[admin (no pm's please)]

One of my current thoughts on the shop is to keep the SHOP portal relatively simple, but add a DEPARTMENT portal, like most portals you would be able to create multiple copies, but a DEPARTMENT would not have its own template.
Instead the SHOP portal would have an option where you listed the DEPARTMENTS you want in your shop, and the cms_shop.tpl file would deal with DEPARTMENTS.

In this way we could keep the extra complexity out of the picture for most users, but people needing it would have in effect categories and other functionality that could vary between the shops departments. For example members only departments.

[Symon]

Sounds a good idea.

Not everyone will want to set up their own like i have, although i have had many people asking how i did it.  so a simple department portal would solve this