Magento multistore catalog issue

Question

In Magento i have created a catalog with 10 root categories, each root category is the default category of a store. I've read that different stores have different catalogs depending on their root category, but it seems that every product is visible in every store. For example every flat table (generated for each store) contains every product in the catalog and every product is visible and accessible in every store. What's wrong with this configuration? Is there a way to fix this so that every store contains only its default category and its subcategories/products?

Answer 1

I believe it comes down to if you have a unique web-site for each store or if you are using the same one with regards to the flat data tables. ie Under System --> Manage Shops are using the same or different website name for each store.

If using multiple web-sites (ie Unique website name for each shop & store view), you can enable and disable the product for each website under the websites tab when editing a product and this will mean that only products assigned to applicable web-site / store view get indexed in the corresponding index table.

If you are using the same website for each store view then I think the data for the products will always get indexed in all the flat tables. I think for this scenario, the only way to stop them displaying in the required store views would be to set the products visibility to Not Visible Individually and Status to Disabled by overriding the default values for the required store view.

Normally, the multiple store views with one single website setup is used for different languages of the same website allowing the same design to be used with the flexibility of overriding product attributes per store. You can still use different domains for each of these store views by overriding the store view config settings allowing for www.domain.com and www.domain.es etc.

The multiple website and single/multiple store setup is generally used for having different websites, each with a unique design, category structure and product range. This would be of the typical form www.domain.com and www.domain2.com etc.