Third party sellers

I would like to give the opportunity to third party sellers selling products trough my Website . What would be best solution in order to give them the possibility of inserting products directly on zencart without accessing Admin page ?

thx

A whole lot of custom coding. Zencart isn't intended to be a 'mall' type script.

Bad news Steve :-) . Maybe a batch importing a csv in the right tables ? hmmm.... Which tables is involved in add new product ?

Not really so bad - there are plenty of mall scripts avaiable. I don't think you want to give anyone direct access to your database.

A better idea of exactly what you want to accomplish might let us come up with a workaround. I know that some Zencart scrapbooking sites allow designers to upload products, but I don't know how they do it.

Same as Amazon , invite others to sale their products on my shop . I could ask them a csv file to be imprted on zencart ( scheduled batch in cron ) but is not very nice and images of products must be handled

I have seen a mod somewhere that allows this in zen cart. I think it might be a commercial mod and if I am right and remembering correctly it was encrypted. While many people might not have a problem with that, I would never purchase an encrypted mod since I can't do any customizing. But for most it's probably not an issue, I am an incessant code tweaker wanting to get everything exactly perfect as my mind's eye sees it.:smile: I think the mod was for scrapbooking sites, so if you search for zen cart scrapbook module you should be able to find them. It was to allow scrapbook vendors to add their products to a site, but should be able to be used for anything.

Hmmm ... I'll look for that .

Today I feel inspired . What if I do a third_party.php form page in order to let others inserting basic product info by reuse some code of update_product.php ?

If you configure ZC to let others list products then you also have to configure for calculating shipping from another location, and payment tracking too.
One of the other free eCommerce platforms does do multiple store/sellers. I don't know if we're allowed to discuss/mention them here but it's the one whose name is real close to a fictional superhero.

joejoejoe:

If you configure ZC to let others list products then you also have to configure for calculating shipping from another location, and payment tracking too.
One of the other free eCommerce platforms does do multiple store/sellers. I don't know if we're allowed to discuss/mention them here but it's the one whose name is real close to a fictional superhero.

Ceon's Advanced shipper mod allows you to set different shipping methods and locations as well. Not sure if it is applicable in this situation though.

Limitless:

Ceon's Advanced shipper mod allows you to set different shipping methods and locations as well. Not sure if it is applicable in this situation though.

Yes, Advanced Shipper will 100% do what's needed here, no problem whatsoever and it's super incredibly flexible for pretty much any unique scenario one vendor or many vendors may have.

It sounds like the payment aspect could be the stumbling block here. I think you will need to use a central payment system which can be a multitude of systems like Paypal, credit card, check/money order, etc., but you or the site admin will have to be in charge of it and disburse funds to the various merchant participants. I don't see any other way around it.

And thinking about it, but I am not using 1.5.x, but with all of the admin permissions can't you create individual admin accounts and restrict them to just the catalog>categories/products menu and exclude everything else? Can you get specific about which categories they can access? If not, you could probably modify the core to allow this or perhaps figure out a way to clone this page and restrict the accessible categories to specific ones.

I still think the money side of the house would be an issue but I guess where there's a will there's a way.

I think you would definitely have to do some custom coding on the payment issue if you really must have one payment method per vendor/mall participant/seller. But, what happens if someone has products from 2 sellers in their cart? Or do you not want to allow that and want this to be truly a mall type script where each area is individual like a brick and mortar mall and you can only add products from one "store" to the cart?

If that is the case, I suggest creating a site that is a "placeholder" for individual ecommerce sites, with the look and feel of being in a mall and seeing different stores selling different products. When someone wants to go to store x they will enter a subdomain with it's own zen cart, or store y will have their own subdomain and zen cart installation. This way, it's all on one site by using subdomains but can be individually tailored per mall store and customized to look a certain way just like a mall is in the brick and mortar world.

I can't see any other way without a lot of custom coding.

In order to start quickly I thought : Clients pay me , I pay third party seller . I know this implies a transactions cost ...