I have learned a few things about dealing with multiple storefronts in cs-cart and thought I would share my findings.
It can be very difficult to edit thousands of products on a second storefront when the import data function only works on the main storefront. The first thing to do before you even create the second store is to make sure all of the data points that you want to share between storefronts are correct. Things like short description, promo text, and price have given me plenty of trouble when I needed to edit them later.
The second thing to understand and pay attention to is the top left store selector menu. To utilize some of these tips, you will be switching between ALL SUPPLIERS, STORE 1, STORE 2 ETC in the admin panel. You can easily screw things up if this is not selected properly when you start editing. Also, make sure to keep an eye on it during your processes so that the store you are editing remains selected. Ir can change if you open new windows and start getting ahead of yourself with edits.
- If ALL SUPPLIERS is selected then the changes you make in the admin panel will only affect the main store, or "owner" of the product.
- If STORE 1 is selected then it's the same as if ALL SUPPLIERS is selected and the changes only affect the owner store.
- If STORE 2 is selected then the changes made in the admin panel will only affect that store. This works great for changing price, but produces an error if you try to edit mutliple items at once. I have found a workaround for this, which saved me tons of time.
- Say you want to edit multiple items description and promo text in STORE 2, but not in STORE 1 (the owner store)
- First, select ALL SUPPLIERS, then use the multiple select option to select a range of products.
- Second, choose edit selected, then the Select Fields to Edit window pops up. Deselect all, then select Description and Promo Text, or whatever fields you want to edit.
- The edit multiple items window opens and you will see that ALL SUPPLIERS is still selected. At this point change that selection to STORE 2.
- Now you can make your edits and the save will work. You can even choose apply values to all products and that makes life easier still in many cases.
If you try and do this from the beginning with STORE 2 selected then it will produce an error saying that you can't edit the products owned by another storefront. That made me throw my hands in the air several times before I figured out this tip. I hope it works for you/
Another trick you can do is change the owner of the product to the storefront you wan to edit. This can work in some cases, but may product unwanted database errors if not done carefully.
Be careful and pay attention to the points listed above and you might save some time and headaches when dealing with multiple storefront in cs-ccart.