Hi, apologies for this message not sure where to post it but hopefully someone can help shed some light.


Client currently (very happy) uses zc as their online store. We sinned and bought a monstertemplate to tart things up but all looks great and functions well, no complaints from here or there.

Anyway they would like to progress things further now and the follwoing is a very (brief) outline.

Clients run a nationwide sales agency within the UK and would like to offer the ability to each agent to have their own version of the shop i.e. it stocks identical products to the main company (feeds from that master sql dbase) but any order placed goes directly to the agent for fulfillment and payment and not the main shop.

I believe the idea of affiliate linking is far better as it is sooooo much easier to adminster from my end BUT I think they want to give the agents a bit of ownership and allow them to create their own "about me" pages etc.

Unfortunatley they have seen a similar company doing this and would like to emulate it (yeah with a £10 budget probably too!!!)

My alternative thought to providing something close to what they want is to use something like wordpress to allow customisation in conjunction with subdomains allowing tinajones.mycompany.co.uk to have her own editable pages which then affiliate link into the main store (easier).

Has anyone any experience of this or any better ideas. This is my 15 minutes of thoughts having just heard about it. I dont think it will happen but have promised I would look into viability and report back.

It sounds a nightmare and overly complex to me BUT I can see what they are trying to achieve and why, I just dont think it's that easy and that zc is the best solution for this.

thanks in advance for any help, thoughts :: w2m