Magento multiple website pros and cons

Question

I know this is not a technical question but i didn't find and better place to ask.

Basically we have a client who is intending to build a website for 16 countries. He is asking for multiple website.

I have dealt with multiple website in magento previously but they were just 3-4 websites. Here i need to deal with 16.

Can anyone please tell me what challenges will be faced especially the database. Can someone point out the pros and cons of it.

Answer 1

Separate websites only make sense when one of these criterias apply (shamelessly stolen from my other answer):

• different prices
• different tax classes
• different (base) currencies
• different payment options
• different shipping options
• different customer accounts per country

The pro:

• you are more flexible in configuration as specified above
• you are more flexible in associating products to websites

The con:

• big parts of the catalog data get duplicated for multiple stores / websites.
• the memory footprint per request rises as Magento builds the config XML tree for all websites

With a decent server and small catalogs you probably won't have a problem. But if you're going for dozens of websites or bigger catalogs (high five-digit- or six-digit-numbers) you may want to check before if the server can handle it and if the websites are really necessary.

I always try to limit the websites / store groups / store views to the possible minimum. Quite often you can work around scope limitations.

Answer 2

Not really, magento loads the config in to memory for stores as well as websites. Although you are looking at the technical side there is also the business aspect. If you need different checkout currencies you need to use website pricing (we have licensed a dynamic pricing solution but that is another matter), each website base currency for each product then has to be adjusted manually. If you perform currency updates you have to reload the entire product dataset otherwise they become out of sync, visitors do not like checking out in non-native currencies. Another example is that carts are cleared when moving between websites, this is in Magento core. Unfortunately some of the comments do not understand the concept of international sales, which is why not many small businesses succeed at it.

Whether to create a website per country, or a website per base checkout currency, or one website with multiple stores comes down to business requirements and that is a consulting job which cannot be advised on sparse information. One of the key aspects is you will need better hosting the more websites/stores/products/categories you have, the guide is 0.5-1% of revenue for the hosting.