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Create a Single Shopping Cart and Checkout Option for WooCommerce Multi-Site Stores

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MultiSite Shopping WooCommerceMore often than not, your online business needs are met, using a single website. Considering that most often, e-shops are targeted towards selling products in a particular category, a need for multi-site does not generally arise. But when you consider venturing into new genres, or dividing administration and services, a good option to consider is multi-site.

For example, consider you have an e-shop which sells software and e-books. You then venture onto a new business which offers web development and designing courses. Since the training business is a separate genre altogether, you can definitely consider multi-site, instead of two stand-alone sites.

Another example for a multi-site deployment, is when you want to sell to international markets. For example, say you have a main site, myexampleshop.com. When you consider expanding your business to different countries, say Australia and UK, you can use multi-site (aus.myexampleshop.com, and uk.myexampleshop.com). Having this setup, allows you to analyse your region specific consumer base, and create target promotions and offers.

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Multi-sites have an advantage when it comes to maintenance and cost.

  • Maintenance & Cost Efficiency: Since the sites share the same database, you save on maintenance cost. Updates can be triggered from a single point. The network administrator or super admin, has full control on the functionalities available across all the sites.

  • Complexity & Limitations: For new users, the concept and administration might be a bit difficult to understand at first. Also, when it comes to availability of plugins, not all plugins are multi-site compatible.

Even though a few restrictions may be present, the advantages for an e-Commerce multi-site far outweigh the limitations.

Multi-Site e-Commerce with WooCommerce

Since the owner of the multi-site stores is a single business unit, the idea behind having multiple sites, is to segregate products based on customer preference and separate out store management. The advantages of setting up the site as a multi-site network are lost, if each site is totally independent, and does not provide any advantage to shoppers.

Below given are some advantages of setting up a multi-site network, to encourage shoppers and increase revenue. (Do note, not all features may be required for each use case, some will be specific to your individual business needs).

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Single User Account Across All Sites

The advantages of having a single sign on for all sites is indispensable when you have multiple stores. Not only is it simple for a user, but also when it comes to managing user accounts.

  • The Registration and Management of User Accounts have to be managed at the Network level. By this, a user is never created on a single site, but rather registered across all the sites.
  • The idea is similar to creating a ‘Global Shopper’. When a user logs in, he can access his account from any site, although the capabilities of the user will be limited, to a shopper.

Possibility to Search Across Stores

If the products you sell, or offer, are related to each other, (for example as mentioned in the above software and course material example), a common search box can be offered.

  • A multi-site search option provides shoppers the advantage of finding the required products, and sellers the advantage of increasing product reach.
  • Based on products being searched and purchased, related products may be suggested to the customer, either from the same site, or from other sites.

Single Shopping Cart & Single Checkout

For a single user across the sites, an advantage we can provide, is to offer a single shopping cart across all sites.

  • The advantage of providing a single checkout is coupled with providing a single shopping cart.
  • Instead of individual carts being created for each store, a user can shop across all stores without losing the products he had added to the carts, and eventually perform a single checkout.
  • This can considerably save user time and result in improved user experience.

Although WooCommerce is multi-site compatible, it does not support a single cart or single point checkout. There are certain challenges involved in providing these options for a WooCommerce multi-site store. Since this article has given you an introduction to the fundamentals of a multi-site eCommerce setup. We will look into additional details, such as the flow of the use case, and propose an approach for the implementation, of a global cart and single point checkout multi-site store, using WooCommerce in a forthcoming article.

Pooja Mistry

Pooja Mistry

21 Responses

  1. What about shipping rates?

    If you are to setup this in such a manner, how would they work? As it stands (some of us out here) are using woo for various shops on their multisite. If this global cart comes in effect, I need to be able to make my local delivery money from the initial sale of 1 subdomain, and ADD additional shipping at a flat rate to each additional store.

    Is this possible??

    ~J

    1. Thank you for your comments.

      The idea is that the order appears as a single order to the user, but actually different orders are created, one for every store he shops at. Products when added to cart, will always be grouped by the store. Since we have the store details, we can query each store to get the shipping classes and calculate the shipping costs. We assume, this is how you would want it.
      But if you want to set single shipping rates, and flat rates for each store, then there have to be options to set global shipping rates. And flat rates will have to be saved for each store. Similar to the way users are saved globally, shipping details settings will have to be provided.

  2. Thank you for your comments.

    The idea is that the order appears as a single order to the user, but actually different orders are created, one for every store he shops at. Products when added to cart, will always be grouped by the store. Since we have the store details, we can query each store to get the shipping classes and calculate the shipping costs. We assume, this is how you would want it.
    But if you want to set single shipping rates, and flat rates for each store, then there have to be options to set global shipping rates. And flat rates will have to be saved for each store. Similar to the way users are saved globally, shipping details settings will have to be provided.

  3. Our requirements for multistore operations will involve both the:
    [a] “National Vs International Sales” scenario where we apply different sales tax rates depending upon whether you are an Australian customer (10% GST) or International customer (0% GST); and
    [b] “different products in a different (separate) store” scenario.

    Whilst I understand the point raised about a ‘global shopper login’ allowing customers to buy from Shop 1, Shop 2, Shop 3, etc and then go to a single Checkout for all their purchases, that is _not_ always desirable. There will (often?) be cases where – as far as the Customer is concerned – there is NO connection between the shops. For example: If you are selling tobacco products, you don’t want that Shop to have any *apparent* connection with another site that advocates Non-Smoking! But from a Administration perspective, we would still want everything to appear as one for the back-end processing.

    1. Hi Geoff,
      Thank you for your feedback. The solution we have provided is quite different from your requirement. As far as I understand, your use case can be met by the creating a multi-site, and installing WooCommerce for each site. In this way, the user sees the sites as different stores. The only place it differs is the admin panel. Currently, when the admin settings are concerned, you might have to go to each site and change the settings. But we understand what you are looking for, is to have a single point for settings options, so as to change values such as sales or shipping tax, etc, which will be applied for all stores.
      This would have to be a completely different plugin, as compared to the global cart. The only thing this plugin would have to provide is the settings options for WooCommerce to be present at the network level. Do you want all orders present at one place as well? The view for the orders at the network level would be simpler to provide, with additional processing being redirected to individual orders page. As compared to all orders being collected at the network level.

    1. Hi,

      We are not currently developing this plugin. But we can build it as a custom solution.

        1. Hi Joshua,

          The implementation will involve about 200 hours of effort. You can contact us via info@wisdmlabs for more information.

    1. Hi David,

      Thanks for your interest. We do not have a plugin ready. But WooThemes seems to be considering a solution for this.

  4. Hi everybody.

    There you go: http://woomu.org

    This is an Open Source project called WooMU that is willing to create the MultiSite and Multi Store version of WooCommerce.

    They are still developing the Alpha and looking for ideas and comments right now.

    I am one of the contributors developing the project, please participate. This is a really necessary feature to have in WooCommerce!

    Lets help these guys 🙂

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