Multi Seller Option

[ital82]

hi anyone! I'm searching for somebody that can help me.
I have a zen website and I would like to transfor it a "multi seller site", like ebay, where anybody registered in manufacturer section, can sell his products.
Example:
John is going to sell a tshirt.
He contacts me, the admin, and tell that he is going to sell his tshirt in mywebiste.
I insert his name and his email in the manufacturer section and I add his tshirt in the catologue, under his name.
Somebody enters the website and sees the tshirt of John and buys it.
The classical email that the admin receives when a product is sold would be received by John, too.
Now John knows that someone, a customer registered in the website, has bought his product.
He sends the tshirt to the costumer.
Can it be realised?
Somebody can help me to modify the php code in order to have this result?
Other ideas?
I would be very grateful to anyone that can help me!

[kuroi]

Your requirement as stated would require only that you extend the manufacturer table to include and email address and then edit the includes/classes/order.php file to duplicate the order confirmation email.

However in practise this is extremely unlikely to be enough. What if somebody buys one of John's tee-shirts and also buys a belt from a different supplier - the confirmation email would show each supplier what the other had sold, creating customer privacy issues in many parts of the world? You probably need a whole new email to avoid this.

Does John keep you up-to-date with his stock, or can customers keep buying irrespective of the amount of stock available? If it works, I suspect you will very rapidly want John to be adding products and maintaining stock himself - but just for his products, a restriction not currently possible in Zen Cart.

Since you will presumably be receiving the payments, you will need a report that tells you how much you owe John. But what if John doesn't send the T-shirt, the customer will come back to you, and it will be you who gets the problems of credit card chargebacks or frozen paypal accounts. Ouch.

I can confirm that this can be done (as I'm currently working on a multi-seller site for a client) but by the time you've worked through all the real world problems it's an expensive and complex development.

[ital82]

Thanks for the reply!
All you said is true!
Maybe I have to do it manually, that is, when somebody buys the tshirt, I send the email to John.
However can you tell how to modify the code of those files?
I would be very grateful to you!
Thanks a lot and keep me uptodate about your creation for multi seller webiste!!

[ital82]

How do I modify the Manufacturer.php page?
How do I modify the order.php page?

[kuroi]

This is not a standard Zen Cart facility. It would require programming changes to a core part of Zen Cart and requires both database and programming skills. An overview of the work needed would be ...

1. Extend the manufacturer table (rather than modifying the manufacturer page). You would do this by using phpMyAdmin or your preferred alternative to add a field for manufacturer email address.

2. Add a SQL select command to the includes/classes/order.php class (rather than the orders page) to make this email address available. There are several places that you might put this code depending upon your personal programming preferences.

3. Edit the send_order_email function (starts from about line 863 of the same file depending upon the version of Zen Cart that you are using). You need to add the manufacturer's email address into the intro area twice. Once adding it to the $email_order string which makes up the plain text email, and once by adding it into the $html_msg array for inclusion in HTML emails.

4. Finally you would need to amend the order email template for HTML emails to recognize the new value that you included in step 3. You will find this template in the email directory.

However, I also repeat my warning that even if you get the programming right, I still very much doubt that tis would be viable in practise. Good luck though.

[tajul_ashyqin]

you may want to download this contrib; http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...roducts_id=327 as its described the way you want but I still don't know how to get it work...

[ital82]

Thanks a lot tajul_ashyqin . Your help is very useful.
I'll test it asap.
Thanks a lot for help!!!!