Does Zen Cart do this?

I am looking for an e-cart solution that allows an individual to go in and upload products and manage their own 'stores' under the umbrella of one e-commerce site.

Like this one: https://www.notonthehighstreet.com

Can anyone answer whether Zen Cart has any of this type of functionality, even if on a smaller level?

No, Zencart can't do that. Most such sites you see use a custom cart, or a commercial program. There are no free 'mall' carts I'm aware of.

thanks, stevesh. Is that what they are called? Mall carts?

Or something similar, like 'mall script'. Try searching for that in places like hotscripts .com.

You can use Zen Cart in this way. It's the basic business model for many of the digital scrapbooking companies who use Zen Cart to sell designs from a number of contributors.

However, it's not off-the-shelf functionality and I suspect that many of these companies use Zen Cart because it's open source so gives them 80-90% of the functionality they need, and they develop the rest themselves.

I very much doubt that you'll find a package doing everything you want or need, any more than you'd find a real-life mall empty and available, just waiting for you to stroll in and take up residence. You're always going to need to do some of the fit-out yourself.

I could be mistaken, but I believe those scrapbooking sites kuroi mentioned work like this:

The designer uploads his/her designs to a certain folder via FTP. Everything after that (adding the design to a category, setting it up as a product, collecting and distributing payment) is done manually by the site owner. I didn't think that was what you had in mind.

If it were possible to amend the Admin Profiles mod to restrict access down to the product level, it would make the category and product part easier, but you'd still have the payment thing (and shipping, if you're considering shippable products).

Thanks for the info - I really like the clean design of the Zen templates, so perhaps they will serve as a good base to build from.

Just to clarify - if there is anything more that can help me:

The 'product suppliers' would need to have an easy template where they could upload or delete their product photos as well as enter their own product text.

Buyers payments would be forwarded to the product supplier and I would only need to track total sales in order to invoice them for my marketing fee.

Shipment would also be the responsibility of the product supplier, but the amounts would need to show during the purchase process.

This site would be strictly a marketing and administration site for multiple small creative businesses and individuals (a type of Etsy, but with proper marketing).