payment method / gateway, not using Google Checkout or anything similar through PayPal. Actually, I was surprised that PayPal returned the payment information correctly for both sites, as I expected only one to work correctly.

Given that, should I expect anything different if we migrate the second store onto AC software and utilize the same DB as our current AC site?

Oh, and what about the Featured Items list? I assume that I should be able to manipulate the second store to pull this information from a different table, or am I asking too much?

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hello,

Actually, I was surprised that PayPal returned the payment information correctly for both sites, as I expected only one to work correctly.

Store ID is respected in most all, if not all of the API as a carry over from previous versions.

[AbleMods]

Oh, and what about the Featured Items list? I assume that I should be able to manipulate the second store to pull this information from a different table, or am I asking too much?

You could easily modify the user controls you'll be using in the second store instance to restrict the product searches.

But you're going to get orders mixed up - the checkout code that saves an order is compiled and I believe forces the StoreId value based on the single instance keycode. So both instances will see the same set of orders to be processed. Maybe that's ok for your situation.

Ultimately there's more to it than just displaying the products of the visitor side. There are all the store settings, next Order ID values, payment methods ID, shipping methods etc. All of that would overlap between the two instances.

Scriptlet assignments for each store page are also stored in the DB.

[Brewhaus]

But you're going to get orders mixed up - the checkout code that saves an order is compiled and I believe forces the StoreId value based on the single instance keycode. So both instances will see the same set of orders to be processed. Maybe that's ok for your situation.

Ultimately there's more to it than just displaying the products of the visitor side. There are all the store settings, next Order ID values, payment methods ID, shipping methods etc. All of that would overlap between the two instances.

Scriptlet assignments for each store page are also stored in the DB.

Actually, the stores are really run on the same set of books, using the same inventory (hence the reason for wanting to have both use the same DB). Both stores therefore use the same payment methods, shipping methods, etc. And, we do not need to use a separate list of Order ID's, so if a purchase from one store increases the next order ID on the other store, that is not an issue. I assume, though, that because both stores would use the same DB that all orders would be shown on both Admin menus. Again, this should not be an issue.

It would be nice to separate some data, but I imagine that it would be a rather heavy undertaking to go through all of the files to manipulate which tables the information is pulled from / written to in order to allow us to pull stats separately for the two stores.

Scriptlets should not be an issue, though, as we can create new ones to assign to the new store.

Ultimately, we simply want to utilize the same inventory for both stores so that a purchase of a given item from one store will not leave us with an incorrect inventory count in the other.

[AbleMods]

Caching will be a factor.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's a neat idea. But pulling it off with how AC7 is designed out-of-box just seems like it's going to mess things up. Maybe it'll work.

[Brewhaus]

Well, we are not in a rush to move our other site onto the same platform, so maybe it is worth holding on until AC comes out with the multi-store version so that it works properly (providing that version will allow for sharing of inventory items, which I assume it will). It is a mess running as we are now, but if it will also be a mess trying to combine the two then we best wait.

[pelliott67]

We're looking at a situation almost identical to what Brewhaus describes: setting up two stores that share a DB and inventory, books, order numbers, payment and shipping methods, etc. We're willing to make some conditional modifications, for ex. to the search code (which we've already replaced with custom code anyway). There are a couple of question that will be critical to us that I don't see covered here so far, and I was wondering if anyone might be able to shed some light:

The stores will share a huge digital goods inventory. We don't want to duplicate the source files. Can both stores pull files from the same \App_Data\DigitalGoods folder? Same question for \Assets\ProductImages (and any other physical files connected with display and download that I might not have thought of yet....)

Is the license tied to the AbleCommerce installation or the Store ID? IOW can we just create a second store in the same AC installation, duplicate all the products in the catalog with the second StoreID and so on, or do we have to do an entire second AC installation and then duplicate all the modifications we've made to the first one in the second one? In the current installation AC is a project within a .NET web application and it was a fair amount of work to set that up once.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[pelliott67]

"Is the license tied to the AbleCommerce installation or the Store ID?"
Just to be clear about the above question: we're of course planning to buy the second license in either case. This is just a question about implementation, not an attempt to sneak another store in under an existing license. We just need to know if running two stores is practical/possible from a digital goods perspective.

[Brewhaus]

Okay, I went through all of the DB tables, and for the most part it seems that running a second store on the same DB would be relatively straightforward. I was left with a couple of questions:

How easy would it be to set up the e-mail list subscriptions so that each store subscribed customers to the correct list? This would apply to both the sidebar (where a customer can enter their e-mail address to subscribe) as well as the option when a person creates an account at the checkout.

We found two table that appear to be very similar- EmailListSignups and EmailListUsers. What is each for and how are they different? (ie. how would the tables be affected, or how would they affect the running of two stores?)

How can we have new customers automatically be placed into a group upon creating an account? We have volume discounts that we offer to mail order customers but not wholesale customers (as they are already discounted), but customers appear to be in no group when they register. If we select groups for the discount, then it does not apply to those that are not part of a group. If we offer the discount to all groups, then wholesale customers also get the discount. This has not been an issue on the store currently running under AC, but our other store does make use of volume discounts on some items.

Can searches be controlled, with relative ease, to not return select groups of products? While the one store offers all products, the other store only offers certain categories. It would be best if the latter did not return products that are only a part of the second store.

There are two tables that I thought may be of value in controlling (or it may be necessary):

ac_Stores- Should the second store be entered here? If so, will StoreID 2 still pull the products with a StoreID value of 1?
ac_StoreSettings- again, should we set up with StoreID 2 and according settings? If we do not, will we still be able to control the layout of the store?
As the stores will be in different folders on the server, would either of these tables really matter? The primary difference would be the theme of the store, and given that the name of the theme is in the StoreSettings table, providing we name the theme folder the same in both website folders, I would guess that we can manipulate each stores' style.css file independently.

Finally, how would we control which products are featured in each store? Currently there is an 'IsFeatured' column. Could we add an additional column such as 'IsFeatured2' for the items featured in the second store, and simply modify the Featured Item grid to pull items based on that value instead of the value in the 'IsFeatured' column?

Hopefully Mike or someone else here can give these answers. If it looks viable, maybe we can get a temporary license to test things out, and if it works we will just purchase the second license and be able to migrate our other store onto AC, and onto a shared DB.

[sashashev]

Hi there,

I realise this post is now old but I was wondering if anyone particularly Brewhaus had any luck with implementing 2 stores with the same DB.

I need to do a similar thing...
Same inventory between stores
Stores can use the same domain with a different querystring or parameter passed to differentiate
Ability to display different categories for different stores
Customers need to log in before purchasing
Different logo appearing based on store.
Different prices based on % discount
Different shipping based on store.

From what I can see it looks like I will need a combination of the affiliate functionality (for logo and price adjustments and login URL) and storeid functionality (Categories, Shipping cost)

If anyone has succeeded doing something similar could they please let me know.

Thx,
Sasha

[Brewhaus]

I had actually asked if we could get a temporary license to try to implement a second store on the DB, but I never received a reply and then got too busy to follow up. I will have to jump back onto that, as trying to maintain inventory counts on about half of our items across two DB's is a nightmare.