eCommerce businesses now a days are tough and highly competitive. To achieve an edge over your competitors, you are might considering launching one after another eCommerce Stores. Multiple stores often require in an eCommerce Business to:
- Promote Different Brands through different stores
- Have a different product line of the same organization
- Have Geographical/Regionl based product offering
- Have different business cases, like B2C in one store and B2B on other
Because of above mentioned one or multiple reasons, eCommerce businesses very often have multiple stores. Businesses found it beneficial to have multiple stores under same eCommerce Installation and OpenCart just offers that. You can easily set up multiple stores from Opencart Admin Panel just by filling up the required data, while some data will be generic and not need to be refilled and your second store will be ready in almost no time.
Though OpenCart support multiple store set up and maintain as a core feature, but still eCommerce Merchants need to remember below Pros and Cons when having multiple stores within same Opencart Installation.
Pros
- Easier to manage
- One Time Product Listing
- Order and Stock management
- Different Look and Feel
Maintaining multiple stores is quite a huge task. But if you get the important data like Orders, Customers, Products, settings and configuration of each store controlled through a single console, it is always beneficial. Opencart allows all data of multiple stores to be viewed storewise and in totality giving more flexibility to IT Managers.
Punch through all your Product and Product Categories using OpenCart admin panel and then tick on and off the products and categories which you would like to show storewise in front panel. If you want to list a Product or Product Category to multiple stores, just tick that on rather than punching the data again for another store. This saves a lot of data entry and data rectification time.
Orders generated by every store coming to a single admin, also an overall stock of the product getting decreased based on sales on multiple stores. This helps in easy restock and easy and quick Order processing for the back end team.
If you are selling different product line through different stores, obviously the look and feel need also to be different. Like a store selling Pet Food and a store selling Grocery can’t be same. Within OpenCart you can have different banner, design and layout for different stores, highly ideal for busiensses who are selling multiple product lines.
Cons
- Extension Problems
- SEO Problems
- Payment Gateway
Almost all eCommerce websites are extended in terms of features to cater business need. The Partner Extensions or Modules which are opted to meet certain features might not work on multiple stores. So if you in need of extension and have multiple stores, check the extension details accordingly before implementing it.
Having multiple stores often mean that merchants lists many identical products in multiple stores within the same OpenCart Installation. Same product description across multiple stores can show as duplicate content in terms of SEO. So please check such content and ensure canonical tags or submit this incident to google prior launching the website.
Payment Gateways are necessary for all eCommerce sites, specifically if the business model is B2C. But if you have multiple stores based on regions and you want to have multiple payment gateways in stores according to its region, that might not be possible with OpenCart. You need to use a single payment gateway across all stores in that OpenCart Installation.
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