According to Magento hierarchy, Website, Store and Store View is 3 most fundamental elements under a Magento installation. Using these 3 factors depends primarily on how store owners want to operate their business and what objectives they want to achieve finally.
Website is considered the first thing you need to create when installing Magento and is called “parent of stores” because it can contain a lot of stores at one time. Meanwhile, stores often have store views as different types of frontend display to represent many various factors such as languages, layouts or designs.
Therefore, all of the 3 terms have a close relationship with each other and help to build a complete online business system. To find out more details, you can also read our “Overview of Magento Store Hierarchy” to have a better understanding of these fields.
In this blog post, we will take a deep look at the Magento Store View to analyze its drawbacks default Magento doesn’t support as well as how to overcome those issues.
1. Cannot set up prices of products for each store view
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As you know, default Magento allows us to set up product prices for the whole website or it means that prices are similar in every store or store view. This issue is reflected in a setting of the following default configuration:
Magento 2 catalog price scope setting
You go to Store → Configuration → Catalog Price and see that only 2 options as Global and Website are supported. Thus, this is the reason why prices of a product cannot be changed in multiple stores and multiple store views.
To overcome this drawback, we make a Multiple Store View Pricing for Magento 2 extension helping to set Catalog Price Scope as Store View so that you can set up different prices of products per Magento 2 store view conveniently.
Therefore, when customers switch store views in the frontend, they can see particular prices of each product. This is useful for store owners to launch suitable pricing strategies for each country or region and also optimize some extra costs such as shipping or storage effectively.
2. Cannot have separate shipping and payment methods for each store view
Like prices of products, shipping and payments methods are only enabled for the level of Website and you just can configure some settings for store view such as Shipping title, Shipping method name, Displayed Error Message of Shipping, Payment title, and Payment instructions.
However, for a store including multiple store views which have customers coming from a lot of countries, fixed shipping and payment methods may be not flexible. There are reasons to explain for this inflexibility:
+ Unnecessary higher shipping costs for countries or regions in case customers there don’t choose the most suitable method for them.
+ Unacceptable currencies for countries that payment methods don’t support as Paypal doesn’t support the currency of India.
Therefore, based on detailed analysis of customers from store views, it is better to limit shipping and payment methods for each store view in order to bring the best shopping experience for buyers.
In addition, to help you solve this issue, we suggest that you can also create a new website, assign the store view you have to that website and then you will be able to separate shipping and payment methods.
In case you don’t mind having one more website, you can try this solution to overcome the drawback of the default Magento 2 store view.
3. Cannot have base currency for each store view
Base currency in Magento 2 is used to set up product prices in the backend and also to check out. It is enabled for the whole website, not for store or store view levels.
Hence, prices of the product are only set up with one base currency of the whole website and can be displayed along with many other currencies in the frontend (depending on default displayed currency you choose).
However, when customers go to check out, they still have to pay with base currency selected for the website.
Magento 2 Currency Setup
This thing is a big issue for a lot of store owners because they always want to bring as good checkout convenience for their customers as possible, especially about currency aspects.
If a customer from French store view can checkout with his/her currency (Euro, for instance) is much better than with other ones which require currency converting via payment methods. Therefore, we come up with 2 solutions to consider in this case:
+ Set up base currency for each Magento 2 store view so that customers can checkout with the base currency of that store view.
+ Allow checking out with display currency of Magento 2 store view instead of base currency of the whole website. Still, by choosing a default display currency for a store view, prices of products are converted based on currency rate (rate between base currency vs default display currency).
Then customers can pay directly with this display currency without converting once again via payment methods.
Checkout with British Pounds in English store view when using Magento 2 Checkout with Display Currency
With the 2 above resolutions, customers can have a better experience to purchase products and check out more conveniently.
4. Cannot have particular taxes for each store view
The tax structure in default Magento 2 also has settings for Store View level, but those are extra configurations such as Default Tax Destination Calculation, Price Display Settings, Shopping Cart Display Settings and Orders, Invoices, Credit Memos Display Settings.
Main things like Tax class for Shipping, Tax Calculation, and Default Tax are still fixed for Website or Global. Therefore, it is impossible for a store owner to have different taxes for a product in store views although this is useful when they want to charge customers in various countries specific tax rates.
In Magento 1, we solve this issue by using Magento Tax per Store View extension to change Scope for Tax Class into Store View and then create tax rules corresponding to tax class. However, Magento 2 is much different from its version 1 which requires more time for research and development. Therefore, we are on the way to look for the best solution. Please keep updated with us for the latest information.
5. Cannot set up shopping cart price rules and catalog price rules for store views
Shopping cart price rules and Catalog price rules are used for promotions in Marketing campaigns and applied for the whole website, which means that customers from all store views of a store also receive the same promotion.
However, most of the store owners often have specific promotion strategies for customers from store views depending on factors such as holidays or special occasions which are only available in some countries.
Thus, configuring marketing rules for local markets is necessary because it meets business plans as well as customer insights to help stores to achieve sales target.
To make them real, there are 2 extensions to overcome these drawbacks of default:
Magento 2 Shopping Cart Price Rule per Store View and Magento 2 Catalog Price Rule per Store View. Both of them help to set up rules for each store view or multiple store views at one time by adding Store View to select easily.
Select store views to set up rules in Magento 2 backend
With these 2 modules, Marketing for Magento 2 sites can be much optimized and brings more efficiencies in the process of increasing sales via promotion campaigns.
6. Cannot view most reports based upon store view segmentation
Default Magento doesn’t also support checking most reports in each store view.
Conclusion
With these 6 most significant drawbacks of the default store view in Magento 2, you must have faced some of them and want to look for the best solutions for them.
If you have other problems or any ideas related to store views, let’s contact us because we are doing works focusing on store views to enhance functionalities as well as make more and more customization.
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