I'm currently running the Interspire Mall Edition. It is lacking in a few features in terms of managing sellers at the same site. For example, when a sale occurs at a shop that is part of your site but not necessarily your products, the customer pays you the full amount and you are left to pay your vendor(s). It's a great feature if you actually know all of your vendors. In my business, I don't know each and every vendor, so paying each of them from my accounts has proved to be a huge pain in the neck. I would rather the vendor gets paid directly instead of me via there Google Checkout or Paypal accounts. Nowhere can you change this option in the program that will allow you to set it up in a more logical way. It is a very frustrating hindrance to an otherwise well made and thought out product. Essentially, how I have it set now is, my vendors pay me a set monthly fee for the ability to sell through the site and really that's all I'm looking for. I provide them with a venue to sell and work my tail off to bring potential customers through the site so they can potentially make some sales.
 
So my question is, can this product offer what my current product cannot? The ViArt multisite feature for example, after it is setup on the webserver, can you give administration rights to another individual who will control that secondary store that was created? (IE: Seperate Control Panel/Dashboard) Can each individual store owner/renter have their own shopping cart so they can keep track of their own orders or are the stores linked to just 1 shopping cart? How many stores can be created in total, is there a limit? Is there room for expansion in other words.
 
In any event, these are my main questions.
 
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

Okay.....How about an easier question. If the ViArt product works much the same as the Interspire equivalent, (I've been doing some reading in the forums and it appears many of the core features are the same) how would you propose paying the vendors? In other words, if all of the payments that are made through the site are going to be paid to me (The site owner), how can I take the headache out of paying the vendors? Can I pay them through a ViArt console? Somewhere in the admin panel perhaps? How is it generally done?
 
Also, why was it done this way? Why can't vendors/sellers have their own admin area where they can enter their own credentials from Google Checkout or whatever and get paid directly? Isn't that more logical? I mean...you have a callback URL and areas for an API as well so I would think it would be simple to do. Maybe I'm wrong. Who came up with the idea that the site owner should be paid all of the money? I notice this aspect in software made in the UK and Australia specifically. Is there some kind of copyright somewhere against making a package like that?
 
Thanks in advance for your insight

Good Afternoon PHPLearner...
 
I'm looking at your posts. ViArt swamps Interspire by a landslide. One thing Interspire has over ViArt is the clean look of the admin panel, however, they're growing into this now, but their features are more abundant for sure. The flexibility is second to none.
 
You cannot have people manage certain stores unfortunately, however this IS indeed on ViArt's todo list.
 
If you have questions about the store, please feel free to drop me a line. I'm really busy lately, so have not had much time on the forums as I used to, but that will be changing soon.
 
Either way, feel free to drop me a line if you want.
daniel[dot]risch[at]tocdco[dot]com

Thanks for your response, I really appreciate it. Can the current ViArt products be modified to meet certain requirements that would meet an organizations needs ? If so, who controls that? In other words, whom would I need to speak to in order to pursue that avenue?

You can request custom coding.
 
VIART has two options - you pay the full cost - can be quite expensive depending upon the time needed.
 
or - VIART will quote you a lower price on the basis that your customization will become embedded in a future release - most of us do that and is one of the reasons it grows fast with so many good features.
 
Otherwise, if you are able to code yourself it is largely open source and can easily be modified by you ar your own programmer - but bear in mind the need to be compliant for future upgrades.
 
Chris

Hello,
 
Thanks for your question,
 
At present, the Merchand Module ensures that merchants are able to sell items through the store owner’s site. As merchants use different payment systems, we have simplified the payment process so that all payments are transferred to one account (one shop owner). Further, a store owner transfers funds to his merchants, taking charge for the use of his shop platform.
 
The merchant module you’re speaking about provides an opportunity to create numerous shops (instead of a single shop). Thus, a separate shop is installed for every merchant. A user will have his own access to the shop and sets up a payment system and other options. This resembles a hosting structure when a user purchases a hosting package and builds his own site.
 
Therefore, we leave the current merchant module without changes but we’ll probably add the possibility to automatically send money to merchants to one of our future releases. This is a feature that, in our viewpoint, the module really needs.
 
Best regards,
ViArt Support Team

Anjula is absolutely right. I would rather be sending out the money myself, but to integrate the auto payment feature as it does points/credits, that would be completely awesome as well.

I don't mind sending the money out myself. However, I don't know of a good reliable way in which to do so. I mean, I would rather the shop owners were paid directly but if that couldn't be done, then I would want an easy way to pay everybody minus my own fees.

Anjula,
 
I am open to having multiple individuals selling through one site. I'm not insisting they have their own stores. That would be a nice feature but it's not something I couldn't live without. However, if not their own stores, can sellers of the site have their own pages? IE: Description of their products, their name somewhere on the page, a link from the homepage to their page etc. etc? For example, a product is listed on the homepage and you click on it and a detail page appears. Somewhere on that page it would say "More from this seller" or something along those lines and take you to a section of the site in which only this sellers items are present?

I agree with you Dan. Interspire does have a well thought out admin panel. The only thing it is really lacking are good features. The "Design Mode" is an awesome feature. However, as a seller, it is lacking in many fundamental ways. Of course, this is just my opinion. Hundreds if not thousands will disagree with me. At any rate, after messing around with the ViArt features in the demo, I can honestly say I like what I see here better so far. Does ViArt also have a simplified page editor that is included with the package? Something similar to the Interspire Design Mode?