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.
