27 Run Multiple Stores from One Retail Digital Commerce Instance

Your Retail Digital Commerce instance initially has a single site, or store; you can, however, run multiple sites from a single Retail Digital Commerce instance.

Each site corresponds to a store and can have its own catalog. For example, if your company has multiple brands, you can have one site per brand. You could also have a site whose catalog includes items for sale in one country and another site whose catalog includes items for sale in a different country.

This section discusses what you need to know before running multiple sites in your Retail Digital Commerce instance.

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, the shopper must log in each time but 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 Retail Digital 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.

Define a Site

A number of tasks required for creating and managing sites in a Commerce instance can be done in the Commerce administration UI, though other tasks, such as enabling a site, are developer tasks that must be done via the Admin REST API.

Only users with the Administrator or Settings roles can create and manage sites. See Configure Internal User Accounts for information about assigning roles to users.

Create a Site

This section describes how to create a new site in the administration interface. Sites you create in the administration interface are not automatically enabled. To enable a new site, you must use the Admin REST API. See Configure Sites to learn how to enable sites.

When you create a new site in the administration interface, you must give it a Site Title and Site Base URL. Commerce automatically assigns it an ID, which is not visible in the administration interface, but which you can access with the Admin REST API.

To create a new site:

  1. Click the Settings icon.
  2. Click the + button next to the Setup menu item to display the Create Site dialog.
  3. Enter the following required information for the new site, then click Save:

    Site Title: Provides the default value of the <title> tag for all your store’s pages, including the store’s home page.

    Site Base URL: Provides the base string value for absolute URL link generation, for example, for sitemap URLs.

  4. Enter additional information about the store for the new site. See Enter Basic Store Information for details.

Change the Default Site

To simplify site creation, Commerce designates one site as the default site. When you create a new site in the administration interface, you must give it a unique Site Title and Site Base URL. Retail Digital Commerce automatically assigns it an ID, which is not visible in the UI. The new site inherits all its other properties from the default site, though you can change them on the Settings Setup page.

In addition to serving as a template for site creation, the default site is used as the destination for requests to your Retail Digital Commerce instance when a URL cannot be otherwise resolved. For example, if a shopper tries to access a store with a URL that does not match the production URL (the primary URL for accessing the site) or any of the additional production URLs (alternate URLs that can be used to access the site), Retail Digital Commerce displays the home page of the default site.

There is always one default site in an individual instance of Retail Digital Commerce. Initially, this is the site included with each Retail Digital Commerce instance. This site’s initial Site Title is Commerce Site and its internal ID is siteUS. Once you have created other sites, you can change which site is the default. A site must be enabled before you can make it the default. Sites you create in the administration interface are not automatically enabled. To enable a new site, you must use the Admin REST API. See Configure Sites in Configure Sites to learn how to enable sites.

To change the default site:

  1. Click the Settings icon.
  2. Select Setup from the list of settings.
  3. Pick a site to make the default from the list that appears above the settings list.
  4. On the General tab, select the Make Default Site checkbox and then click Save.

Delete a Site

Deleting a site may affect many aspects of your store, including orders, reports, and a number of store settings. You should not delete a site that is currently in use with your production environment. You cannot delete the default site. If you want to delete the site that is currently the default, first make a different site the default.

To delete a site:

  1. Click the Settings icon.
  2. Select Setup from the list of settings.
  3. Pick a site to delete from the list that appears above the settings list.
  4. On the General tab, click Delete.
  5. Click Continue in the Warning box to confirm that you want to delete the site.
  6. Click Save on the General tab.

View, Preview, and Publish Sites

When a shopper views a site, the Retail Digital Commerce server detects the site from the URL and only returns content appropriate for that site.

When you preview your sites in the administration interface, you can choose which site to view. When you publish changes, changes you have made for all sites are published, meaning you cannot filter the updates-to-publish list by site.