drop shipping module - is this a good way?

I run a zencart from our little shop on the high street. We'd like to be able to sell some products that we don't actually stock in the store and have our suppliers drop-ship them when orders come in.

I want to create an admin type area where suppliers can edit and add their own products. I've downloaded the nearest plugin http://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=217

which basically replicates the admin area into a different folder and then allows suppliers limited access to areas of the admin. I'm wondering if that's overkill? I'm not very experienced with programming but would it be safe enough to just build all the required (limited) functionality from scratch rather than having the entire admin load each time? Is there a big advantage in loading in all the zencart admin functions etc? I'm not going to be using hardly any of them.

Whats the best way to do this?

thanks ;)

I think I should be a little more specific. If I wanted to make a separate admin area where suppliers are able to login and do some limited actions in terms of adding/updating their products, is it a better idea to clone zencart's admin and remove stuff or is it better to code it all myself?

I haven't done anything like this before and I'm worried about making my zencart vulnerable

I'm surprised that old mod works with the current Zencart version.

The latest version (1.5.0) of Zencart has an improved version of what once was the Admin Profiles mod, which allows you to create more admin users and limit their access, though I haven't done anything with it and don't know how restrictive you can be. Might be something to look at. Giving anyone access to any of my admin makes me nervous.

I'm just using the old mod as an example, I'm working on a 1.5 cart and I know about the admin access restrictions which are probably very good, and handy for me controlling other members of the staff who don't need to access a lot of it, but for suppliers who could be getting the work-experience guy to upload products, I'd rather have a stand alone admin-lite, as it were.

Is it a better idea to separate them like I'm describing or am I worrying too much, or am I missing a trick not using the admin access because perhaps it's more robust and therefore safer?

aargggg!!?!

The Admin Profiles is not "specific" enough unfortunately. You can limit access to certain areas, but not "areas WITHIN areas". So you can't limit users to certain categories and not others... which is probably a KEY limitation you would need. You don't want the "manager" of products A,B and C to have access to the manager of products X, Y and Z... but you can't configure that level of restriction.

Yeah, so is it a better idea to clone the admin and manually restrict access to bits with my own version of admin profiles or should I just create a separate area myself?

What are the drawbacks of not using the zencart admin's autoloaders, functions etc? Is it better for security to use zencart's admin or if I roll my own is it safe enough to allow people to make limited changes to their own products in the database in my verison of admin

The essence of this is that zencart is not designed to be a mult-vendor system. From the ground up, it is fundamentally designed to be administered by one organisation.

You seem not to have given any consideration to:

1. Payment systems... how will each vendor be paid? How will the system handle all their individual payment gateways? Currently, payments are made into a single account (eg: paypal).

2. Shipping... how will the logistics of fulfilment be handled? Customers may buy from several of your "vendors" and each will be responsible for arranging delivery of the goods. Customers will get really pee'd off if they order products that come through 5 different deliveries.

What is your business objective with all of this?

Before you even look at "software solutions" you should be scoping out all the (considerable) arrays of potential actionalble possibilities in your business model. When you have ALL these on paper (and there will be a LOT of them), you can start looking at how it's translated into a website.

Last year we assisted with a project that had multi-vendor options and worked with a London-based platform development company. The project budget was over £250,000 ...

Just add the products yourself and process the drop shipping manually - ie forward the copy of the order email to your supplier.