I am hoping to use Drupal 7 for a multi-country, multi-language e-commerce website, and I'm looking for advice about the best way to structure it. This would be my first Drupal project and I have a timeframe of six-eight months both to learn and complete the website. At this stage, I'm trying to find out what is possible with Drupal, in order to build a test site to prove to my superiors that it is the right product on which to base our new site.
Firstly I'm not sure if I need to use "multi site", or if it should all be run as one single site. The majority of the content will be shared across all countries and languages. However, I do need the ability to customize content on specific countries' pages - for instance the Canada (French) homepage might show different featured content to the France (French) homepage, as well as a different currency. We intend to ultimately run the site from three server clusters in the UK, US and Japan.
Secondly, I'm planning to use a single domain with ISO country codes to specify the country in the URL. For countries with a single language, I'd like to map this country code to a list of languages. For countries with multiple languages, we would add a hyphen and two letter language code to determine which to display. For example: