Web store with multiple physical store fronts

[heinscott]

I was wondering if anyone could give me advice concerning a new project I will soon be undertaking?
We are currently in the process of rebranding our brick and mortal locations to be the same as our PoolGeek web store. As a result, we would like to have all of these stores run off of the same system for order processing, vendor ordering, etc. Now, it seems the easiest way would be to use our ablecommerce store, with some modifications. Here are some of the issues we think we'd run into.
1) How do we designate which location each order has come from?
2) How do we use a proper payment gateway/method for each location, as a physical credit card transaction needs to reflect the site where the card was scanned.
3) How do we keep inventory levels unique to each store front?
I did notice that the orders table does include a storeid, so I'm assuming it might be possible to add new stores to the stores table, and modify the admin order screen to allow a new store to be selected. Not sure if this is going to cause any future problems, though. Not sure about the additional Gateways... Would it be possible to add a new Authorize .Net gateway for each store front we add? I think inventory might not be that hard to figure out with an additional table, although determining when to update it might be challenging.
Any ideas/suggestions/options for me would be GREATLY appreciated. I'd rather not jump into this project before thinking about all the possible challenges and issues beforehand.
Thanks,

Scott
PoolGeek.com

[heinscott]

Okay... so scratch all the previous ideas....
We've decided, instead, to run a separate Able Commerce store for each physical location, and just auto sync our products and category structures. Would anyone have any kind of good suggestions for this? At first I didn't think it would be too big of an issue, but then I got to thinking about all the separate tables... (products, categories, parent categories, catalog nodes, kitproducts, kitcomponents, not to mention custom fields).
I originally thought about just syncing with an ashx request from the client store, but... might be a better way if I need to write from table to table directly.
Again, any helpful suggestions would be most welcome!

Scott

[jmestep]

The problem you are going to run into will be if you want to keep the ids the same in both stores since most the them are identity fields.
You might try using the dataport- I know I have used it to synch before, but I can't remember if it kept the ids the same.

[heinscott]

I was hoping to come up with some kind of automated system, kind of set it and forget it, if possible. The problem with dataport is that I need to leave my inventory alone, but sync anything else that has changed. Any other ideas for me? This all of a sudden seems like it's going to be a little more tricky than I initially thought. The only other idea I have is to write some kind of log entry every time a products gets created or edited, same with a category or a kit. Then, I could just create an xml of that info to send to my satelite store. Not sure if this would be the best way, though, or not...
More thoughts anyone??

Scott