Shipping different specially grouped products from different manufacturers

Hi,

I have several manufactures each with a different set of products. Each manufacturer will ship their product directly to the client for me, thus removing the need for me to keep stock. I would like to group certain products according to manufacturer so that a client can ONLY order from that particular group of products for any one particular shipment.

For example I have several products that are only made by Factory A e.g Product A1, A2, A3. If the client orders any A products, then I only want them to order A products and I can't have them to order B products as they are shipped from Factory B and thus there would be 2 shipping charges. I would like to be like a central ordering system and shunt the orders to these different manufacturers, maybe as many as ten in the future.

Is this possible?

I suspect this is the issue of multiple vendors that zen cart does not seem to support?
I have trawled the net and not come up with a solution. Please help!
Thanks in advance,
Deansta

What distinguishes these products? Are you using the manufacturers_id for that?

If so, you could use one of the functions in the shopping_cart class to check that all products are from 1 manufactuer either on checkout or when things are being added to the cart ...

Or, you could customize a shipping module to make calculations based on the 2 to XXXX manufacturers_id to calculate how many from each manufacturer are in the shopping_cart to do a shipping charge based on that manufactuer based on the method of shipping you want to use and build the charge ...

There isn't anything that I know of to do this for Zen Cart at this time, however, this could be custom coded ...