In planning the design/structure for our site, I'm trying to figure out the best architecture.
The potential size is large. The hypothetical example would be a site that is representing many booksellers, each of which has thousands and thousands of titles. Many of the booksellers have the same books. We would also represent, hypothetically, many supermarkets, each of which has thousands and thousands of grocery items. Many of the supermarkets have the same grocery items.
I want, for example, a site visitor to be able to compare books but not be swayed by which bookseller it might be available from. I want a site visitor to be able to compare wines and get wine recommendations across various supermarkets without regard to which store it comes from.
I understand that I probably want a site for booksellers, and a separate site for supermarkets. But do I want a separate site for each bookseller and each supermarket? Or just a separate store for each bookseller and supermarket? Or a separate store for all booksellers, and separate store for all supermarkets?
From reading the scope document(s), it appears that there's essentially only one catalog, and so all products are stored in that same place. This may be great for indexing and searching, and therefore for comparison, etc. But that also seems to lead to some bleed-over in terms over in terms of things like "Featured Products" which cross store lines where perhaps it shouldn't, confusing stores the books might come from where customers could find them, etc.
Can someone comment on the best organizational structure for such a site?
