Thank you.  the multi company option would be best for me as I use the free version of Odoo with no paid support.

That does raise some other questions:

Can one website be created and then copied to my other company?

Can the two websites then be independantly edited?

Hi Geoff Kimpton,

If you want to seperate your ecommerce site into local and national, you can use the concept of multi companies and manage the access accordingly.

If you want two different websites, you need to change the port number and connecting database credentials which will be in the config.py file and host it in a different port number. But if you do in this manner the database will also change and if you want to update any product in both the sites you need to do it twice(one in local and second in national).