Aug
26
Multi-store Ecommerce Part 2: Performance, Customization and Uses
In our last blog posting we talked about the primary reasons that we don’t recommend multi-store ecommerce for the vast majority. This time we’ll cover the performance and customization issues surrounding multi-store ecommerce. Finally, we’ll honestly address when multi-store could be a benefit.
Ecommerce software has become complex though the years with literally hundreds of common features which require complex programming and frequent database calls to operate. When you add in the additional calls to separate stores from a single database, it’s easy to understand why it would be slower. Up until version 7.0, AbleCommerce had supported multiple stores per database, but we dropped it to improve performance and ease of customization. There is less code to deal with, and it’s much easier to test – hence the popularity of our new version with developers.
We are seeing an increase in inquires for AbleCommerce, mainly from developers and users of other shopping cart software applications. We hear how tired they are of digging through layers upon layers of ‘spaghetti code’ to accomplish minor customizations. Speed issues and lack of stability are frequently cited problems that stem from poorly conceived foundations, which is multiplied when they further layered multi-store into their code. A review of our code compared with these others will quickly reveal the elegance of our API which makes seemingly difficult core level changes minor by comparison.
“I honestly continue to be impressed with most other aspects of the application. There have been several instances where I’ve gone in to change the code for one reason or another, and instead have been pleasantly surprised to find that certain methods or properties already exist, and all I have to do is call them, or call them a slightly different way. The organization and commenting of the code is truly top quality. I can already tell that I’m going to sleep much better knowing that my company has such a solid framework at the core. Seriously, I cannot tell you how many times AspDotNetStorefront just “breaks.” Why should I have to spend my time fixing their careless mistakes? I’m really not trying to slam them, but that’s my real review in the few years that I’ve used their software.” , says Jason Hendee, Cables for Less
So given the pitfalls of multi-store ecommerce, when and why would you want to consider them? If you have read Multi-store pitfalls and follies: Part 1 Google rules you’ll remember that your marketing and content staff will need to increase in proportion to the number of stores you are trying to launch. So the question to consider is this – can multiple narrowly focused niche sites increase your search engine rankings and sales, enough to justify the cost?
I’ve tried to find actual examples of stores using multi-store and didn’t find anything to help quantify when multi-store would be a benefit to small or medium merchants. A good example of a retailer using multi-store is newegg.com, with their neweggbusiness.com website. The primary benefit was to highlight business products over consumer products, while offering deeper discounts and reporting tools to aggregate multiple buyer purchases into a single view for accounting purposes. Newegg has reported sales of over 2 billion a year and nearly 2000 employees. So they have the resources to leverage multi-store and to provide a customized user experience for their clients. Clearly though, they don’t represent the vast majority of the millions of ecommerce stores on the internet.
That really doesn’t help answer the question of when multi-store would be of benefit to small or medium sized merchants. Hypothetically, I can answer this with the following example. Say you’re a DVD/CD reseller with a wide product line, clearly you wouldn’t attempt to sell Christian titles alongside adult DVD’s or CD’s with racy lyrics. So resellers with opposing product mixes could benefit from multi-store ecommerce, if there is overlap in their product mix which could be presented in multiple stores.
So while multi-store has its place, it’s typically not going to help the vast majority of small to medium businesses. In fact, by spreading your resources out among multiple websites, overall, it’s going to lower your SEO rankings and sales.
