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By JohnH - Sat 20 Aug 2011
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I want to open up my stamp selling site to allow fee paying users to add their own products. This raises quite a few problems/issues, but the first one to tackle is adding orders. If I create a new user, how can I lock them down to just creating orders and processing their own invoices ?
Thinking off the top of my head, can I create a separate instalation/sub domain of Kartris for each user....
I might be pushing it here.....
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By Paul - Sat 20 Aug 2011
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We've looked at running multiple storefronts from a single Kartris, and this is certainly something that will come. But it would be multiple store fronts off a single back end, such as for a single company that wants to run separate sites for different brands and have a unified back end for all of them. This would for example give the capability to choose which of the multiple front ends a particular product appears on.
But opening up kartris in the way you describe is a much bigger task than you appreciate, and there are real practical problems in doing this as well as the technical challenges.
Firstly, the back end security would need to be completely rewritten so that each admin can only see their own categories, products, versions, orders, promotions, etc. Each of these items needs to be tagged to a user in the database. All linked data such as attributes and options too - these would all need to be linked to a particular admin user, with others not being able to edit them. This is technically possible, but nevertheless a very major modification.
But then come the practical rather than technical issues which need to be resolved.
All these items posted on the site by different vendors - they can all be put into a basket, mix and match. So a customer can select items from multiple vendors and check out.
But what about shipping? The customer has 5 items in his basket from 5 different vendors who are actually based in 5 different locations. Each vendor will want to set up his own shipping rates that reflect his location, and his available delivery methods. So the customer gets to checkout and then has 5 different shipping selections to make, one for each item in his basket?
And then payment... does each vendor on your site set up their own Paypal or gateway account? Does the customer have to do five different credit card orders? Or do you run the site ordering and bank the cash yourself through your gateway account (this is the only practical option really)?
What happens if one of the 5 vendors does not deliver, or messes the customer about? What happens with chargebacks? If you're banking money for the order a chargeback will come to you, so you would need to retain some vendor money to cover these for up to 6 months, just like many payment gateways do.
Things such as config settings which are 'per site' in many cases would need to be duplicated 'per vendor'.
You'd probably want some way to have admin control over items submitted by each vendor too, which might mean having a two level admin structure in the back end.
Once you start thinking about the practicalities of having multiple vendors on the same site with a unified order process that allows a customer to purchase items in the same order from multiple vendors, there are further practical problems to the ones outlined above.
It's really a very big step required to get something like this working, it's certainly not a few trivial modifications to certain areas like orders.
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By JohnH - Mon 22 Aug 2011
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I agree with your comments regarding the complexities of working this way. I was really testing the water to see if anyone had managed to get something similar workable.
I do think that there is a market for multi-vendor shops because there's a lot of sellers wanting to move away from EBay due to their ever increasing costs. This is where I am coming from, including fellow stamp dealers.
Food for thought....
John
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