Difference Between Website, Store & Store View in Magento 2

Magento Commerce and Magento Open-source have four levels of hierarchy: Global, Website, Store, and Store View. It is crucial to have the basic fundamental knowledge about website, store, and store-view for starting an online eCommerce store.

Here, we will provide you with a deeper understanding of Magento websites, stores, and store-view to determine the similarities and differences that can help you further in business expansion. Let’s go through the key difference between Website, Store & Store view in Magento 2.

If you are just getting started with Magento 2, you may also refer to our another blog post that shows how to set up store information in Magento 2.

What is the Difference Between Magento 2 Website, Store, and Store View?

Magento offers the opportunity to manage multiple websites and stores within just a single installation. It is possible that every website can have multiple stores and store views. One parent to multiple child relationship is possible in Magento 2 for websites, stores, and store-view. A Magento hierarchy map usually looks like a pyramid and, at times, seems to be complicated enough.

As a Magento owner, it is possible categorizing this hierarchy into multiple systems, which means it is likely to create multiple websites under a single Magento installation. A website contains various Magento stores, and a store is further divided into multiple store views with different languages.

Let’s have a look at the difference between Magento 2 Website, Store and Store view that will be helpful to utilize the knowledge to expand your business.

Global

Magento Global is at the highest level in the Magento hierarchy and is considered to be the superset. Magento hierarchy consists of only one global view. Whereas other levels facilitate allowing you to multiply them, the global level does not provide such a facility. It comprises three options that you can set for your store, which are:

• Stock: Configure the main product settings.
• Price: Set a similar price for the products in all stores.
• Buyers: Facilitates to merge all the customer data into an extensive database for all websites.

Thus, it refers to the entire installation, and the whole pyramid gets affected by performing any activity on the global.

Website

Website is the subset of Global and is possible creating as many websites as needed. After installing Magento, the system provides you with only a single website called the main website. It is possible to set up multiple websites for a single installation, each having its IP address and domain. Store owners selling various product types need to create two different Magento websites.

For example, pens.com and pencil.com. Here, it is possible to set different payments and shipping methods, set different prices, and have varied client bases. So, you can create multiple stores for each website. The store owners can easily manage all the websites from Magento 2 admin panel. It also facilitates users setting up different designs, websites and layouts from the admin panel.

Advantages of Multiple Websites:

• Allows sharing the data between websites.
• Ability to manage entire different customers for each website.
• Manage orders, reports, and checkout configurations.
• Manage separate inventory for each website.
• Allows managing separate shopping carts.

Thus, having multiple websites by your side helps to grow your business with countless products and proper management by collecting all the data on a single dashboard.

Store

A single website can own multiple stores, each having its main menu. Here, the stores facilitate sharing a similar product catalog but can have different choices of products and design. All the stores under the same website share the same admin and checkout.

Magento provides an opportunity to the users for creating and manage multiple stores for a website. It is highly advantageous for the ones selling multiple products types and also best used for category management.

Advantages of Multiple Stores:

• Enables managing all products on a single admin panel.
• It can have a variety of product categories.
• Facilitates adding attributes such as check-in, checkout, and add to cart option.
• Easy to set and manage multiple stores.

Store View

Each store is presented according to a specific view made available to the buyers. They are specially used for different languages and currencies. It has the same categories for all the stores but, you can specify different product prices. A store comes with only a single default view. Additionally, Magento store views can be added to support various languages or any other purpose.

Advantages of Multiple Store Views:

• One can set different prices for the same products in-store view.
• Boosts sales.
• Offers enhanced shopping experience to their customers via language support.
• Offers category attributes.

Conclusion

Magento 2 supports running multiple websites, stores, and store views undering using single admin panel, and it is important for the businesses to understand the fundamental differences between them to take utmost benefit out of it.

Hope this post will clear any of your doubts regarding difference between website, store & store view in Magento 2.

That’s it.

Any doubts? If so, do mention them in the comments section below. I’d be happy to help.

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Thank you.