As your online business expands, you will like to increase your share in the pie by opening up new eCommerce stores. The reason for this is that having more than one store gives you the opportunity to dominate a larger market share. Moreover, you can now have separate stores for different countries and/or languages. However, you might think that opening up these additional stores and maintaining them can be challenging and time consuming. With multi-store OpenCart Development, this problem finds an effective resolution. You can add a new store in the following couple of steps :
- Select ‘New Store’ option from your Admin section
- Fill out the desired information
You are now ready to have your new store. As easy as this sounds, it is not for everyone. In this article, let us discuss about the various advantages and disadvantages of OpenCart multi-store.
Advantages :
One Admin Area : This is one of the biggest benefits of OpenCart’s multi-store feature. Most businesses think that having multiple stores can be time consuming as well as stressful. With OpenCart, all your stores are listed in the same Admin area. From there, you can evaluate your current orders; have a glance at your customers, products that you sell, settings, etc. All of this happens from the same section of the website.
Single Listing of Products & Categories : This takes a leaf from the previous benefit that we spoke about. On the admin area, you have a complete list of products. You can select which products can be listed under what stores. The tick box system is extremely simple to use. If you wanted to have the same products under all stores, this feature will make your life extremely simple.
Orders & Stock Tracking : Restocking of products and product forecasting can be an extremely challenging task for an online merchant. OpenCart’s multi-source feature makes it a breeze. When you have all your orders right there, you will never forget about an order.
Fast Set-Up : We spoke about this earlier. Setting up a new store is like a 2 step process.
Different Looking Stores : By using the multi-store feature, you don’t lose the option of selecting from the multiple Opencart designs, themes, layouts, and banners that are available. This means that it is almost like having a separate installation, and you can have stores on different domain names that look different too.
Disadvantages
While this feature sounds like a winner, there are some disadvantages that you need to be aware of as well.
Payment Processing : While OpenCart customization is completely possible with multi-store, the one challenge you will run into is that the payment option that is your default might have to be used for all your other stores too. Many payment gateways at this time don’t allow their systems to be used separately.
Module : OpenCart developments happen around the world, and there are many companies who do it. However, it is important that you work with a company that has the desired experience and expertise. That is especially the case with multi-store as you can experience issues using some of your modules. You need to check with your OpenCart development company about the same.
Marketing : SEO is an extremely important part of your store’s marketing. However, if you are setting up identical stores, it may affect your SEO because of duplicate content. You will have to find an appropriate solution for this problem. You might even want to submit your sites together to Google to find a workaround.
ABOUT DIT INDIA
DIT India is an OpenCart web development company that offers comprehensive development & design solutions to its clients. Right from OpenCart design to OpenCart theme development to deployment, testing, and analysis; we have the skill and the manpower to generate the results you like.
