2. Products from multiple vendors in one order...Should a customer know whether his order contains product from several vendors? I personally think, no. A customer will see only one order.
5. Shipping options and rates. ...Most probably only a store owner will manage shipping options and rates in the first edition of multi-vendor support.
Anything else? Your thoughts, ideas, suggestions?
It is a great proposal!!.. as always :D
2. For some business models it could be useful to disclose the identity and profile of vendors. Make it configurable, and if disclosure is selected, then as Tim2376 suggested, display it in products and have an about profile page of each vendor (name, description, contact info, selling and shipping conditions, etc.)
5. Enhance Shipping by Weight cost computation method, which is very flexible and powerful, to include filtering by vendor (country/state/zip/method/vendor/weight-range)
a.m. wrote:
Of course, there could be a lot of multi-vendor support implementations. And as it http://https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/22403/multi-vendor-roadmap-lets-discuss.aspxp=15#91106 was already told there is not such a concept as a "standard" multi-vendor situation. In each case it all depends on the stores business model. So let's choose the one which could be used by the most of store owners. Here are some points that should be considered/done:
Your proposal conforms with the Amazon (dropshipping) model. In the other extreme it is the Ebay model (more or less suggested here by Tim2376. This other extreme could easily be achieved with the following (besides my previous suggestions for 2 and 5):
- Let the customer filter products by vendor.
- Dont let customer to add to cart products of different vendors, so to make orders vendor by vendor.
- For payments (6) each vendor should be affiliated with each of the payment providers of the store and the corresponding information should be included in a table (all managed by store owner).
- Have a registration page for vendors as suggested by Tim2376.