One of the core features of Magento is the ability to handle multiple websites and stores with a single Magento installation; internally, Magento refers to each of these instances as scopes.
Values for certain elements such as products, categories, attributes, and configurations are scope specific and can differ on different scopes; this gives Magento tremendous flexibility, for example, a product can be set up on two different websites with different prices but can still share the rest of the attribute configuration.
As developers, one of the areas where we will be using scopes the most is when working with configuration. The different configuration scopes available in Magento are: