Magento Single Site Multi Store Multi Store View

Question

Here is the business problem:

There is a website which has items that are sold to:

1. The US in USD going into the US paypal account
2. Canada in CAD going into the Canadian paypal account.

95% of the items overlap, but 5% of the items available in Canada are not available in the US. 80% of items share the same price, but the remaining 20% are cheaper in the US. The Canadian website needs to be in French and English.

Here is the technical problem:

Initially this was configured as a single website and a single store with multiple store views for Canada (English and French). This worked fine, until we needed to as the US.

Do I need a separate store group or a separate website in Magento?

I would like to have a base link change for the US and for Canada (ie. /ca/en/, /ca/fr/, /us/en/). But after trying to change the base link, the whole site stopped working.

Any ideas on how to best tackle this?

Answer 1

I believe what you want is one website, two stores and three views. The Canadian store would have two views for EN and FR. The US store would have one view for EN. This would support the payment method differentiation. When configuring products (pricing) you can specify the store. This should also support your pricing differences for the two stores.

I don't have experience with multiple languages, just multiple stores / websites. So I'm not certain, but I don't think Magento normally uses URLs to select views. You might be able to use a .htaccess redirect in some way for that, but normally the store visitor selects the language.