Brands? Suppliers?

Ok forgive me for asking what probably is obvious for some:

1) Brands: Would this be synonymous with Manufacturer? So if someone wanted to look for a particular game by a manufacturer this would be what we use?

2) Supplier: Ok how is this used in PC? I cannot find where this is used and/or what it is used for.

Thanks again for the assistance as I try and wrap my feeble brain around this product.

Sean

Sean,

Overall: "supplier" is a product property. So you find it across many Control Panel features as a way to identify a specific group of products. For large stores, this is crucial.

For example, the powerful "Global Changes" feature (one of those features that virtually no other e-commerce application has and that saves merchants countless hours), allows you to filter products by Supplier before applying a "global change". See "Products > Updated Multiple Products > Global Changes".

Initial specifications for the "Supplier" feature also called for the ability for the suppliers themselves to log in and add/update products. However, that's one of those features that - as we started digging deeper - presented way too many challenges for being implemented effectively. I won't go in all the details, but - for example - there is the issue of how updates added by the supplier would be reviewed/approved by the store manager(s). So we did not introduce that functionality (that was quite a while ago).

As for drop-shippers vs. suppliers: they are two different things (e.g. product XYZ could be supplied by company ABC, but stored and shipped by the online merchant itself), although a supplier can also be a drop-shipper (happens frequently when the online merchant does not do any warehousing). Since they can be different product properties, ProductCart handles them separately.