Hi there, I'm the owner of Xport1.com. We specialize in laser engraving and cater to a specific market. We also want to expand our products but keep the site as it is now without combining products. So what we want to do is add a new site to our existing one. Right now our site is Xport1.com, we need to find a simple way to make multy sites by say making an audio site like "xport1.com/audio" or a xbox modding store like "xport1.com/xbox". The idea is to make it a completely different looking store but still hooked up to the same shopping cart as the main store. So if anyone has an idea on how to do this please let me know. Thanks

I recommend buying a new domain and creeating a niche site dedicated to your product line. You can then cross-link and build themes. You can get a second store for $49/month. I have 5 stores selling theme based products and it works great. Google doesn't mind if you do it within reason. It a little extra work but will build your PR and generate more clicks.

The whole point is to save on money, spending 50bucks a month extra for the same store but with different products is a waist of money. Its hard enough being a small business owner without spending money where I dont have to. Doing it the way I suggested allows for Customers the flexablity to sell in different niches while saving money.

It is not about saving money.. it is about expanding markets and making more sales. A second store on the same IP and domain will get you into trouble with Google.

Opening a second store on a second domain is the way to go... and is worth the $50/month. If you can't generate a good ROI from that $50 it may not make sense to be in the business you are in...

I do agree it would be nice top have multiple stores on multiple domains feeding off of one database. That has been submitted to the programmers.

Captain,

You report that Google does not mind that you have multiple stores selling the same thing, "within reason." I am wondering how they would ever know that the five stores you have are all tied back to you.

I dont understand what google has anything to do with my store. Personaly I dont care as 99% of my business is all word of mouth. Im also not interested in selling in large numbers as the last 1% is us making calls to other business's for reselling. So google is not an issue for me. Im not asking to open a second store but to just seperate my products for differnt customers. Iv seen other stores do this and I will find a way to do it. It would be helpfull for information on how to do this other then trying to sell me on spending money where I dont have to.


Please explane the google issue captain keeps refering to.

XPort,

Sorry, I assumed you were a web based business trying to gain market share on the web. If you are not interested in search engine placement, then I agree, it makes no difference if you are banned from Google.

Regarding your comment regarding "trying to sell you on something..." That was a bit out of line... it really had nothing to do with earning an additional $49/month... it has everything to do with SEO. I am not in MC Sales, I am in SEO and web promotion.

My advice, I believe was valuable feedback for anyone building an online business.

Perhaps it would be wise to concentrate on SEO so more that 1% of your business was driven from search engines? I am not telling you how to run your business, but I do know that there are sales to be made from SEO driven leads.

What I recommend that you do for you instance is create HTML pages off of your main shop as you discussed in the beginning of this post that cater to your niche items- do you mind that your users see categories for your other niche lines within your store?

Robert,

Sorry I missed your question above...

Google is good a detecting duplicate content. So when cloning a duplicate product database to a new domain (to create a niche store) it is wise to change product descriptions, titles, category names etc. You want to cange the store up enough so Google doesn't flag your stores as "clones" or duplicate content.

You don't have to obsess over the changes... but you'll def. want to mix up the structure.

I dont plan on getting banned from google as Im not selling the same products.....heres how I want it......I laser engrave. Now our main products are for computer related products. My partner want to start selling laser engraved marble and tiles. Now this is all one store and we dont want to make 2 differnet stores but we do want to just sepperate our products for our customers. So basicly we want 2 web pages, one for computers and one for tile/marble. So the simplest way would be 2 product pages connected to the same shopping cart.

IE
xport1.com/mods
xport1.com/marble

Thats it, no second domain, no google issues, no extra needed cost. Other companies have no issue doing it and either should we. So I still need to know the easist way of setting it up. Thats it. Thanks for your reply.

Hi please see our site its not fully live but i think this is what you mean.

We sell DVDS, BOOKS ETC ETC so split the sight into catagories, ie. DVDs Books etc etc if a customer logs onto the site under 1 domain then they can click on whatever they are looking for. I understand totally what you are saying about the extra cost of the Extra Domain name, with a business such as your i also agree it wouldnt be cost effective, we did create a second store with a different domain but that was purely because we sell adult DVDs and wanted to keep it seperate and market it seperate from others. This isnt live yet but i know we will get the money back and the backing from google.

If i can be any further use to you please feel free to let me know and ill help any way i can

Hey Xport,

I understand what you are saying, as I myself will be tackling something very very similar but on a much larger scale (boardgames.ca, tradingcardgames.ca, miniaturegames.ca, roleplayinggames.ca, pokergames.ca)

Thus, i'll be looking into acheiving something similar.

However, I question why you would want to have it on the exact same domain, with a /relevantmarket ? This doesn't really seperate it out. It would really be better for your customers, if they were different domain names.

But, how you could do it is make your very own HTML pages, and manually put the product information on them, and the unique design for Tile/Marble, and all of that. I'm sure can do a more detailed description of this process for you (or they already have somewhere on the forums) I know you can use DRAW's to call the Shopping cart, and the Buy button, and all of that. So you could really build your own couple stores manually, so they can look and feel different.

I do wish however, that the databases of multiple stores could somehow interact. This is because all of these online stores will be run from one Brick and Mortar store using their single Point of Sale system, that we've had to jury rig to make work with (and we are still working on that). So then having to do that again for new stores will be a pain, but hey... like Ryan said, if it's not making more than $60 a month (the store plus dataport fee) then is it really worth it to be pursuing it anyway?