Hey Mike,
Sure, the solution we developed is actually quite simple, and any development team should be able to replicate it fairly easily.
When I first started thinking about this problem, I was thinking along the lines of Magento.. having to make a new store within a store, hours of complications, and BS .. but than I took some time and laid out exactly what we need.
- We need a way to show specific products based on different country supplier feeds.
- We need a way to show different pricing based on different country supplier feeds.
Our solution ended up being something that took only a weekend of development and testing to complete (doing some minor addons to it now).
This is what we did:
1. We realized that if we KNEW the customer's country, we could extrapolate this data into other areas of the system.. for example, similar to the Multi-Currency system that shows different currencies based on country, we wanted to apply similar logic to our product feed.
Currently, we using MaxMind for GeoIP2 API Integration to correctly identify a user's country =
http://www.maxmind.com/en/country (its pretty cheap).
2. Next, once we had the customer's country, we needed to make the system show ONLY products available within this country. So we edited the Product Page and included a new area called "Country Availability". From here we listed all major territories such as: United States, Mexico, United Kingdom etc and made them checkboxes.
So we'd go to each product and select which countries we want this product to show for.
Example: If a customer comes from the United Kingdom and a product isn't checked for UK, than it will NOT show to the customer. Likewise if it IS checked it will display for the customer.
This simple mechanism allowed us to store multiple types of the SAME products in our store, but have the different language/priced variants show to ONLY the selected countries via the product page.
3. Once the country was selected, we simply added a new pricing field into the product page, for example: USD (box 1), GBP (box 2), and EURO (box 3). The multi-currency module already knows which currency belongs to which country, so we didn't need to make any adjustments there.
So we simply put in the different prices into the box knowing that when X customer visits us from X country, the correct product and correct price will NOW display.
and that's how we solved handling multiple catalogs of products to only show for specific selected countries with different price points.
Now that its setup.. it takes us 5 - 10 seconds to align each product. HOWEVER .. to make it really easy.. we just imported an CSV document with the changes in bulk and the entire system updated..
Hope this helps,
Ryan