Multi-shop, multi-admin, single domain

Hi;

We are creating a social networking website, where each member should have the opportunity to set up & manage his/her own store. There could be thousands of stores & administrators, who should obviously have rights to only their store, which should be set up automatically.

I know there are Multi-store add-ons to zen cart, but I don't know how they work.

We have our own PHP developers, we can make modifications to the code; the question is does Zen Cart support multiple storefronts in a single installation, and then assigning individual storefronts to individual administrators?

Another "nice to have" feature would be like a superstore, that presented all the products in the "Virtual Mall", from all the stores, but kept track of which product came from which store in the shopping cart, so the individual store owners could be compensated appropriately.

Does that make sense? Would that be a big deal for us to add this functionality?

Thanks for any info/feedback.

Chris

The first just sounds like multiple installations of Zencart in subdirectories in one overall domain. Many of us do that for testing purposes. You'd obviously need separate databases, too. The 'set up automatically' part could be done with something like Fantastico.

The 'mall' thing can't be done in Zencart without a lot of custom coding. I'm not a programmer, but I'd guess it would be as easy to write something from scratch as to try to convert Zencart to that kind of cart.

While the separate zencarts would need... separate zencarts.... with separate databases, a virtual mall would then need access to all of the databases. I could be wrong, but I'd think that making connections to dozens of databases every time someone loads a list of products would be somewhat intensive. Also, I would think, since it's automated, you'd either need a database which contains the names, usernames, and passwords of all the other databses, or a self-writable file with that info so that the mall could access the zencarts. This seems like it would reduce security.

Just my 2 cents.