Multi-vendor - more than one vendor per product - thoughts?

Hi!



I posted this in the ideas section but wanted to drum up some support and feedback for it.



I was very excited about the multi-vendor capabilities because we presently offer an affiliate program for parish bookstores but have been looking to do something more. In particular, we wanted to provide folks with local options for purchasing items in their area where they exist.



So for example, a parish could list products in their tiny bookstore and their price and you would effectively have an amazon marketplace style selling platform. This would allow our catalog to expand in ways that we might not expect, provide analytics on products we might not otherwise see demand for, allow print on demand folks to have their work given a trial run etc.



Another option - what if you have an online store and many physical store locations? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to have your customer request certain items for pick-up locally? Multi-vendor would be great for this is you could set up a vendor account for each location and then, once again, let the customer choose the vendor (in this case the location) for the product.



This choice could easily be integrated into the product options section - even allowing for price modifiers, etc. You could list it as a table with a radio button, etc.



Thoughts? Is this not how you would expect Multi-vendor to work? Don’t get me wrong, if I was still running a drop-shipment enterprise the multi-vendor as it stands now is awesome - we sure could have used it back in 2006. But this seems like a really innovative application that doesn’t seem like it would take a lot of development time.



Thoughts?