selling for others, product type?

I may be confusing myself here but I set up a cart for someone and they would like to sell products for other people on their site. I'm trying to figure out if that can be done, and if so how it can be done. Is this something that product types fit into? Since the other people are in different states, the shipping would be different for the different products. The more I think about this, the more I think that it could not be done unless I were a PHP guru (I am not.) Any suggestions?

I think there are drop-shipping mods in Downloads that could cover the shipping aspect.
If they want the "other people" to control their own products, that would require significant custom coding; if there will be only one admin for the site, there is no problem there.

I'll take a look at that. Thanks for the suggestion!