This is a great article!

I’m using the new 1.4 version and multiple sites has gotten quite a bit simpler using environmental variables and setting them with .htaccess rules; however, I was struggling with passing sessions between “websites” and it seems that only possible between “stores”.

I’ve got everything working down to the second step of the checkout.

I start on website-b.com, populate my cart, start the checkout on website-a.com and the moment I click continue, it shows me the billing step but then immediately redirects me to a screen telling me my cart’s empty.

Did I miss a step? Any thoughts on what might be causing this?

Thanks for Your help, I am elaborating what I actually want , I have client which have stores in other shopping carts like oscommerece,zen-cart and x-cart, Upto this time I was giving them a facility that they can checkout through ny site by using the button on client side and when the customer submit the button and checkout they can checkout through the My orevious made java based checkout,But now i want to shift my javabased checkout to a new checkout which will be magento,

There are three pieces to the puzzle:

1. Shopping Cart.
The shopping cart’s ability to communicate with the Payment Gateway through an API. Most all shopping cart’s provide this by default, but every shopping cart differs in the Payment Gateway provider they support.

2. Payment Gateway.
Authorize.net is by far the most popular solution, and is already supported in Magento and most all shopping carts.

3. Merchant Service Account.
In order to process the transaction and make the deposits into any checking or savings account of your choice, you need a Merchant Service Provider. The most reputable in my experience are BAMS (Bank of America Merchant Services), FirstData, Elavon, and SAMs. But there are so many, so just look for the best deal and most reputable. Keep away from resellers, call the number on the merchant service provider website direct, to make sure you don’t get a reseller. Best thing to do is call your bank and find out who there merchant processor provider is, because you’ll probably get the funds deposited faster and chances are there is no middle man. I searched merchant service provider on the internet, and I couldn’t believe all the shady type websites I came across, i.e. charge.com, gotmerchant.com, and so many more that look like scams. Stay away from them like the plague. Or maybe they need to revamp there website, regardless if they are a trusting provider, they should make a good first impression especially on the net. No excuses.

Having said that (to explain to the rest of the readers), you would need to talk to your merchant service provider and payment gateway provider when you want to open up different stores. I could suggest the following, from experience.

If you want one merchant and one gateway account for all stores, than simply change your industry, for example if one of your stores sell knives and the other sells garden supplies, then change your industry to Home and Garden. An addition, you would need to change you business name or do a DBA, to an umbrella type company, for example instead of calling it Jack’s Knives, call it Jack’s Stores, or Jack’s Enterprise. This way when the customer get’s their MC, Visa, etc statement it will say Jacks Ent. or Jack stores, and no red flags go out. For your website name, you can give them the umbrella store, i.e. magentomall.com, jackstore.com, etc.. I’ve done this with two customers, after providing all the paperwork to their payment gateway and merchant provider, they were ok with this setup. As far setting up the corporations, sole proprietorship, fictitious name, etc.. well that’s up to you.

If your stores are all different industries and different business name then you would probably need to open different merchant and gateway accounts for each. I don’t know your business plan or structure, so the best bet is to contact your providers.

I hope I was helpful.

-CJ

To put it simply, all these(zen cart, x-cart, magento, oscommerce) web apps are built on PHP and SQL. Magento simply facilitates “one page checkout” out of the box. So you can hire a programmer, to write you the scripts which enables a “new one page checkout” functionality on any ecommerce platform. For example, OScommerce you can buy a plugin (no need to hire anyone). For Virtuemart, which is Joomla’s flagship ecommerce solution you can also buy a plugin. I’m not sure about the others, but I would check out Zen Cart forum and X-Cart forum.

If the cart you have doesn’t offer a plugin. You can simply hire a freelancer at, PHP Freaks, Nerdlance, PHP Freelancers, and Freelancers.com. From my experience, China and India programmers work for less money and went far and beyond what was expected; and the nicest personality ever. Remember, the internet was invented by the US, so it’s interpreter language is English. Notice every Chinese, or other language websites have html tags, in their source. So, if they can program in PHP,SQL, then the language barrier should be little fuss.

I hope I was helpful. Let me know if you need anything else.

-CJ

I figured out how to set up the 100 domains outside the public_html folder and how to code the 2 files to make them point to the magento cart. I then created symbolic links to a few folders like this:
ln -s ../public_html/404/ ./404
ln -s ../public_html/app/ ./app
and so on.

Now my question.
1. If I am doing SSH from a different IP address I’m thinking the symbolic links above would not work. What should i use assumming my domain where my magento is installed is http://www.mike.com?
2. in the index.php - now i have
$mageFilename = ‘../public_html/app/Mage.php’;
Does this stay the same on another IP?
3. Do I need to do anything with the .htaccess file other then copying it to the folder?

Thanks in advance, your post are great!

Do you have any suggestion on how to solve this?

Your website stores are very impressive. Very catchy domain names, too. Any suggestions or questions please let me know.

-CJ