Multivendor and cart sharing

[rainman2000]

Hi All,

I've read plenty of post regarding multivendor on this forum, but I need some guidance. We are currently running Joomla 2.5 and VM 2.0.24. We want to establish two more websites with their own domains and have all 3 of the websites share the cart. When a user register they will effectively be registering to purchase on any of the 3 websites. We want the person to be able to place orders on any website and checkout once. We are a single company with one warehouse, but we require 3 different website names and each website will sell different items.

We are Okay using the same template on all 3 websites to make this easier.

Do I need to use the "Enable multivendor" feature in VM 2 to accomplish this?

Is this basically just accomplished by properly grouping my products and using DNS to point to pages within my main website? For example, I create category if the main website sell beauty products and website 2 sell toys, do I simply group toys so that a URL may be http://www.beautywebsite.com/toy_category1 and then use DNS to make it say http://www.toywebsite.com/toy_category1?

How do I have a single instance of VM but have 3 different frontpages since the frontpage functionality is specific to the instance of VM? Also, I know that there are other things unique to the instance of the VM install such as the invoice logo, terms and conditions, etc. How do I handle this type information being unique to each website with only one installation of Virtuemart?

Any assistance to accomplish this is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[jenkinhill]

I think you are talking about multistore, certainly not multi-vendor.

Your problem with using different sites with a common checkout, as I see it,  is that the purchase session is set to a particular deoman and will not be carried onto another one - even if browser security allowed it. This would need a lot of thought - and someone with good programming skills to think about possible solutions.

[rainman2000]

Thanks Kelvyn,

Yes, you are correct. It would be multistore. I've seen a couple solutions out there that hack the code but I don't want to go that route.

Thanks!