Understand what is shared among sites

If you choose to run multiple sites from a single Commerce instance, you should be aware that some content and configuration is shared among the sites and some is not.

The following list describes what is shared by all of the sites in your Commerce instance:

• Tax processors are shared by all sites, but you can assign a different warehouse ship-from address to each site.
• A shopper’s profile is shared by all sites. This means that a shopper uses the same credentials to log in on each site. If the shopper changes sites, he must log in each time but he will use the same credentials. It also means that any billing or shipping addresses added to a shopper’s profile are available to all sites.

  Note that, while profiles are shared across sites, the values of certain properties in the profile can be site-specific. See Create a shopper profile for more details.

• Translations are shared by all sites. You can, however, specify different locales for each site.
• There is one search index for all sites and they share thesaurus entries, keyword redirects, and searchable field ranking lists.

Features and settings not included in this list can be configured on a per site basis. For example, catalogs, price groups, shipping methods, page layouts, promotions, email templates, and so on can be configured on a per site basis. For site-specific information on these features, refer to their documentation in Understand Oracle Commerce and Understand Extension Features.

Understand what is shared among business account sites

When your environment is configured to use business accounts, a contact’s profile is shared across sites. However, before a contact can log into a site and make purchases, the contact’s account, must have an associated contract for each site. When you create a contract for an account, contacts can log into the site and make purchases using the product catalog and prices that have been assigned to their account. To enable a contact access to any site, the account must have a contract for the site.

Note that accounts can be associated with multiple contracts (one contract for each site), which allows you to have accounts that span multiple sites from a single Commerce instance.

The following account-based entities are shared across sites:

• contacts
• the contact’s roles
• addresses
• account properties, including name, location in hierarchy, status, description, classification, type, DUNS number, Tax Reference number, Unique Identification number, VAT reference number and the account logo

For information on working with business accounts, refer to the Configure Business Accounts section.