It's becoming more popular in e-commerce to create multiple storefronts selling the same or similar products, each having a different domain name, branding design, and content. In this way, merchants can extend their marketing by appealing to different market segments, not just having one website trying to satisfy all consumers.

For example, let's assume you want to sell shoes online. You have a great distribution source where you can source all kinds of shoes, from dress to casual, running to flip-flops. While you can certainly have a comprehensive, "all types available" online shoe store, you might elect to secure different domain names focused on different segments of the shoe market. www.runningshoes4you.com would cater to joggers, while www.highheelsemporium.com features designer-quality dress shoes for women.

In Magento, you would create one website but create at least two stores, one for each of your domains. You might also create a third as an overall retail store for all your shoes. Each store could either share the same product catalog or each have its own separate catalog. By having all stores assigned to the same website, you have the ability to control certain configurations that apply to all stores. For example, if all the stores belong to the same retailer, as in this example, all would offer the same payment methods, such as PayPal.com or Authorize.Net. Most likely, the shipping methods you offer would be the same as well as your policies for returns and shipping.

In short, if all the domains belong to the same retail business, it may make sense to have one website with multiple stores, rather than to create entire website-store hierarchies for each product-focused domain. As you can see in the following diagram, this makes for a slimmer, more manageable structure:

In contrast, if your installation will be used to manage multiple businesses, you will need to create multiple websites. The reason for this is that actual, separate business entities will have separate payment system accounts (for example, PayPal, credit card merchant accounts, shipping), and therefore need to be able to segregate these between different websites.

To extend our example, let's assume your shoe retailer also owns a sideline business selling women's sportswear. This other business exists under a separate legal entity (for example, corporation, partnership), and therefore has different bank accounts, distributors, and customers. With Magento, you should create separate websites for each, even if they are to share certain products.

For instance, the sportswear site might also feature women's casual shoes, which are also offered by the shoe website. The same product can be assigned to multiple product catalogs (and therefore different stores) even if the catalogs belong to separate businesses. And somehow, through a complex database architecture, Magento succeeds in keeping all this straight for you. Amazing.

Even among some of Magento's top competitors in the open source e-commerce arena, very few provide the ability to create multiple language views of a website. Multiple language views are not simple matters for several reasons:

Magento has several tools to help you create multiple languages and currencies for retailers wanting to sell globally (or just provide multiple languages to users within a single country). It all begins with creating multiple views for a given store.

In our example, our running shoe website needs to be available in both English and French, so you would create two views within the running shoe store, one for each language. In your Magento-powered website, you can easily include a small drop-down selector which allows a visitor to choose their preferred language based on the views you have created.

In fact, in most Magento theme designs, this dropdown is automatic whenever there are multiple views created for any given store.