Hello, before buying multisites I would like to ask the following question please.
We currently have a website www.example.net.au
We want to extend our global reach and would like to know if this is the correct product for us. We have registered
www.example.com
www.example.eu
www.example.sg
www.example.co.nz
Will multisites allow us to be able to exclude certain products from some sites? Do we still need to use canonical codes? Can we select which region a url will display in? Would we be able to have different payment gateways on each site? We only need 2 but the au gateway is different to the other sites. Does google rank each url independently for each region without any penalities?
We are using joomla 1.5.25. with Virtuemart. Any problems with this? Thanks

With JMS, you can effectivelly create websites with different domains.

Concerning the question of "exclude certain product", this depends on the extension that you will use for the management of the products.
This is possible with Hikashop that has an additional functionality when JMS is present.
Hikashop allows filtering (select) the hikashop categories that must be displayed in a website. As the product can be attached to several categories, you can decide in which website they are displayed.
www.hikashop.com/download.html?partner_id=16361

With other eShop system like VirtueMart, it is only possible to share all the content between all the websites and not a particular product.

With JMS medium edition, it is possible to automatically redirect user to the appropriate website depending on his location.
So if you have a customer located in New Zealand that access the Australian website, it is possible to automatically redirect him to the .co.nz website.

Concerning the payment gateway, this depend on the eShop extension.
With Hikashop, it is possible to setup the website to have specific payment system per website and also share "partially" the hikashop concerning the categories.

Concerning the google ranking, the website are independent as long as you apply the recommended architecture proposed in our tutorial video 0.b.
The key element is to avoid that you have a wesbite that is a subdirectory of another domain.
It is also recommended to avoid duplicated content to avoid penalties in google.

You can used JMS under J1.5.
Concerning VirtueMart, all the products will be identical in each website.
The payment gateway is also identical with VM 1.1.x. With VM 2.x, the payment gateway information is stored in DB and is therefore specific for each website.

See Hikashop that provide the possiblity to have specific product per website and also different payment gateway settings.