In the last 2 months we have built 2 ecommerce websites using the Magento Commerce platform. Magento is certainly generating some interest around the place at the moment. It’s a pretty sophisticated platform considering it’s a relatively new, open source and freely available system. One of the really cool features is it has the ability to set up multiple ecommerce stores all from the one back-end.
In this post we will go through a Magento site we just finished, Discount Deals which is powering both the Discount Deals site and secondary sites – Remote Controlled Helicopter and Wooden Balance Bike all from the admin section of the Discount Deals site.Back in February I wrote this post about the launch of my Discount Deals online store. This website is based on the Magento platform and can be fully administered (changing the content on pages, adding products, managing orders etc) via the back-end interface provided. To demonstrate Magento’s multiple store functionality we have also recently developed the sites Remote Controlled Helicopter and Wooden Balance Bike to just sell one of the products from Discount Deals.
As you can see Remote Controlled Helicopter is an entirely different website. It’s on it’s own domain, it has a different design, different product catalogue etc. In the past, without a multiple store feature to achieve this you would have to have 2 completely stand-alone websites. There are numerous issues with this the main ones being:
- You have to pay to build and maintain 2 separate websites – every time a new patch comes out you have to apply it twice. Want to add another payment option? You have to add the code twice.
- You would need 2 separate hosting accounts and pay 2 lots of monthly hosting bills – good for us not for you.
- You would have 2 sets of product catalogues so if anything changes (i.e. you sell out of one item, you get some more stock in etc it has to be updated twice). This can be a real problem with inventory. What if you only have a few left and you get a few sales on each website? You might not have enough products to supply the buyers – if it was just the one site the system would prevent it because it would know you had run out.
- You would have to go to 2 separate places to process your orders.
In fact when you think about it, all of the data collected by an online shopping system (customer data, order data, product data etc) would have to be duplicated and would not relate to each other if you had 2 separate websites. And that is just for 2 websites, think about if you had 10 different storefronts all setup on stand alone ecommerce platforms – that would be a nightmare (if you are wondering why you would want 10 storefronts I will be addressing this in another article in the next few weeks).
Magento’s inbuilt multiple store support enables you to have separate storefronts without the issues associated with the duplication above.
Think of it as a franchise type setup. Each of your online storefronts are the franchisees who sell the products. Your one central back-end is the head office that processes all of the information and manages the business.
With the Discount Deals site, it doesn’t matter whether someone buys a Remote Controlled Helicopter from either RemoteControlledHelicopter.com.au or DiscountDeals.com.au. They go into the back-end system as a customer, their order goes in as an order, the inventory is deducted from the central inventory (if the product sells out it will no longer be displayed on either site).
The coolest thing about the way Magento does it is all of the configuration settings you can have on your main Magento site you can also have on the secondary sites. For example we have configured the PayPal payment gateway, the secondary site will automatically use this unless we tell it not to. We have set up Google Analytics to track statistics on the main site and while we also want to track user stats on the secondary site, we want them to be tracked separately so we have configured it to use a different tracking code for this site. We can use a different template to the main site so it can look completely different, we can show different products, we can have different shipping rules, different content on the website pages – all controllable via the one interface.
Overall it’s pretty cool….well I think so.
If you want some basic information on Magento check out our Magento Outline or if you want to speak with us about an ecommerce project please contact me.
