Hi Natasha,
We have previously created a multi-vendor marketplace on another platform and we are currently looking at the feasibility of porting it to Odoo.
Marketplaces can be a bit of a technical and legal minefield. There are a number of different models that you can use. The simplest is the "Aggregator" approach which is the approach outlined by Dovydas above i.e. you would set up an e-commerce store in Odoo and then create accounts for your vendors with permissions for them to add/amend product details. There would be one checkout and when a customer purchases a product they purchase it from you. In the Aggregator model, the customer is purchasing from you and you will need to pay out to the vendor (supplier). If there are any disputes you will need to resolve them. This approach is technically the easiest to implement but you have more legal responsibilities and overheads in running the marketplace.
On the opposite end of the spectrum to the Aggregator is a true multi-vendor marketplace. As Dovydas stated above you could use Odoo's multi-company functionality to allow vendors to only access their own product catalogues. However you might also want to think about the following:
- Payment systems - Stripe, Paypal (Braintree) and others offer marketplace payment systems so that you can do split payments, partial payments, escrow and other useful marketplace features. Not all features are offered in all countries.
- Commissions - You can end up paying double on payment charges (payment from customer, payment to vendor) depending on the payment system you use and how you implement it.
- Single shopping cart - multiple vendor products - In the Aggregator approach this is easy because the customer is buying from you. In a multi-vendor marketplace you will need to split the order into sub-orders and place these with the vendors separately.
You should be able to achieve all of the above in Odoo, but I am not aware of any out of the box marketplace solution.