New Store or Mall?

[Behrents]

I'm not exactly sure what the term Mall means..
I know with in Miva I can create multiple stores that use the same Database and what not.

We have a store that carries our products and that of other manufacturers. We have two sites that advertise our own products. We would like to basically create those two sites as Miva stores themselves. The data and information are already in our Miva store, we just want to be able to push our products first. We want them to look like serperate sites but work through our current miva.

Ok if any of that makes any sense, what is the best course of action. Have 3 seperate miva stores, or create 2 more stores right in our current Miva.. I'm not even sure if I understand what I'm saying. sorry.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: New Store or Mall?

A 'Store' inside of a Merchant mall shares only domain level data (mostly just a modules listing, users, an initial licensing information). Everything else about the each store in a mall is separate, EXCEPT for one big thing: they all share the same URL. For example,
www.mymall.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Store1
www.mymall.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Store2
www.mymall.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Store3
etc.

So that's a starting point for determining which way to go (yes you can fake/hide the URLs until you get to the cart, where its needs to match the SSL certificate).

The only advantage i see, and may be a disadvantage as well, is that stores share the same template code. And store licenses, for within a mall, are I believe still less expensive and SOME developers license modules on a domain level basis--e.g., Mall level--but that's about the only advantage. They do not share template

[d_host]

Re: New Store or Mall?

A "mall" in Miva Merchant terms means more than one store on the same domain name. The way you differentiate between which store to load, then, is by passing the store code in the URLs, for example:

http://domain.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Store_Code=retail

http://domain.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Store_Code=wholesale

Each store runs off a separate set of databases and can have completely different look and feel, different shipping and payment options, different 3rd party modules, etc. These stores do not share the same product/category/customer database - they are completely independent of each other.

As you can see from the URLs in the above example, the domain.com part remains the same between the stores, which means you do not need a separate hosting account for the second store, or a separate SSL certificate. SOME modules are also licensed per domain, not per store, so you can use those on both stores without purchasing additional licenses (most 3rd party modules are however licensed per store).

The disadvantage obviously is that all stores in a mall share the same domain name (domain.com in this example) so if you wanted to run two separate web sites, with completely unique domain names, you couldn't do this with this mall type setup. You'd need a separate hosting account with a separate Miva Merchant license key for each domain name you wish to use.