Multiple installs ?

Hi
We have affiliates who want us to allow them to put a copy of our shop on their site. We are currently investigating how to manage this.
From a despatch point of view it would be ideal if we can create a copy of the zencart software on a subdomain (say) which still points at the one database.

So (for example), our site is
https://www.ourshop.com
and an affiliate is
https://www.affiliate1.ourshop.com
The affiliates customers would see a website with our products but with their branding and any orders would come directly through to us (as if they had come from
https://www.ourshop.com.

is this possible ?

Thanks
4ec

You should be able to do that by pointing the information in the configure files (admin/includes and includes) to the same database. There may be a speed issue if the site and database are on different servers, but it is doable.

Hi
Thanks for your info.
We have had another thought on this, and the tertiary websites (if our current one is the primary one) may have different prices and maybe in different currencies (we are based in UK but are looking at a European websites too).

I understand the idea that certain info is stored in the config file, but also, the database will contain a number of items that will be displayed on the database. Using the example of prices and currencies . . I am assuming that these cannot be overridden for another install.
Therefore we need more than one database.

If we have to have more than one database we will need an army of people keeping product info up-to-date etc..

Do you see our dilemma ?

Many thanks

4ec

Well Zen Cart does have feature to translate the prices to different currencys.
You can download a mod that sets the deafult currency according to customer browser country. ZC enables also to give user option to self select currency.

You can also download a mod that automatically update the change exhangerate to the real time rate.

Well about the different prices there are group discount price feature and also a whole sale price mod that maybe can also be used to greated a different prices.
Well on the different price problem I have not good knowledge, but tried to give some directional pointers. Hopefully some one else give more pointers and corrections on mine. :)

marksu

It is possible to amend Zen Cart to offer different pricing strategies for different parts of the world, or even different routes into the site. BUT, if you are talking about countries within the European Union, beware that there is a wide body of competition law specifically to outlaw differential pricing by country or groups of countries that looks beyond simple pricing to ensure that there is a single European market.

kuroi has good pointers there.

There is also a good module for hosting multi sites.

MultiSite Module
http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=563

Manage multiple sites from a single Zen-cart Install of Zencart.

• Choose a specific template for each sites
• override the configuration for specific sites
• Make categories specific to one or more websites
• Allow cross-site cart (buy products from different sites in the same order)
• Only one admin section for all your shops
• Filter your orders by sites.

More information on the Development section of Medea International:

http://www.medea.co.uk/dev/

EDIT:
Note ZC own download seems to have old version of the module.
You get newest version at
http://www.medea.co.uk/dev/.

marksu