Same products

Hello,

Yes, HikaMarket has been doing exactly this for a long time, through what we call the "Vendor characteristic" mechanism. Instead of letting every vendor recreate the same product as a separate listing, you build one shared "master" product, and each vendor that wants to sell it creates a variant of that master product. The customer then sees one product page with a vendor selector that lists every vendor that has actually opted in, and picking a vendor switches to that vendor's stock, price and shipping origin. There is no duplication on the listing side at all.

A few mechanics to know:

(1) On HikaMarket install, a special top-level characteristic is created automatically, with the alias "vendor" (you will find it in HikaShop > Products > Characteristics, named "Vendor"). It has no preset values: HikaMarket fills the values in dynamically at display time, one per vendor variant of the product. So this characteristic does not need any maintenance from you; just leave it there.

(2) For each shared catalog item, you (the main vendor / shop admin) create the master product in the backend the normal way: name, description, images, categories, etc. The master itself is not tied to a specific vendor (product_vendor_id stays at 0). Then on its Characteristics tab, you attach the "Vendor" characteristic alongside any other characteristic you want vendors to vary (color, size, etc., if relevant). That is what tells HikaMarket "this product is open for multiple vendors to join".

(3) A vendor adds themselves to a master product from the front-end. When they visit the master product's page logged in as a vendor, HikaMarket shows a small "+" icon at the top of the product (next to the usual edit icon), which links to a pre-filled new-variant form scoped to that master and to their vendor. They fill in their own price, stock, product code, possibly per-variant images, save, and from that point on the master product's vendor selector has their store as an additional option. They can come back and edit just their variant later through their vendor dashboard the same way they would edit any other product they own.

(4) On the front-end, the master product page renders the vendor selector through HikaShop's regular variant selector (so its look and feel inherits from your template). You can additionally turn on the "Show sold by" option in HikaMarket > Configuration > Market, which adds a "Sold by VendorName" line on each variant once it is selected, and on the listing pages. Stock display, price, "add to cart" all switch to the selected vendor's variant data automatically. The order, once placed, is routed to the right vendor through the regular HikaMarket order split.

(5) A couple of caveats worth flagging:

- There is no built-in front-end page that lists "all master products available for me to join" for a vendor to browse. One possible pattern is that you create a Joomla menu item (or a category) pointing at your master products, and you ask your vendors to go there and click the "+" on whichever items they carry.
- The master product still has to be created by you (or by a vendor with the right ACL) up front. Vendors cannot mint new master products on their own and expect the system to merge them later; the "shared" identity has to exist before vendors can opt in. So in practice this works best when your shop curates the catalog of "official" products and vendors only join existing entries.
- Per-product attributes that belong on the master (name, description, main image, category) are shared and are not editable per vendor; what is editable per vendor is what lives on the variant (price, stock, product code, optional variant images, sale dates, etc.). If two vendors need to describe the same item differently, they need their own separate products, not variants of a master.