How To: Share Objects Among Stores

Important

This article applies only to CS-Cart, not Multi-Vendor.

How Does Sharing Work?

When you create an object (product, page, promotion, shipping method, etc.) in CS-Cart, you must assign it to a particular storefront. However, you can share objects among different storefronts.

Note

You can’t share categories, because categories determine the storefronts to which products belong.

CS-Cart has two types of sharing rules depending on the object type:

  • Invariable sharing: objects are shared among storefronts without any changes. This rule applies to such objects as product features and filters, global product options, promotions, CMS content, languages, currencies, and shipping methods.
  • Configurable sharing: objects are shared among storefronts and can have different properties on each storefront. For example, when you share a product, you can define a different price, description, and other properties for different storefronts.

Note

CS-Cart also allows to share customer accounts among storefronts.

CS-Cart has a number of global objects that apply to all storefronts and cannot have unit-specific values. These include the tax calculation rules, order statuses, locations, states and countries, user groups, user profile fields, etc.

Sharing Objects Among Storefronts

Share Products (Configurable Sharing)

  1. Switch to the root administrator mode: select All stores in the store selector in the top left corner.
Select all stores to switch to the root administrator mode.
  1. Open the product details page: go to Products → Products and click the product you want to share.
  2. On the General tab, click the + button (Add categories). This will open the common category tree.
  3. Select one or more categories (highlighted in green) under a different storefront (highlighted in red.)
Select a category from the different store for the product.
  1. Click Add categories and close to close the form.
  2. Click Save to apply the changes.

The product will appear on the storefront under the selected categories. Now you can switch to the store administrator mode and define the storefront-specific properties for the product.

Share Other Objects (Invariable Sharing)

  1. Switch to the root administrator mode: select All stores in the store selector in the top left corner.
Select all stores to switch to the root administrator mode.
  1. Choose an object that you need to share. For example, go to Administration → Shipping & Taxes → Shipping methods to share a shipping method.
  2. Click the gear button of the object. This opens the object configuration page.
  3. Switch to the Share tab. This opens a list of storefronts that already share the object (if any).

Note

You won’t see the Share tab if you only have one storefront: in that case there is nothing to share.

Use the Share tab to share objects among storefronts.
  1. Click the + button (Add stores) to open a list of all storefronts.
  2. From the list, select the storefronts that will share the object. Then click Add stores and close to update the list of stores that should share the object.
  3. Click Save to apply the changes.