Implementing multi vendor Magento site. Should we create separate products with each vendor as attribute?

Question

We have a requirement for multi-vendor Magento site. We need to develop custom module for this.

• Seller can add his own products (simple and configurable)
• Seller can sell existing product by adding his own SKU, price and quantity.

We are planning to make one entry in entity product table and then maintain separate entries for stock and price for each vendor. By then SKU is different for each vendor.

Should we be creating multiple simple products with vendor as a attribute?

Answer 1

Ok, so if I understand what you are asking for here. You want to have a single product range, that when you access it via a particular seller, you get a price for him?

So for example:

http://www.example.com/vendor/acme/some-cool-product/ sku=config001 http://www.example.com/vendor/bobsemporium/some-cool-product/ sku=config001

If I buy from acme, it will cost me £29.99 If I buy from BobsEmporium, it will cost me £14.99

If thats the case then would it not be more sensible to setup the each vendor on their own website (multi site install) and then you could get away with using default functionality?

If for some reason thats not a viable business logic, then when loading a product in adminhtml, you would need to observe the load of the product, insert the price based on the product + admin logged in, then save this information to a price table.

On the front end of the website, you would do the reverse logic: Identify vendor from the URL or other means, then load price into model based on that combination.

From there it should be possible to use default core again.