Many retailers start with one shop – and a few years later they have several: a second one for another country, one for business customers, one for a new brand. If these become separate systems, the work doubles with every shop: updates, product maintenance, extensions, hosting.
Magento was built for a different approach from the start: several shops from one installation.
How a multishop is structured
In Magento, several websites, stores and store views can be set up in one system. Code, extensions and – where desired – products and customers are shared. What can differ:
- domain and design per brand or country,
- language and texts,
- prices, currencies and taxes,
- assortment, payment methods and shipping,
- customer groups with their own terms, for example for B2B.
Two examples from our projects
Promostore sells promotional products to business customers in four countries. The four country shops have their own languages and prices but run on a shared code base – with the same FACT-Finder search, the same product feeds and the same payment methods.
Deutsche Carportfabrik runs more than ten domains from one multishop system, with separate shops for private and business customers. Every product has its own configurator – yet it is maintained only once.
What matters
A multishop saves effort, but only if it is planned properly from the start:
- What is shared, what is separate? This decision shapes the data model, maintenance processes and permissions – and is costly to change later.
- Extensions must support multishop. Every module has to handle different settings per shop.
- Keep an eye on performance. Many shops mean more indexes, more caches and more load. Hosting and caching must be designed for it.
- Updates affect all shops. That is the big advantage – and also why good automated tests matter so much.
When does a multishop pay off?
Rule of thumb: when your shops are more alike than different. Same processes, similar products, but different markets or target groups – then a shared system is almost always cheaper. If business models and processes differ fundamentally, separate systems may be the better choice.
Planning a second shop or merging existing shops? We help with the decision and the implementation.