Difference between website, stores and store views

The main point for different stores (store groups) is to have the same data basis but present the product in different shops. Let's say you have one store where you sell all your products and then you create specialised shops with their own domains (seasonal products as summer/winter/christmas/... or special brand shops) to better target your customers. The prices, tax configuration, shipping methods and so on stay the same everywhere.

If you want to sell your products in several stores and have to change one of the following criteria in these shops, then you have to go for different websites:

• different prices
• different tax classes
• different (base) currencies
• different payment options
• different shipping options

If you just create store groups, your customers will be able to log in to all shops with the same credentials whether you like it or not.

If you create websites, it's up to you whether your customers can log in to all shops with the same credentials. If it's clear that these shops belong together you may want to do that for convenience. In other cases it's not so clear (or shouldn't be) that your shops belong together. Then you may want to configure Magento so that your customers have to create an account for every single shop.

Websites

It can be referred as the basis of the shop. Basically, you can think of a website as a domain/subdomain (though, this is perhaps an oversimplification). From one administration you can manage a few shops.

For different Magento websites it is possible to:

• to maintain a separate customer base, or can share the customer accounts within all websites.
• make different currencies.
• create different product pricing or make prices global (shared for all websites).

Stores

Stores are ‘children’ of websites.They are your actual product catalogue. Products and Categories are managed on the store level. A root category is configured for each store. They can be used to define for example different (looking) shops with the same information.

Managing stores it is worth to know:

• All the stores within one website share the same customer accounts.
• Currency and prices are identical for all the stores.
• Different shops can have different products assigned.

Store Views

Store Views are mostly used to handle different languages on your website. You will typically have one Store View per language. This way you can “showcase” the goods in the language more convenient for the client (if you are selling goods worldwide).

With store views you can:

• have the same root category for all store views;
• set different prices depending on view.

Source: mag-manager

Generally storeviews should only be used if you want a different language or different (themed) design. As soon as you need anything else different like prices, products, shipping etc you're best off going for a website which allows you a lot more flexibility.

So anything that can be done only using the design / template directory on the server or a language pack a shopview will do.

But again, this is a shorthand rule and different cases might need different solutions. All in all this worked pretty well for quickly deciding what to use.