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Creating Direct Several Online Stores Using Magento CMS!

As an eCommerce retailer, developing and managing multiple online stores can be challenging, considering the time, effort, and resources you’ll need.

Thus, Magento’s creators have tried to ease the maintenance of multiple stores by allowing users to customize their online stores and enhance your consumers’ experience via the Magento Content Management System ( Magento CMS) features.

Magento is one of the well-known eCommerce platforms in the market, for both small and big businesses such as Sally Hansen, Liverpool, and Ford, to name a few. Thanks to its several plug-ins that meet your business need, this open-source software also comes with a ton of ready-made modules.

With a single installation and admin panel, you get to run multiple stores. You can also set up every store on a separate domain with different languages, design themes, products, and customer groups to target each shop’s target audience.

In this article, we’ll consider how you can get the most out of Magento CMS to set up multiple stores, pricing, and likely challenges to avoid during a store setup.

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What is Magento Multiple Store?

Before we look at how to set up Magento multi-stores, it is crucial that you first have a clear understanding of how the multi-store is structured

Magento Websites: When you install Magento, you’ll operate a single website. The site is, by default, referred to as the “Main Website.” Using a single software installation, you can set up several websites, and each has a distinct domain and IP address.

Magento Stores: With a single site, you can have multiple stores, each containing its main menu. Magento stores have the same product catalog, but they may differ in various products and store designs. The administrator and cashier are the same for all stores under a single website.

Magento Store Views: Your consumers get to view each of your online stores by a specific “store view.” At the point of installation, there is only one default store view. But there are features on the software that allow you to add variations of the same store in different languages. Your customers in different countries can navigate your store in their preferred style using the “my store view” feature.

Pricing Of a Magento-based Website?

Besides using Magento CMS for its several features and benefits, price consideration must be considered before you pick your desired edition. Getting an exact price estimate of running a Magento-based website is not easy, due to the several factors involved in running one. However, an excellent place to start is by understanding the Magento CMS Editions available. At the moment, the company offers the following platform versions:

Magento Open Source (formerly known as Magento Community): This is an entirely free edition, and it works best for developers and small businesses. However, there are added costs for coding, configuration, hosting, support, etc.
Magento Commerce (formerly known as Magento Enterprise) and Magento Commerce Cloud: These two editions provide a more advanced functionality set that works well for larger businesses with a more significant turnover. The cost of using these versions depends on your gross sales revenue.

The cost of maintenance and support of your final website varies significantly based on the platform you choose.

How To Build Your Ecommerce Store On Magento

Install Your Selected Magento Package:

From Magento’s official website, click on the Products menu and navigate where to start and click on Open Source to download the package.
When the package had downloaded, you can extract the file content to:

Public_html folder to keep the Installed folder as the primary domain, or;
public_html/store/ to keep the installed Magento package housed in a sub-folder

Upload Magento To Hosting Server:

Upon completing your installation, you’ll need to upload all the Magento files onto your hosting server. Upload the files by accessing the File Manager via the cPanel menu or through your FTP client.

Create Product Categories, Subcategories:

Setting up related product categories and subs is essential because it serves as a guide that helps your customers through every purchase. Magento makes this easy by allowing you to create multiple categories and subcategories for your store. To create your product categories:

Click on your Admin Panel ˃ Catalog ˃ Manage Categories and the Root Catalog
You can then include a Category and Sub using the Root Catalog option and edit information such as store name, keywords, price, page description, visuals, etc.
The Subcategories display from the Page Layout menu can also be customized
When you are done with the adjustments, click the Save Category to create the newly added category

How to Set Up Magento Multi-Store:

To set up Multiple Stores in Magento, these are the steps to follow:

From the Admin menu, navigate to System > Manage Stores.
There’s a Create Store button you can click on to create as many stores as you need.
For every new store, a new page appears with the following blank boxes:

Insert in your Magento store URL Website i.e., the parent site of your store.
Enter a Name for the store, distinguished from your other stores

Under the Root Category set options for the main navigation of the store. It can be the same as other stores or unique to the new store.

And then, click on Save Store.

How to Install a Language Pack

To set a new language for your Magento store, you’ll need to download and install the language pack. The languages include Chinese, Portuguese, French, Arabic, English, Filipino, German, etc. You can find them under Translations and Localization on Magento Marketplace. Next, you can create a Store View for the Language with these steps:

From the Admin sidebar, go to Stores > Settings > All Stores.
Then click Create Store View to set your options for the new store view:

Store: select the parent view store
From the store view, navigate to configuration> General > Locale Options.
Select the corresponding Language from the Locale menu. If you have several store views, switch to the Store View you want to change the Language for.

Name; key in a name for the store view. E.g., Chinese
Code: entre the code in lowercase characters for view identification. E.g., chinese
Status: set to Enabled to activate the view.

Once you’ve done, click Save Config.

Checklist to Help Avoid Problems for Your Magento Multi-store Setup

Although setting up multiple stores on Magento CMS is straightforward, you still need to ensure that the following are in place to enable the most efficient store operation:

Get a multi-domain SSL certificate such as Wildcard SSL OR Subject Alternative Name (SAN) Certification particularly for new domains;
Sign up to a reputable multiple-website host to avoid server issues;
Ensure that you have a backup for your Magento store;
Configure your Magento multi-store from the admin panel;
Carryout a few product testing and check that they meet requirements;
Create unique content especially on your page titles and descriptions for each store to avoid duplication of content;
Update your Magento software to enable plug-in activation for multiple stores.

Conclusion

I hope these tips can help guide you towards getting the best out of your Magneto CMs, so you don’t have to consider integrating it with other CMS. Additionally, there are several Magento extensions and plug-ins available to broaden your online store for specific functionality and enhance your customer experience.

Author

John Edwards is a writing specialist who works at The Pick The
Writer. He is looking for ways of self-development in the field of
writing and blogging. New horizons in his beloved business always
attract with their varieties of opportunities. Therefore, it is so
important for him to do the writing.

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