Primary and subdomain sharing single Commerce

Hi,

I'm trying to help a friend. They have an existing small publishing-business site using Squarespace and Squarespace Commerce to sell books from their catalog.

In May, they plan to add a subdomain to the site for a new imprint so that they can send visitors interested in that new catalog/imprint straight to a sub-section of the site. So, something like:

    https://main-domain.com
    https://new-imprint.main-domain.com

The new imprint will have a separate catalog of books, but at the same time, we'd like to use a single instance of Commerce so that a visitor to the domain can add/buy books from both catalogs with a single cart.

My questions:

    - I'm assuming we can categorize the new imprint's books within the Commerce inventory then serve only items from that catalog to a product page on the subdomain. Is the feasible?

    - Could we also filter out the sub imprint's books from the primary domain's product page?

    - Will Commerce's cart instance be sustained over the domain and subdomain? In other words, if a user adds a book from the primary domain and the subdomain to their cart, will a single cart instance be created that contains both items?

    - Has anyone with experience already done this and if so, can you forewarn me of any pitfalls?

I'm an experienced Laravel and WordPress dev, so can hopefully grasp technical answers in Squarespace speak, if required. This is my first time dipping a toe in Squarespace—I am very impressed.

Thanks,

Pat

You cannot add a sub domain to the same Squarespace site (the ‘single instance of commerce’ that you referred to). Visitors to the sub domain would simply be redirected to the main (primary) website domain.

However, you could achieve everything else on Squarespace by adding a second Store page called ‘new-imprint’ so that the new imprint is available at https://main-domain.com/new-imprint. This Store page would contain only the new products, but if the visitor navigated to the existing Store page, they’d be able to add products to the same cart from here too. 

6 hours ago, paul2009 said:

You cannot add a sub domain to the same Squarespace site (the ‘single instance of commerce’ that you referred to). Visitors to the sub domain would simply be redirected to the main (primary) website domain.

However, you could achieve everything else on Squarespace by adding a second Store page called ‘new-imprint’ so that the new imprint is available at https://main-domain.com/new-imprint. This Store page would contain only the new products, but if the visitor navigated to the existing Store page, they’d be able to add products to the same cart from here too. 

Many thanks for the reply, paul2009

Just to make sure I’ve got what you’re saying - are these correct?

    - A subdomain managed by Squarespace can’t be used to point to a directory in an existing site - it must point to ‘/‘ So if I wanted to use https://new-imprint.main-domain.com it would either have to point to a separate SquareSpace site or it would point back to ‘/‘ of https://main-domain.com

    - A separate Squarespace site obviously can’t share a cart with another site.

    - Best plan then is to put a new Store page and other additional pages for the new imprint at ‘/new-imprint’

To clarify, if the domain was purchased from Squarespace you could set up forwarding, but it seems overly complex without achieving anything new.