Multiple sites with same shop

[Dek]

I am using Actinic Developer and run a site www.thehockeystop.co.uk

I want to have multiple domain names pointing at different brochure pages but ultimately using the same check out set up.

Is this possible?
My thinking would be to have www.allterrainboarding.me.uk going to atb.htm brochure page, this page will have its own theme and colours and be a site within the main hockey stop site BUT if you enter the atb site it is themed differently, all links go to atb pages only. I can achieve this easily with redirect at source then just using the links.
My problem is then the checkout, could I have a generic checkout page that just reported what had been added to the checkout but did not match the theme of the main hockey stop site.

I would of course want the products for the atb stuff to be on themed pages that matched the atb entry pages and not the main hockey site.

The idea behind this is to give the impression that every domain name goes to a dedicated specialist site as opposed to a general extreme sports and hockey site.

Thanks

[Ian_W]

Hi,

This might work - you could easily redirect domain names towards sections - either have them in 100% frames or it is possible with a little jigging of DNS to have them showing up as seperate sites - however they would simply be pointing towards sub-sections of the main site - these subsections would then have different templates and not be linked from the main URL - the checkout pages would have to be generic as only one would exist.

Can't see why this wouldn't work.

[Dek]

late....

very late reply but hey, busy busy.

Thanks, I have spent a lot of time thinking this through and the best option is to have a separate shop for each topic and mention it is a division of my main shop but dedicated in its own field.

This method improves massively my promotion with search engine placement.

[pinbrook]

if all the shops are yours, ie you don't need to download orders to different locations, then I would use developer to create one shop per url.

then you can cross link if required

[Dek]

shops

None of the shops are "mine".

They are all actual shops, not just internet ones.

[Sally Dickson]

set-up a template

I have built multiple shops and what I have done is built one shop called template, which I have saved as a snapshot, and to jumpstart the shop building process I import the Template snapshop.

And hey presto building multiple shops doesn't become so daunting.

But I like your idea of one checkout, I had to change all the designs for the checkout pages in my latest shops: www.fairlyoddparents.tv, maily because I wanted the page width set to 800px.

I not only editied Act_Primary, but a whole stack of pages such as Act_Checkout and other not much talked about Act_pages. Fortunately I have had help from Actinic support, but yes in theory you could design the checkout pages differently to the product pages.

How I wonder would you split the products up though, so say for instance your hockey products don't appear in a 'different' shop?

How would the sitemap work?

Just thinking aloud

[chris ashdown]

Derek

We do the same we have the main shop "Internet-workwear" that sells a wide range of workwear and the other sites are specialist sites selling sections of the main site and making it easier for customers to find their items of interest

The benifit is that for a small charge for hosting we can hopefully get two sites selling on the natural listings and also pay for two listings on PPC

We did think the specialist shops would out sell the general site but todate there are no clear winners, although i do expect the specialist to overtake the main site at some time in the future as it should do better on natural listings

Cross linking all sites also helps with the SEO or so I hope

[Dek]

cross linking

Cross linking within the same site needs to be done and cross linking between your own sites carries much more weight if they are on separate Class A addresses. If they are on the same Class C addresses they carry very little.

Nice to know the specialist thingy works though. Ta