Running several thousand sites with multisite

Question

I am a wholesaler and I sell thousands of products to over 4,500 retailers through a Magento website (1.7). The retailers in turn sell the products directly to the public. Our retailers would like us to provide them with a website that they can use as their own. In an ideal world, we would like it to work like this…

We create the 4,500 mini sites on our website and they all link to the same catalog. That way, we only need to update a product once. The retailer can go to their site, upload their own logo and select what products from the catalog they want to show on their site. Then they can add a markup to the price or turn pricing off so it is just a catalog.

Firstly, is this even possible? Is running 4,500 multi sites off one database and catalog possible? Will it cause performance, security, or any other issues? Is there a way the retailers can do all I mentioned above themselves?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

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Thanks for all the help guys, much appreciated.

Any advice on maybe doing it another way? What if i created a new sote (or one multi site) and then each company got their own page. In WordPress, on any page you can add a line of code like below to show a specific category.

"[product_category category="mens_shirts" per_page="12" columns="3" orderby="price" order="asc"]"

Then we create a specific category for each retailer with their own sub categories and sub navigation on their pages.

Would this work? I know It would probably be ok on WordPress but I am very inexperienced with Magento so not sure... can a website handle 5000 plus pages each displaying catalog info?

Thanks again for all the help, Mark

Answer 1

Due to the internals of Magento once you get to 10s of stores it starts to slow to a crawl. Once you get to 100s of stores you need enterprise grade hosting architectures costing $1,000s/mth. In "theory" you can run it - but you would need $10s thousands/mth of hosting using the best most experienced consultants in the world. Partially suprised the mods do not know and/or present these facts but there you go - Magento knowledge peters out in the single digit $millions and you are talking much larger solutions.

We know this as we know consultants via via who made Magento act like ATG & Websphere. For context, the largest handful of Magento installs are $2-5mil implemenations (from Magento themselves), ATG & Websphere's standard installs are at this level.

Magento is a Micro & Small Enterprise platform (sub $14mil revenue/yr). Now you can make it go higher but you are then fighting the internal limitations of the platform, so need to bolt on enterprise grade third party tools to it such as ETL, onboarding, pricing managers, corporate hosting clusters, etc. The above consultants did all this to make Magento scale from zero to ~$200million (their reference architecture is Net-A-Porter), the platform makes up just a small part of the solution where they bypassed badly designed parts such as reindexing, pricing & website management.

So can it be done, basically no, except if you have such large enterprise solution experience to mitigate the limitations of the Magento platform, of which there are only a handful of architects in the world that can do that - we use solutions from one of them. The other alternatives are custom build (years of development), Hybris/Demandware ($100s thousands & 3-6mths to implement) or ATG/Websphere ($millions & 9-12mths to implement).

Now, these people (via via) architect some of the largest solutions in the world as part of $10s to $100s millions implementations (not company size) of which Magento is their startup platform. It might be worth you connecting with the implementation consultants as making Magento do the impossible is their speciality.

Answer 2

The hosting cost for such a solution will be too immense for it to be worth it.

Why don't you consider hiring someone to develop an extension for you that can achieve the few points that you want? They don't seem to hard to achieve:-

• Allow reseller to setup own URL
• Allow reseller to upload own logo
• Allow reseller to set pricing

I know that ModulesGarden did something similar for another shopping cart so they may be able to develop something for you. You can ask them for a quote here: http://www.modulesgarden.com/development/ecommerce/magento

Answer 3

It's not feasible to host websites on your single server. but you can have multiple sub-domains or pages for your clients.

Solutions? YES, if your total users are able to hit your website directly. Let me tell you whats that mean, if all the hits to your re-seller websites are less then your database server capacity. if your database server does not support such heavy traffic then you will be required to upgrade your server hosting. upgrading does not cost much related to impact of users with sales.

For re-seller websites, develop simple CMS with their local margins and other customization's. This will query your database for products rates and margins from local database. This will reduce your load from your main server by distributing workload to re-seller hosting.

If you are not interested to upgrade your database, then CMS for re-seller websites will employ mechanism for pulling updates from server. you will be required to write triggers on your tables and update status table. your re-seller applications will timely check for status table, this will reduce traffic since only changes will be pulled.

Vonsidering re-seller will pay webiSince separate hosting for each re-seller is normally acceptable, under 20$/month. So better solution will be to go for it.