Hello @iamlavernecox1,
There’s many questions I’ll try to cover everything, but I’ll already say that there’s many ways to solve it on WooCommerce, not even by using plugins, but programing as well, like hiring someone to build it, so I don’t think there’s a right answer for build a store like that, but I’ll recommend some of the extensions from the WooCommerce marketplace that could help you, but feel free to look for any other alternative that may work better for you.
The purpose of the store is to have users (clients or employees) order from our vendors for thank you gifts or company grab bag gifts without paying for anything. Essentially, they will be granted a dollar or unt based coupon to make all purchases while on the backend an invoice or electronic payment is authorized for vendor payment for selected items.
For what you are saying, sounds like that your store should only be accessed by specific customers and not open for everyone in the internet, so you need to control the access and there’s the Products Visibility By User Roles extension that can help doing it, you could use some plugin to create user roles (there’s many plugins for it here on wp.org) use those to only access specific categories, in case some of your customers can’t access products from all vendors.
You also described that other important part of our business is the ability of customers to use credits instead of money, there’s also an extension for Credits on WooCommerce, this extension allows you to create coupons to give credits, send credits, allows that more credits get bought on your store, also have reports about credits and more, so sounds like it could helps you.
Finally the last part is the payment, as you described “on the backend an invoice or electronic payment is authorized for vendor payment for selected items”, for this one there’s many solutions and all depends on what you want, like if it’s just an invoice, you can find and use one of many plugins to generate a PDF from an order and you could send it by email, but if you like to process payments directly on your store after the order is placed, maybe you could try the Product Vendors that’s a more advanced option allowing manage everything as vendors, but again, all depends on how you plan to pay all your vendors. If you want to share more details maybe I could give some other advice.
Doe it matter whether my vendors are Amazon or small mom-n-pop retailer?
I guess that will matter on how you plan to deal with all your vendors, since there’s many options for that.
I hope that I address all your questions, but please let me know if it helps you.
