Hi Guys, can someone explain to me what the differences are between “supplier” and a “vendor”
In the admin panel on the multi-vendor addition Ive tried to locate the suppliers section by going to :
Administration > Addons >
I cant seem to locate where to enable the “suppliers” addon
Regards.
Admin->Settings->Suppliers-> Check “Enable suppliers functionality”
The difference (I believe) is a vendor is a company/store selling in your store (picture it as a mall). This vendor will be able to use different suppliers to sell their product/service.
ok thanks for that, so a supplier would be a wholeseller
so the basic functionality for a supplier would be to sell products via said store and would only be able to access sales stats and nothing more ?
deang, this is only my assumption. I haven’t even looked at the MV edition and probably never will. The only reason I posted was to tell you how to enable suppliers.
ok thanks.
Think of a supplier as an alternate fulfillment company. This could be a drop-shipper or could be different warehouses within your own company. When you specify a supplier for a product, the contact info related to the supplier is notified when the order is ready to ship for shipping/delivery.
A vendor is like a mini-administrator. They can post products, upload images, change pricing, etc. for the products within thier “vendor domain”. They too can have different suppliers.
A good model is think about someone who offers vacation rentals. They have many vendors that post images/descriptions of the properties and set pricing. The store owner gets a commission on sales. But pricing, scheduling and delivery remain the responsibility of the “vendor”. However, from a customer perspective, they will see the store owner as the supplier. So be careful in choosing your vendors!
thanks for the reply its becoming clearer now.
In the multi vendor store, there doesnt appear to be Suppliers in either the addons or settings pages, but the comparison page for the ‘community, prof and multi v’ says that the Multi vendor has this.
Ive only noticed the suppliers section in the ‘Pro Version’, however its disabled in the demo version 
Regards.