Need different inventory and currency, should I make two websites or stores?

Question

So here is my issue. We are running a clothing store which ships internationally as well. Often we need to maintain different inventory for our local and international customers. For local store, shipping address has to be limited to Pakistan while billing address can be anywhere in the world. And for the international store, the shipping address can be any country except Pakistan whereas the billing address can be anywhere in the world. Furthermore, we also need the Pakistan store to have PKR currency while the international store to have a couple of major currencies (USD, GBP, EUR).

What's the best way to achieve this? Should I make two websites or two stores? We are using Magento 2.2.

Furthermore, I would like two show the store selector (i.e. Pakistan or International) first time a user visits the website (something like this: https://www.kayseria.com/country.php?20180219155425) and then it should always show their selected store to them. Unless they want to change it (there will be an option for that in the header).

Answer 1

Looking at the scenario in a cryptic manner, you must need to go with the multi-website concept not multi-store.

In Magento 2 - Currency scope is either Website Level or Global level so if you want to achieve multi currency feature you need to create multiple website. Because we only have one Base currency for one site.

Second thing if you go with store level then you can only do currency switcher on different store but order should be go in base currency only.

Regarding that country part you really need to use GEO IP based store switcher which is works same like you asked , it will take country based on customer 's ip address and if they want to change then they can change it for the same .

Below is the extension link for GEO IP Based store locator :

https://www.magedelight.com/geoip-advance-magento-2.html

https://amasty.com/geoip-redirect-for-magento-2.html

Hope this help you :)