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rundy
rundy

Reputation: 65

Magento Multi-Store Setup / Store Codes Setting

I'm running Magento on a shared server with a single IP. I originally set it up as a single store with no plans to do multi-stores. Do I need to have store codes trailing each domain in magento to get this work correctly? They will all checkout at the main store URL. I have done this in the past and it has worked fine for me, but I was using store codes and with this instance I am not.

Will it completely jack up my SEO?

So I have store1.com (main store) and store2.com which needs to checkout at store1.com

Any help or link to a how to would be great. Have not been able to find a straight forward answer.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 322

Answers (1)

Ashley Swatton
Ashley Swatton

Reputation: 2125

Your proposed setup of having store1.com and store2.com with a shared checkout URL of store1.com will work with a bit of work from yourself, but it's not clean or ideal in my opinion. Magento will append an SSID every time it switches domain to try and re-load the customers session data (They will have ?SSID=something). You would also need to change the checkout URL in your templates to only use the 1 domain which would require hard coding the full URL to the checkout and cart page in the store2.com templates.

Personally I would simply have separate checkouts for each domain which is supported straight out of the box in Magento without really doing anything. Why the need to have the checkout always under 1 domain? If it's because of SSL and 1 IP limitations then buy a UCC SSL certificate for multiple domains and have all the domains required to run on the server setup as SANS on the certificate. Cheap and simple. This way there is no need for store codes in URLs, SSIDs in domain switching, and the user will always stay on the same domain without any funny switching business or complications.

As a customer I would also be a little surprised to shop on one domain and then checkout on another these days, especially if one of the domains is international and this will ultimately effect your conversion rate.

You seem to be familiar with store views, so once you have setup your secondary store view, simply go into the admin and override the base URLs for the secondary domain. Point the store2.com domain to the same IP address you are using for store1.com. Setup a vhost on the server so store2.com effectively replicates the vhost for store1.com. You can use vhost directives so that magento initiates the correct store view for the relevant domain name in your new vhost.

SetEnv MAGE_RUN_CODE yourstorecode 
SetEnv MAGE_RUN_TYPE store

You should now be able to have multiple sites/domains running on 1 magento instance each with an individual checkout URL. e.g. store1.com/checkout/onepage/ and store2.com/checkout/onepage/.

By using a UCC SSL certificate, the SSL will be valid for both domains and not cause you issues so no need for multiple IPs.

Upvotes: 1

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