Joya started life as a boutique gift store in the pretty Cotswold town of Nailsworth. We met them several years ago and created an online store to help showcase their products. Then came to bamboo revolution - a wonderful fabric that was ideal for socks and clothing. After some research and many overseas buying trips, Joya began to supply beautiful, unique bamboo socks to the trade as well as in their own store. They then asked us to create a trade only store, where they could direct potential customers to register and place bulk orders for other retailers.
And now they wanted a german version of the trade site.
So, we proposed we use sub-sites to do this. The benefit of this is that they would have one install to login to for all version of their websites, one database of images to use and one database of user accounts. The sites themselves would be very different in functionality: joyasocks would still remain a standard business to consumer to sell beautiful clothing to the general public, using stripe payment integration. Joyaonline (trade) would only allow purchase on account, once the customer had been credit checked and verified on the site. They would then get 30 days credit and could place bulk orders. Joyaonline has minimum quantity of products and order values too. If an invoice remained unpaid, their account could be suspended.
de.joyaonline has the same trade functionality, but is translated into German and uses Geolocation for it's tax and postage.
So, Joya's online presence now exists as joyasocks.co.uk, joyaonline.co.uk and de.joyaonline.co.uk - all under one code base, all with unique domain names but with a single login for admins. Simple.
If you manage multiple sites, perhaps sub-sites could be a solution for your business. Contact ilateral for more info.