We are selling products on over 10 different platforms, each of which has different category sets. Also, we are selling internationally and a product can belong to different categories on different country shops of the same platform. For example, category A on eBay UK and category B on eBay FR. So the case is, considering the country shops we have, at most a product can belong to 36 different categories in the PIM system that we wish to develop a Magento CE into.
A category is corresponding to an attribute set. I think it is possible that we import all attribute sets from those platforms to PIM. However, a product in Magento can only be assgined to one attribute set, which means I need to first combine over 10 attribute sets into one and then assign it to the product. That is too much of work and might overwhelm the system.
Is there a solution to what we want to do with the system? Is it possible to have multiple attribute sets for a single product without actually creating a new big combined attribute set? Or, can we create multiple products in the system for the identical product, each for a store view? (website=platform, store=store view=country shop) so that I can assign each of them a smaller attribute set on platform level. I know Magento was not designed this way, but is it worth trying?
Thank you in advance for any help!