One of the many great things about Magento is just how versatile it is and how many Magento Extensions are being built on a regular basis in order to provide additional features.
At Object Source, we are seeing a growing trend for people wanting to build marketplaces, a place where their suppliers can input their own products and use your brand/site to promote them. Magento is a perfect solution for this. There are a few ways of achieving this and we have used a few now. Either we will do something bespoke or use one of 2 very good extensions from Unirgy; uMarketplace and uDropship. The route taken very much depends, obviously, on the clients budget.
Naturally, there are a number of challenges with this business model like, how do I take payments, how do I achieve a consistance look and feel in what all these different products will look like, how does the supplier get notified of the sale and so on. These are all marketplace challenges that Magento can handle and Object Source are happy to discuss solutions for.
We have launched one marketplace on Magento so far and have another 2 in development. Go to 59Strings to see our live one and keep coming back here or follow us on twitter to see the other 2 sites.
