AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

After a lot of tinkering we were able to get two store running from a single database, sharing inventory where given products are sold by both stores. I have attached a PDF of the instructions that we put together, and if anyone had suggestions on cleaning the instructions up to make them easier to understand please let me know.

To see the two sites in action, go to

http://
www.
brewhaus.
com

and

http://
www.
hotsaucedepot.
com.

The setup shows all items on the first site, and only select items on the second. As customers set up accounts, they are placed into a group that allows us to offer specials to those who shop on one site (such as free shipping over a certain purchase value), while not offering the same special to customers of the other site.

We have been running the two stores from one DB for just under a month now, and aside from a couple of tiny quirks (eg. needing to copy any changes to scriptlets from one site to the other), everything is running smoothly- certainly far more smoothly than running two separate sites and trying to keep the inventory straight!

Thanks Rick. I'll be doing exactly this by the end of the year.

Any more tweaks/problems, please post.

Things work pretty smoothly. The main qwirk is that when you change a scriptlet or add an image for an item you need to copy the file(s) from the primary website folder to the secondary site folder. I think pretty well everything else is handled in the setup instructions that I built along the way, but if you have any questions when going through the process just let me know.

UPDATE: A little more tinkering has shown that you can indeed change scriptlets for each site by being logged into that website's Admin section. We have just done so with the Home Page scriptlet. It even uploads graphics to the correct site's folder. Originally it did not appear that this was working, but it was apparently a permissions issue.

Did you have any trouble in this set up with non- www.domain names? Like http://brewhaus.com redirecting to http://brewhaus.com? We have a client who is trying to set up to sites, but his sites are on a server we don't have access to so there is little we can do.
Thanks

Got this working in my demo environment, but I have a question before we jump into developing the real site... Is it possible to set the 2nd site up as a virtual directory under the first site?

My specific need is to present a specially-branded site (with special pricing, different featured items, etc) to users from a special customer of ours. Let's call them Company X. We would like to tell users from Company X to go to http://store.mydomain.com/companyX and have them see "their" store instead of the normal store (obviously, we'd want to require login and validate that users were members of the proper user group before allowing them into the site; We've already written that code, in fact).

So anyone know if it is possible to set up a second store in this manner, or must we use something like http://store.mydomain.com and http://companyX.store.mydomain.com ?

Another question - I assume you need two Able Commerce licenses in order to run two stores, even if they are sharing a single product database?

Thanks!

You don't mention anything about Payment Methods or Payment Gateway, can these be diffferent for each store?
Presumbaly one can show inc. tax on one site and exc. tax on the other?
Thanks...

Brewhaus, thanks for the PDF instruction file, but I'm not clear on the license requirements for this kind of setup. Could you import the license from the first site into the second one, or did you have to get a new license? If you got a new one, what kind of license did you use for the second site? Did you need the Domain Add-On?
Thanks,
Rebecca

we are interested in setting up multiple stores, they would mostly carry diffrent products than our current store, but our main area of concern is from backend processing of orders. Will this solution allow us to process orders and shipments from a single interface?

I have a question about the category specific search function.

I have changed the line of code in ConLib/Custom/SearchPage.ascx.cs and change the following: to The thing is, no matter what is searched, the results will return every item in the category.

Any suggestions on how to fix this?


Also, on a separate note, would there be a way to exclude a category from the normal search results?

Do you have the search sidebar on the page? If not, it will return results from all categories. You can hide it if you don't want it shown, but it needs to be there.