They would not be suppliers or vendors. A Vendor would be a party selling stuff through the system. If they are not customers of your company, then no they wouldn't be customers either.
What you call them depends on how the company interacts with them. When I do analysis I document each part of a business process in terms of actor and action because it is often confusing or misleading to leave one or the other out. In this case, what are these retail stores doing? How do they interact with your company? Or, do they not interact with your company and you just want information so that others can interact with your company (ie "Customer searches for retail store"). Again based on your short description, so far the more accurate term seems to be "Retail Store", but how you model that in OFBiz depends on what the business process looks like (ie it could be a Party, a Facility, or both... or perhaps something else entirely, or Party/Facility combined with custom extensions). -David Matt Warnock wrote: > One of our upcoming needs is to track retail stores across the country > who sell our products. Most of them are not direct customers, they > purchase the products from distributors, who in turn buy from us. We > need to track these retailers and which of our products they carry. > > They are not Suppliers (to us), but could be customers. They are a > "Party that sells something" per David's definition, and we need to > track which SKUs they sell. Should they be Vendors, then (which seems > counter-intuitive), or should we create a separate Retailer entity to > track these? Any thoughts? > > On Fri, 2011-12-09 at 13:44 -0800, David E Jones wrote: >> Ruth Hoffman wrote: >>> 2) If you look at how vendor/supplier is used in some of the OFBiz >>> applications, you might observe that: >>> >>> A vendor "supplies" goods or services to the Company of record for the >>> OFBiz instance. Those goods or services may be raw materials for >>> manufacturing, products for resale on the ecommerce site or computers to >>> run your business. When a vendor (with a record in the VENDOR table) >>> supplies you with something, they are acting in a role called a "SUPPLIER". >>> >>> So, in the OFBiz world, my interpretation is: A vendor is a supplier. It >>> is as simple as that. Anything more is making it too complicated :-) >>> >>> Anyone care to comment on my interpretation? >> Actually a Supplier is a Party the sells things to the company running >> OFBiz, hence the SupplierProduct entity. In other words, a purchase >> order is sent to a Supplier. >> >> The term vendor doesn't mean much in OFBiz, but has been used for any >> Party that sells something. For example, if you have multiple stores in >> your OFBiz instance you may have a vendor per store. You could also have >> multiple vendors selling through a single store. >> >> They are not really equivalent terms. >> >> -David >
