How to set up and manage Multiple Stores in prestashop

This tutorial is going to show you how to add and and manage Multiple Stores on your Prestashop 1.5 website.

Multiple Stores functionality allows you to power any number of stores or websites within a single Prestashop installation. It can be useful if you are going to sell products on different domains/sub-domains sharing the same admin panel and to track your sales and customers without having to login to the admin area of each website.

Here are the steps to follow:

Activating the multistore option:

1. Log into your Prestashop admin panel.


2. Go to the Preferences menu -> General.

1. Next to the “Enable multishop” option, check “Yes” and click Save.

Creating a new shop group:

1. Open the “Multistore” page under the “Advanced parameters” tab to create a new shop group.

 

1. Click the “Add new shop group” button in the top right corner.

1. On the next page you you need to specify a new Shop group name (invisible to your customers, can be changed anytime).

1. On the same page, here are other options available for you to enable:
   
   • Share customers (once set to yes, cannot be disabled) allows your customers to use the same login credentials on all shops of this shop group.
   
   
   • Share available quantities to sell allows all the shops of this group to share the same available quantity of products.
   
   
   • Share orders (once set to yes, cannot be disabled, active only when the two previous options are set to yes) allows your customers logged on any shop from this group to see their order history for all the shops of the group.
   
   


2. When you are ready, click Save in the top right corner.

Creating a new shop

1. Open the “Multistore” page under the “Advanced parameters“.


2. Click the “Add new shop” button in the top right corner.

1. On the next page you you need to specify a new Shop name (visible to your customers, can be changed anytime).

 

1. On the same page, here are other options available for you to enable.

Under the Shop tab:

• Group Shop allows you to set the Group shop.


• Category root allows you to to use the same root used for your main shop or any category of the catalog as its root.


• Associated categories allows you to make particular sub-categories of the main category available in the new shop.


• Theme allows you to select a theme from those available for this shop.



Under the “Import data from another shop” tab:



• Import data when enabled, allows you to pass over organizational and product data without having to duplicate data entry like carries, currencies or modules etc (when saved, cannot be changed). prestashop_multiple_stores_managing_8.jpg


• Choose the shop (source) allows you to indicate from which of the existing shops you want to import data from. Choose data to import allows you to select different kinds of the data to be imported to the new store from the main one.


1. When you are ready, click Save in the top right corner.





Setting a shore’s URL



1. Once a new shop is created, you will see a warning asking to create a URL for it. Click on it.







1. On the next page you will see the following fields:



URL options.








• Shop. A reminder of the shop to which you are adding a URL. You may also simply switch to another shop.


• Main URL. By enabling this, you indicate that you want all of this shop’s other URLs to redirect to this new main URL.


• Status. You can disable and enable a URL at any time.



Shop URL.








• Domain stands for your main domain or sub-domain.


• Domain SSL should be changed only if your SSL domain differs from the main domain, otherwise, leave it unchanged


• Physical URI allows you to set the physical path to your shop on your server. If the shop is at the root, leave this field empty.


• Virtual URI allows you to create a virtual location that doesn’t physically, e.g “new_shop/”.



This feature is available only if mod_rewrite for Apache is enabled on your server. If it does not, you will see this warning.









You need to contact your host to enable it. Once enabled, you need to re-create a .htacess file. In PrestaShop 1.5, the “Web service” page under the “Advanced Parameters”, and then choose “Yes” for the “Enable PrestaShop Webservice”. The .htaccess will automatically be generated, while keeping your custom rules.



• Your final URL calculates the final url of your site according to the options filled in above.


1. When you are done, click Save in top right corner.


2. Now click the URL to see if it works.









How to set up and manage Multiple Stores in prestashop