Magento DOES NOT Fully Support Multi-Store Functionality
Magento is a feature-rich ecommerce application that has a ton of features. However, one of its most popular features (multi-store functionality) does not work as advertised. I love Magento and recommend it to all my clients, this is not a Magento bashing post. I just want people to be aware of a serious limit to the app before they promise too much to a client. In three clicks you can see exactly what I mean...The problem seems to come from Magento's session handling. Follow these steps exactly using Internet Explorer (other browsers seem to also have the same issue, but most of your customers will use Internet Explorer so let's see what they see):
- Clear your cookies to simulate a brand new user visiting your website
- Go to: http://www.magento-mall.com/ (this is Magento's multi-store demo)
- Add any product from this website to your cart. You will see "My Cart (1 item)" in the header.
- Now click the Apparel Store tab.
- Oops! Your cart is empty now.
- Stay on the Apparel store!
- Add any product to your cart. You will see "My Cart (1 item)" in the header.
- Click back to the Magento Mall tab. You will see 1 item in your cart. Clicking on My Cart will show you the most recent product you have added, but you have completely lost the first product you added to your cart.
If you click through all the other tabs, everything will work fine. The issue appears with the first product that is added to cart.
Why is this a problem?
If you have sold anything online, you can remember how difficult (and expensive) it was to get that sale. A 2-3% conversion rate will make my year! It is hard enough getting someone to add a product to their cart, let alone buy something. If we are losing shopping cart items, we are losing sales.
Here is a Magento blog post that references multi-store functionality.
The GAP.com website is a beautiful example of how multi-store functionality should work. Another drawback we have found with Magento is that we have no way of knowing which website a particular product was added from. At GAP.com they have a cool icon for each product in your shopping cart. This becomes a bigger problem in the admin, when you are viewing an order in the backend you cannot tell which website each product was added from, you can only tell which website the order was completed through.
Ok, remember at the beginning of this post I mentioned not promising too much to a client. Well, we did that (@ Ad Stream - www.adstreaminc.com). We had a client who needed 3 different domains with some shared products. They needed to have a single shopping cart across all three websites and they needed the shopping cart to show which website each product was added from.
With a bit of duct tape we were able to get Magento multi-store functionality working how (in our opinion) how it should.
Check this out: www.jensenrvdirect.com
Add a product to your cart from the RV website and then click the Marine tab at the top. Voila! Your cart will still have the item. And you get a cool little icon in your shopping cart showing which website you added that product from.
Need something similar? Contact us with your project details and we will get it done!
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