Multi-Shop

Ok what is the purpose of this new multi-shop feature? Where and how would you use it? What's it for?

That is a very good question. I don't really know. I guess it is so you can have a single admin with multiple domain stores. But it seems like you might end up getting orders confused and if you have 500 products per store and 5 stores then you have 2500 products to sift through. I don't really see the draw, but maybe that is just me. Seems like the idea on paper is better than the actual use of it. But that is an uneducated guess.

The main two reasons we want to use the multi-shop system are:

We have around 8000 products which we can dispatch in the uk, however we are starting to offer some products in the usa, but we can physically only ship around 1000 of our products over there at the moment. So rather than have two stores setup with identical data we can simply tick a box to enable a product on the USA version of our website.

We also offer B2B as well as B2C pricing, so for these two options its perfect!

Thanks David

I was struggling to to think of a real world concept where it would actually be of any use. Superpose the pricing could be set-up using groups but the different products for different country's could come in good use.

Don't think it would ever be of use to me for the stores I have planned but its nice to have it their for the future.

That is good to know how it is being used. Seems like a very rare case though. I can't see more than 10% of merchants actually utilizing it. I may be wrong.

I personally have many online stores that sell completely different products, so I would prefer completely separate backends to keep things separate.

there are people who want it. I Just implemented a very similar thing on an oscommerce based store for a company cause the guy didn't want to have multiple backends to deal with. We've done this before for 5 or 6 clients, but I would say that Q's 10% figure is about right if that high. One thing I'm curious about I haven't looked at the code or setup a multi-shop setup just yet on the new opencart does it mark the order with which domain it came from? It seems it was done fairly well, but I see several places it could be expanded. Modules jump immediately to mind. In the instance mentioned above a company might want a b2b site with a po module, but not offer it on their b2c site, also as I mentioned customers and orders would be nice if they tracked the domain if they don't already that way you could write reports and filters to make things easier to manage on the backend.

I can throw some light on this. Keep in mind there is also the idea of affiliates involved for some, as provisions have been made to add that feature as well.

There are many wholesalers / dropshippers who offer "free sites" to their customers / affiliates. The draw of the multi-shop arrangement is one database to maintain, as far as inventory and price changes. Say I have 20 people selling for me as affiliates. I can have my own cart and have them as affiliates send people to my cart for a commission. Or, I can use this and let them have their own design template and their own "storefront", although they are still selling for me.

Which would be the most appealing? Sending customer's to Pete's Shop or sending them to My Own Shop, even though it is one and the same in the background?

So, for little or nothing as far as cost, I can offer those 20, or 50, or 100 for that matter, "their own shop" from which to sell my goods. Maybe a domain name and/or template cost and they are good to go. Or, they can even be just a subdomain on mine - theirname.mycart.com

Another example would be for niche sales. I could sell let's say pet name tags. One site with a dog format, another with a cat format. Or even drill down to a site for labs, a site for beagles, etc. That's what niche selling is all about, drilling down to your own little pocket of the world wide web. This way you can have more pockets than cargo pants.

Take off the blinders and use your imagination, their are all sorts of uses for something like this.

one of the other benfits is if you sell different types of products then you can theme each site for that set of products and set some unique content on each site for seo purposes.

and yes it does log which products where order from which site. the space was a bit tight between columns on the order list page so i had to show it on the order details page.

the emails that are sent out also send to the customers to view there order details online to the right store.

peteVA wrote:I can throw some light on this. Keep in mind there is also the idea of affiliates involved for some, as provisions have been made to add that feature as well.

There are many wholesalers / dropshippers who offer "free sites" to their customers / affiliates. The draw of the multi-shop arrangement is one database to maintain, as far as inventory and price changes. Say I have 20 people selling for me as affiliates. I can have my own cart and have them as affiliates send people to my cart for a commission. Or, I can use this and let them have their own design template and their own "storefront", although they are still selling for me.

Which would be the most appealing? Sending customer's to Pete's Shop or sending them to My Own Shop, even though it is one and the same in the background?

So, for little or nothing as far as cost, I can offer those 20, or 50, or 100 for that matter, "their own shop" from which to sell my goods. Maybe a domain name and/or template cost and they are good to go. Or, they can even be just a subdomain on mine - theirname.mycart.com

Another example would be for niche sales. I could sell let's say pet name tags. One site with a dog format, another with a cat format. Or even drill down to a site for labs, a site for beagles, etc. That's what niche selling is all about, drilling down to your own little pocket of the world wide web. This way you can have more pockets than cargo pants.

Take off the blinders and use your imagination, their are all sorts of uses for something like this.

the problem I see here is that you would want each person to have backoffice access to their own store and product/category level control without seeing everyone else's stuff and the current implementation doesn't provide this.

Xsecrets wrote:

peteVA wrote:Take off the blinders and use your imagination, their are all sorts of uses for something like this.

the problem I see here is that you would want each person to have backoffice access to their own store and product/category level control without seeing everyone else's stuff and the current implementation doesn't provide this.

As Xsecrets said.. this isn't "Multi-Vendor" this is "Multi-Store". It is meant for a single admin group and it has very limited use.

Xsecrets wrote: the problem I see here is that you would want each person to have backoffice access to their own store and product/category level control without seeing everyone else's stuff and the current implementation doesn't provide this.

When used with affiliates, the Customers / Buyers belong to the main cart owner and payments are through the cart owner's processors. The affiliates only are paid a commission and with many affiliate programs never see the contact details of the buyer.

This is just what would be needed for an affiliate situation, where each affiliate can have their own design for an interface, but all activity is actually taking place within the cart owner's admin. The affiliates would not have FTP access or actually any access at all. Just pick a "skin", maybe add a logo and start selling. And even the skin and logo would be done by the cart owner's staff.

The multi-vendor deals are usually called "malls", even if not presented that way. In those arrangements, often the cart owner charges "rent" of a percentage of the sale and different vendors / sellers can offer just their own products, or products from other vendors, as well. Mostly used by "crafters" in a "consignment shop" type of presentation, as far as I've seen.

And, as Daniel and I mentioned, the multi-shop is good for offering a varied inventory to different interest groups. You may have 5 shops, each specializing in a category. Shop 1 may offer their own goods and those of shop 3, but not from shop 2, 4 or 5. Where shop 5 may offer the inventory of 1 and 4, in addition to their own. Etc.

Like most things, you can look at it as expanding opportunities, or shake your head and say it's useless. Looking at it as someone selling good, it certainly can't hurt and with an affiliate module will be a great product - if it works.

We're just about to start testing the limits of this feature.

In my previous experience of such discussions in forums it is frustrating to see people poopooing features that they are simply unable to imagine a use for rather than asking people to explain how it could benefit their business. So here is our set up.

We work out of a warehouse where we sell a variety of products, and currently run two very different stores. Each store caters to differ customer groups with almost no crossover - however a few lines are available on each one. We have had major headaches with stock controlling these two sites separately.

Those few lines cause all sorts of problems - because if we are 'out of stock' on one site customers may try to buy from the other site... Stock may be coming from the other side of the world, so not having both sites out of stock at the same time is a real pain, and if the item that is not in stock is part of a much larger order we will probably see the whole order cancelled... So good stock control is part of a good customer experience.

The assumption may be that there is one 'admin' but we have customer support, which has to deal with two completely different customer types - different couriers even. Also we have people that pack for one part of the business but NOT for the other - so the processing of the orders is an issue too - we do not want a packer from one half of the business to have to wade through the orders for the other part of the business.

So allowing people with different levels of access to see only one or the other shops orders would be great.

Equally the reporting on each shop needs to be discrete too - as there is no point telling me the combined totals when I need to monitor performance of each shop against their individual marketing campaigns, etc.

I think it is hard to imagine getting what we want without setting up 2 separate installations, but as we would like to launch more shops running from the same inventory, stock control across those stores will be increasingly important to us.

I'll try and add to this discussion as we come across issues and questions :-)

One more thing - we may have separate offices and locations in the future - so this is not a multi-VENDOR requirement, just that a team running one shop front end might need to be kept apart from the data from another shop front end... they will not share the same customers.

The same might be true if we want to run a wholesale/distributor operation and want to manage the stock (a trade order taking 100 pieces of the same product we are making available to customers is a stock control issue!).

Our trade 'voice' will be quite different to that for consumers, and the administrators may also be completely different - so again the admin features are important, without there being multiple 'vendors' - just departments within one business.

I hope that made sense - I will be testing and reporting on how we got on :-)

Is there way of limiting access user access in a Multi-Shop setup to a particular store? I just inherited a site from another developer, and I see the feature for creating / editing user profiles includes a field for setting what store the user should be associated with. But setting this does not seem to have any effect on what the user can access. The user group setup will let me say who can access reports, but I don't see anything in the UI that allows me to limit that by store.

The desired behavior is that we would have overall administrators who can see everything, but the affiliate owners of individual stores would only be able to access sales reports and orders for their specific store.

Is there anything in the base system that would support the scenario? Or does it require the development of an add-on module of some sort? I have a decent amount of experience with PHP, MySQL, and the WordPress APIs, but I'm new to OpenCart trying to assess how difficult it's going to be to customize the system.

It would require custom coding. As a matter of fact if you actually have a setting to configure a user to a store then there is already custom coding done as that setting does not exist in the base system.

OK, so now I need to figure out the right way to add custom code and whether the previous developer did it the right way.

It looks to me like there have been modifications to core files that would be overwritten if I tried to update the opencart software.

Under \admin\language\english\user\user.php I found this, which is presumably the label to appear on the form for English language users (all of them, in my case)

$_['entry_store'] = 'Store (Agents Only):';

under \admin\controller\user\user.php I find this:

$this->data['entry_store'] = $this->language->get('entry_store');

Then under \admim\view\templates\user.tpl there's this routine to list the stores:


<!-- ::::::::::::::::::::::::::: STORE ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: -->
<tr>
<td><?php echo $entry_store; ?></td>
<td><select name="store">
<?php foreach ($stores as $store) { ?>
<?php if ($store['store_id'] == $store_id) { ?>
<option value="<?php echo $store['store_id']; ?>" selected="selected"><?php echo $store['name']; ?></option>
<?php } else { ?>
<option value="<?php echo $store['store_id']; ?>"><?php echo $store['name']; ?></option>
<?php } ?>
<?php } ?>
</select></td>
</tr>

From what you're telling me, these are all customizations. Is this the right way to have implemented them, or is there another way this should have been done? I'm used to the WordPress model where you put all your changes into a plugins folder to keep them separate from the core application files.

correction, the templates file was \admin\view\user\template\user_form.tpl

you will not be able to do that without changing core files that will get overwritten on upgrade. The best you can do is use vqmod to make the changes.

Hi

I wonder if anyone could help me please, is OpenCart Multi-Shop what I need for my requirements below.

Here is my scenario (sorry it’s so long winded ):

I have a own company that sells Widgets (and what magnificent widgets they are ), I have one retail outlet that sells only Widgets and where the physical stock is held.

I own 2 other retail outlets that sell other things as well as my Widgets, they hold stock of the most popular Widgets but if they require a Widget that they don’t have in stock they phone me and order it and then I drop it off to their shop.

I also have a Web Store where people can buy my Widgets from, the site processes the order, takes payment and I then dispatch the order from my main retail outlet (where the stock is held)

Because my Widgets are so good (they are really very good you know), I have 2 Franchises (and more on the way) that sell my Widgets, they purchase at trade prices and carry a large stock of Widgets, when their stock gets low they phone me with an order which I then ship to them as they are in different parts of the country.

Recently I have been approached by a group of shops who would like to carry a small stock of the 10 most popular widgets which they will buy at trade prices, they currently place their order by phone.

Can OpenCart (or with the addition of Modules) do the follow:

Hold a single Global Inventory so I can see what stock I have in my 3 retail stores, allow me assign stock between my stores, see what I am getting low of so I can order more from my supplier, some reporting on which is the most popular lines, value of stock etc.

Run my web store selling to the public, shipping Widgets all over the country.

Allow my franchises to have a Web Store so their own customers can buy from their website, they will dispatch the order from their shop or if they don’t have it, they want me to send it on their
behalf.

Allow the franchises and shops to order stock and pay for it from me when they are getting low.

Hold stock of items that I can dropship, both to the general public and my franchises and allow them to order and pay for it and then it gets dropshipped to them.

Handle RMA’s

That’s about it, any help / advice greatly received !

Thanks
Kev

you are well beyond the built in capabilities of opencart.