A little while ago I had a customer contact me about starting a nutritional and supplement website to sell approximately 1200 products for health conscious individuals and body builders. The client had at least six different domain names and wanted to make each site its own, but did not want a back office administrative area for each of the domains.

The client decided on one of our pre developed ecommerce ColdFusion solutions. The administrative back office of their selected product is very intuitive, in that authorized administrators without web development experience are able to create brands, manufacturers, products, product features, such as sizes and colors, coupon discount codes and a myriad of other features. The client loved the interface and features, but it would take quite a bit of time to continually update each of the six domains.

Now why would a company want to have multiple websites that offer the same products to begin with? Well, I guess a good first answer quite simply would be to build market share and tremendous website traffic or to perhaps build up certain domains and sell them individually at a later date. I have outlined some of the long term monetary benefits for customers further below but as I briefly outline the following project it should go without saying that it is time consuming and requires extensive testing initially. In the long run, the customer will recognize and appreciate a significant savings in both time and money after the project is finished.

In order to meet the customer's objective, I set up the initial store (client / customer side) as well as the back office administrative area. On the customer side of the store, customers are able to drill down by product manufacturer, category, price, sale items, clearance items, etc. The results are displayed in presentable product description. If applicable, the customer will select the color or size of the products and it add it to their shopping cart for checkout.

The client had a lot of repeat business for their products and wanted the customer to be able to login to a Customer Account Management area. The following website development modules were developed for the customer login area:

For the customer desktop features, I developed and enabled a user name and password protected customer account area (directory) in which the following is supported:

• Developed the customer user interface so that existing and potential clients can easily purchase the products created by the administrator, by allowing quick click on category and sub category links or search forms.
• Ability to search products by keywords using and / or options.
• Customer will be able to select from various product options and add their product to a shopping cart.
• Customer will either login to an existing account or create a new account.
• Through the customer’s account they will be able to provide or update shipping and billing information along with applicable account information to ensure timely communication.
• Customer will be able to login to their account at any time to view statuses that may require some sort of validation etc.
• Ability to create and edit account. Primary information will be their billing and shipping information. (Company, Full Name, Address, City, State, Zip Code, Telephone & Fax Numbers, E-mail Addresses etc. )
• Develop interface in which customers can create, edit, delete additional and innumerable shipping addresses and points of contact.
• Ability to manage their login information.
• Ability to view and search chronological date order of purchases along with related documents etc.

After the initial store for the primary domain was completed I created five new directories (hs,xa,hc,an,ds) within the root of the web server and copied the initial store into each of the new directories. The additional directories were named a variation of the domain and would later be used as the code to identify the site's domain and would be used to track where the orders originated from. I used ColdFusion cflocation code to determine the domain that was being passed and redirected the user to the appropriate directory that was associated with the domain. After the new directories were created I applied applicable design changes to each of the sites.

• In the back office administrative area, I added additional fields to the product creation section to accommodate product features based on the domain that was accessed by the customer on the front end of the website. The following list represents the additional modifications that were added to the product creation section:
• I added the following domain codes (hs,xa,hc,an,ds), the same as the directories that I created above, to identify each of the six domains. This field was added to the SQL Server Orders table. Every order that comes through captures the code and identifies the domain that processed the order.
• The category and product development modules in the administrative back office set the precedence for all main and subcategory categories and their related products.
• I added additional pricing fields to the product creation modules to accomodate additional pricing for the five additional domains and update code to support this implementation globally across the entire application as necessary.
• I implemented additional code within the main site administrative back office to accomodate turning off features and / or ensuring features are enabled dependent on which site the administative user is maintaining.
• I developed an intuitive user interface to complete the following reporting options. This reporting module will be implemented and only accessible in the primary domains administrative back office. I also included the option to ensure that the reports can be run by date and/or date range.
• a. Order tracking by domain
  b. Order revenue (all websites)
  c. Order revenue by website
  d. Order revenue by customer
  e. Order revenue by product
  f. Orders by product (no revenue, top selling products only)
  g. Orders by brand (with $ amounts)
  h. Orders by category (with $ amounts)
  i. The ability to import and export customer information (name and e-mail, address) by CSV file.
  

The main challenge, that was faced in developing the application was that the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate would need to resolve to one domain for all six of the domains. There was certainly the option to purchase an SSL certification for each of the domains, but that would be very costly. Using application and session management I created variables that would identify the referring domain from where the customer was processing their order. When the customer checked out they were passed to the primary secure domain, completed their order and returned to the originating domain. For this project I implemented the Authorizenet API solution as the real time credit card processor. The PayPal advanced API, as well as many other APIs could have been used as well.

In summary, after extensive testing, the client was able to run six domains off of one back end database seamlessly with the following benefits.

• As the owner of the websites, the administrator was able to login to only one adminitrative back office to manage all of the domains, rather than six different login screens.
• The administrator had the ability to create, edit and remove products for display on the repspective websites that they desired.
• The administrator also had the ability to offer different product pricing, shipping rates and discount codes using check boxes and additional input fields for the respective websites. On the customer side a product may have different prices dependent on which website the customer was doing their shopping.
• The administrator could also run reports to track total sales, for all or each of the websites.

This project was completed using ColdFusion 8 and Microsoft SQL Server as the database by 2simplifi Web Solutions, Inc.. Other databases such as MySQL could be used as well. This project could also be applied from using a minimum of two to an indefinte number of domains.