Magento – Best practice with multi country set up – Magento 2

I would avoid separate installs if at all possible (so long as there is enough shared content to justify the stores living in one instance). You can store every unique setting for a website's config scope that you would be able to store on a separate install.

As far as subdomains - why not use the country's TLD instead (IMO looks cleaner)? i.e. yourstore.com yourstore.au - then GeoIP redirect to appropriate TLD for users

Magento offers several options for translating or localizing store views - and if you're worried about DB load it may be best to do this via .csv translation - just be cautious when creating your translate .csv files as Magento can be quite particular about how these files are encoded and formatted! (see: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/groups/166/useful_tools_to_work_with_translations - I typically use OpenOffice)

Also - big gotcha! in regards to translations - strings you want to translate must be passed to the frontend via Magento's automagical translate method:

<?php echo $this->__('Email to a Friend') ?>

note the __

So long as you're not adding custom frontend/server side validators, translation should be fairly straightforward.

In regards to performance, load test, load test, load test. You might find a need for a cluster setup (i.e. one server for adminhtml/database, a load balancer to handle geoip redirection/load balancing, a frontend server for each locale, and global CDN)

Here are a few more localization resources I've found helpful in the past: https://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/tutorial-multi-site-multi-domain-setup http://www.magentocommerce.com/translations/ http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/magento-in-multiple-languages-translations-getting-started

and one that can be SUPER useful in localizing custom extensions (shout out to the Demac crew): http://www.demacmedia.com/magento-commerce/mini-tutorial-adding-store-view-selection-to-your-modules-adminhtml/

This can also be helpful when trying to display content tailored to a certain locale: http://www.techdilate.com/code/magento-get-current-store-details/

Best of luck in your localization endeavor sahilbr!

You will need to create two websites (not stores) on your single Magento instance to keep the product catalog shared between them. This also allows you have different prices/currency, taxes, shipping methods, static pages, etc. You can have the different domains as well.

What you won't get from default Magento is separate inventory pools. Unfortunately, Magento supports only global inventory. There are extensions, though. I've used one from AITOC. It worked OK..