How to setup Magento to query vendor before confirming order?

Question

1. On our website I want to have 30-40 commonly ordered products on display. These are very fast moving consumer goods in both the online and offline worlds.
2. We will also have 100-200 vendors, all of whom sell those products - but sometimes they may be out of stock.
3. We cannot have those vendors upload their inventories and that information will be instantly out of date. These are very tiny shops with very little infrastructure.
4. The customer can select the item and quantities for each and "place" the order (but it is not "confirmed").
5. Once the order is "placed", from our module, we want to redirect the order to vendor #1, and checking with him whether he has those products and quantities. If so, he should have a link or something which will have Magento assign the order to him and the order becomes "confirmed".
6. If vendor #1 rejects the order, our system will redirect it to vendor #2, etc. until the order is accepted or completely unavailable across a set of (say) 10 vendors (that sequence and logic is determined by us). If that happens, the order is canceled.

Questions:

A. Can I setup Magento to query the vendors, in a non-instantaneous / non-live manner, before the order is confirmed to the customer?

B. Can I setup Magento to query the multiple vendors in sequence as described above?

Answer 1

In Magento, a placed order is pending until the payment is taken. Once the payment is taken, the order becomes processing.

I suspect, you'd want to set the placed orders to a custom status like 'pending_vendor' once it is successfully placed. Then, in a sequence, the vendors would be requested to approve and that would update the order status to another order status 'approved_vendor'.

This would trigger a request for the payment to the customer and then your system is back to normal..

The custom order statuses can be added in the Magento backend. However, the logic to trigger the 'approved_vendor' particularly will need a custom module unless I am mistaken.