One store - multiple sellers

[NJP]

Hi, I'm just getting an understanding of AbanteCart, and so far I really like what I see. This is my first post to the forum. I have a specific need which I do not think is currently satisfied and I would like to hear from anyone who could either tell me I am wrong, or might be interested in working to develop a solution. The requirement is for our small company to host and maintain a shopping cart system in which our customers (artists) can present and sell their work. We are doing this as a service, not as a shop, the distinction being that the individuals are not required to be VAT registered, whilst here in the UK our company would have to charge VAT and therefore if we sell the art, the prices would have to include 20% tax. In order to avoid having to charge tax and for it to be agreeable to the tax authorities we need each piece of art to be invoiced from the respective artist. In practice I imagine that either each Artist's work is contained in a category, or each Artist is regarded as a manufacturer and that invoicing details could be stored once so that when an individual piece of art is sold the invoice comes from that individual artist. So how can I make Abantecart provide different invoices according to the item sold? I look forward to some discussion, and many thanks for your time.

[maxter]

Welcome to the forum,

Are you looking for Multivendor or Marketplace solution? I can help you. 

[NJP]

Welcome to the forum,

Are you looking for Multivendor or Marketplace solution? I can help you. 

Hi, thanks for the response. I'm not sure I know exactly what you mean by Multivendor or Marketplace, or the distinction between them. But let me attempt to answer by means of an illustration.

I sell materials to artists and as a service to them I would like to develop an on-line "Market" where they can sell their work and, like in a co-operative, we all benefit. We are not charging commission, our benefit is derived solely from selling materials to them.

Here in the UK when a business or person selling products or services exceeds a turnover above approximately $100,000 they have to pay 20% VAT (value added tax) to the government, which they collect by adding a cost to their products.

So we want to avoid grouping all the art together and selling as one "shop", as most artists do not reach the VAT threshold, whilst collectively they would. However the sytem needs to cope with some who have to charge tax and some who do not.

In order to comply with government tax rules each piece of art would need to be sold by the artist and this requires that the invoice comes from them - and this could be subject to tax inspection audit.

So in an AbanteCart based system I am assuming that each artist would either be a manufacturer or have a category to themselves and that they would have to complete their own invoice template which would link directly to their art pieces (products).

Ideally the system would allow an individual artist to share a link with people interested in their art that would provide a view of just their work. However we would also want to allow people to browse all of the art and make purchases. This scenario would introduce another potential problem in that a customer may make purchases from several different artists and thus need a number of individual invoices.

Fortunately we are allowed to use one payment system which pays money into a trust account from which it then gets apportioned to the artists who sold their work.

I think I want "one market for multiple vendors" - eBay and Amazon are two such models.

In terms of system architecture I see two possibilities.

Firstly the shopping cart system handles it all internally.

Secondly the shopping cart is setup such that each product has links to an external system working alongside the shopping cart which actually sends out the invoices by email and the shopping cart merely records the total payment (which could include shipping) and states you will receive your invoice(s) shortly.

Hope this goes some way to answering your question.

[eCommerce Core]

Welcome NJP to the forum.

Thank you the detailed overview.
AbanteCart does not do what you explain right of the box as these are specific business requirements.
Good news, functionality can be customized for what you need, and it sounds very similar to AbanteCart Marketplace that we developed.
You can check it here: https://marketplace.abantecart.com
It is a matter of filing a resource or company that can do this for you. Feel free to reach out to our team if you need help.

[NJP]

Thank you for your post,
I'd certainly welcome contact from any person or company able to help. And yes the "maketplace" looks to be very close functionally.

[vadimsa]

I'm looking for a solution similar to your marketplace. Are you planning to release a commercial version of the AbanteCart marketplace or extension? Your platform looks very interesting and I would buy it to create my own marketplace.

[abantecart]

Welcome to AbanteCart forum vadimsa.

Can you please PM to me and we can discuss the details about marketplace.

[ThomasTax]

There are a few who disagree, but you can see by the survey, as well as the time we did it last, there are some who disagree with the one board concept.