It will depend on how you want to present your items !?
You can have just one store, you can also have 100-stores.
The question is, how you want to present your USER all the items?
- Do you want to present them sepparatelly?
That means, for example you have 50-Stores and you give your user first the option to choose, from which STRORE the user wants to see PRODUCTS?
(50-different-DATABASES in the BACKGROUND) ??? Is that an ideal solution?
- May be you want show the user just the ITEMS (categorized by ITEM-TYPES) no matter from which DATABASE the ITEMS come from?
All ITEMS shown in one big REPEATER-LIST which can be scrolled as INFINITE SCROLL-LIST. Items loading from either one big database, or several separated ones, but loaded in just one big list.
If i would be the user, i would prefer a menu where i don’t care from which store a product comes from, i just would search for CATEGORY (SHOES, T-SHIRTS, CARS, SOFTWARE, WHATEVER) and would expect to see exactly just the items of my choosen category.
The same way a glocery-list should work.
The user don’t care about where the item comes from.
He just wanna see his generated LIST and the SUM-PRICE (END-PRICE) on the very bottom of his created list, to know how much to pay for all selected ITEMS.
I would use DROPDOWNS ONLY TO CATEGORIZE all ITEMS, but showing them in an REPEATER with CHECK-BOX-OPTIONS to select them.
The Dropdowns would only do the JOB of a FILTERING-ENGINE.
- User selest a category from dropdown —> REPEATER offers all related options to make your choices.
-User selects a second category from second dropdown → REPEATER loads additional ITEMS and shows them aswell.
You also could even give your REPEATER some special functions like…
-different-view-options (sepparated CATEGORY-VIEWS / ALL-CATEGORY-VIEW)
and some other special FEATURES and FUNCTIONS.
But this will depend on your own imaginations and creativity.
You can generate everything with CODE if you want.