Magento website/store/storeview organization

Question

I have two (example) domains:

• euro-shoes.com
• us-shoes.com

I need them to be connected to the same Magento installation. They share most design elements and they share the catalog. They each have three translations: English, French, and German.

I tried setting the two stores up as Stores, and the translations as Store Views (three per Store). But the problem is, when I go to "System > Configuration", I can't change the scope to the Store. I can just change it to a Website or a Store View. This means that any changes I want to make to one domain or the other need to be made three times: once for English, once for French, and once for German. I realized at this point that I might be going against the design of Magento.

Considering my situation, should I make euro-shoes.com and us-shoes.com Websites instead of Stores? If no, what would be my best organization?

Answer 1

Yes. Make euro-shoes.com and us-shoes.com Websites instead of Stores. The effort saved by doing this is notable and worth doing.

You could change "System > Configuration > Customer Configuration > Account Sharing Options" to "Global" so that customers can continue to switch between websites.

Also consider, the store switcher normally seen on themes doesn't work for separate websites so you'll have to find a replacement.

Answer 2

if you don't need the separation in order level then you can set up two store-views and add a custom locale switcher instead?

Pseudo code:

<?php $store->setLocaleCode('locale_code', $store->getId()));?>