consignment shop

[sports guy]

Has anyone used Zen Cart as a consignment shop? I did a search in the forum and add-ons but consignment did not show any results. The reason I ask is that with a consignment shop you attach a consignor to each product (since you are selling other people goods). But then one would need a consignor area where you can add form fields like name, address, etc. for contact details.

It would then get real complicated if you added commissions and payouts when the item sold as well. I would like to know if anyone has this type of store and whether or not this functionality is possible without re-writing the whole zen store. Wish there was an add on for this.

[stevesh]

Sorry, no. The rub is the payment part. There's no way to direct payments to multiple recipients in Zencart without writing a lot of custom code.

[sports guy]

OK so the payment part is a problem. What about if the payment option is just a field that I enter a number and is done outside of zen cart completely? Another words this is just a text field added to the product that I would enter after the sale has been made. Or I completely omit the payment (payout) part. Then this is possible?

[DrByte]

You could probably expand the manufacturer table to be your list of consignors and add fields for name/address/email etc and maybe payment details.
Then write reports to report on sales-by-manufacturer, and then manually send your commissions to them on a periodic basis according to whatever arrangements you've made with them. Your store would accept full payment just as it would for any normal sale. You'd use the reporting to decide how much to pay to whom, and you'd run those reports yourself whenever you want to make the payments.
That would allow you to leverage as much of the existing code as possible, while writing your bespoke code for your unique requirements.