In this demonstration I’m going to walk you through how to create a website store and store view in Magento 2.

To do this, I’m actually going to start from my admin.

The first thing I want to do is take a look at my existing business structure. And I can see that here from Stores, Settings, and All Stores.

Let’s take a look at our structure here. We have a single website, Luma USA. That’s my primary market.

That website has a single catalog of products. So that means we have a single store, main website store, and then those products and other settings are being displayed in the United States English, using the US dollar.

Okay, so now my business owners have determined that it’s time to expand. We’d like to move to a French market and to do that, we need a new French website since our payment and shipping methods are going to be different for our French market.

So to get started, I’m just going to go over here to Create Website, and I’ll give my website a name.

And now I need to give it a code. And I’m not going to go into what the code does, there’s documentation on this in the Magento user guide. But it is a required field, and what I like to do is to just take the name of the website, make all the words lowercase, and replace spaces with underscores.

Like this. And now I can specify a sort order. And what I like to do is I like to keep my primary business unit at the top of the grid and to do that, I need to make sure that I give my sort order here a higher value than the primary business units website. When I created the Luma USA website it used a zero sort order. So all you need to do is make sure that the sort order here is higher than that. I’ll just use 10. I like multiples rather than single digits. And I don’t need to set this as the default.

I’ll go ahead and save.

There we go. Now we have our French website, Luma France. The next thing we need to do is to define a store or a catalog of products for this French website. So we’ll go over here to create store and see what the fields are.

First thing I would do is select a website, Lima France, I’d give the store a name. And here we go, root category. So since a store defines a starting point for a website’s catalog I need to make sure that I have a root category created for that store’s top level navigation and products.

Let’s take a look at what we have. Right now we have a single store Luma main catalog. Now, if I was to select Luma main catalog here, that would mean that my US site and my France site would be sharing the same catalog of products. And I don’t want that. I’m going to create a new root category so that my French website has a different line of products than my US-based one.

So to do that, let’s go over here to Products, Categories, and on the category creation screen here we actually start with a new root category. If we had any doubt we could just click the Add Root Category but I don’t need to do that. I give my category a name.

I choose Luma France catalog.

I need to make the category active.

And I want to call your attention down here to the bottom. By default, Magento includes these categories in the navigation menu. I don’t want that for my root category since that’s not its purpose. Its purpose is purely organizational. It serves as a starting point for my top level navigation for this store. So now just go ahead and save.

And here we are, we can see that we’ve got our new root category and I’m ready to start creating my sub-level categories beneath it. For top level navigation and then sub categories there and so on and so forth.

Alright, so now we can go back and create a store. Back to Stores, Settings, All Stores, Create Store.

Now I can associate this store with Luma France. I can give it a name.

Let’s keep it simple and call it Luma France store.

Now I can select the right root category, Luma France catalog. Let’s go ahead and save the store.

Alright, and now we’re done. Now, Magento is going to need to re-index after this store is created. It gives me this message here and asks me to make sure that my cron job is running since the indexes will refresh automatically. Mine is. So I shouldn’t really need to worry about this message.

Meanwhile, now that I have my Luma France website and my Luma France catalog, I need to set up a store view in which I will define how my customers will view the products in this catalog. So rather than using US English, I want to use a store view that uses the French language and the Euro.

So let’s go ahead and create store view.

First thing I need to do is choose the store. In this case Lima France store. I’ll give this a name.

I’ll just call this French. And we’ll make sure that my customers know that it’s French and France as opposed to French and Canada, because Canada would use the Canadian dollar and France would use the Euro.

Now, the store view here also needs a code. And what I like to do here is just use the code for the website with a language code afterwards. So if I was doing a store view for English in Great Britain, for example, I’d probably just do EN rather than FR.

Lastly, I need to enable the store view and then I could give it an optional sort order if I had more than one store view. We’ll go ahead and save it.

Okay, now my website, my store and my store view have been created.

Now, those are the basics for creating a website store and store view. There are additional steps that you would need to take to use these in production, right? So there’re some settings on the web server level. And then there’re some settings in configuration where you’ll need to set up locales and base URLs, which I’m not going to cover in this demo but there’s good information in the Magento user guide to explain how that should be done. -