Is this possible in prestashop?

[Vinay]

Dear Prestashop modders and developers,

I am working on a ecommerce portal and i am thinking of using prestashop, the portal should provide the following core needs among many, Are these possible with prestashop??

*Individual authors portal , where they login and post books, blogs, etc. which will be available through individual authors page listed in the fronend.
* Authors should be able to customize their pages through the back office.(banners, headers etc)
*Book sales occurs similar to amazon.
*Percentage of the sales go to the site, rest to the author, so the site needs to be able to manage weekly cashflow - payments to authors accounts -paypal, cc, etc happens weekly.
* Once the author adds a product, it will be available only after admin verifies the product and accepts it.
* Can we modify the backoffice in prestashop according to our needs?
* There is a very good stats system in prestashop, but is printing the reports possible in prestashop?

Waiting for your response,
Vinay

[Seanmcn]

Firstly

I'm not a developer of Prestashop so I can't actually speak for the Prestashop "team" on how they think this would work out, who knows maybe they've had your idea all along! What I am is an experienced PHP developer. I've made plenty of online applications and have just under a years experience with Prestashop.

Onwards

*Individual authors portal , where they login and post books, blogs, etc. which will be available through individual authors page listed in the fronend.

This isn't yet a module available and is obviously going to take you quiet a lot of coding to get working, I'd nearly suggest Wordpress to make your life easier but I don't think it would much. The Authors portal you are going to have to make from scratch I think.

* Authors should be able to customize their pages through the back office.(banners, headers etc)

Again nothing like this in Prestashop, its very one shop orientated if you get me? Again, I'm going to mention Wordpress, their Wordpress MU does allow individual authors to customize their pages. However again it's going to add a lot of bloat for what you want.

Book sales occurs similar to amazon.

Can't comment as I haven't actually used Amazon *gasp* but Prestashop's ordering system is pretty customizable.

Percentage of the sales go to the site, rest to the author, so the site needs to be able to manage weekly cashflow - payments to authors accounts -paypal, cc, etc happens weekly.

Again nothing for that here on Prestahop, or even Wordpress this time! This will have to be done from scratch and will tie in very much with your whole Portal.

Can we modify the backoffice in prestashop according to our needs?

First straight answer, Yes.

There is a very good stats system in prestashop, but is printing the reports possible in prestashop?

This question confuses me, you can print anything you can see in a computer really.. Control + P. I believe there is an option to make a printable version of the reports.

My advise to you
Your going to have to code most of what you want from scratch. Learn PHP if you don't know it. :|
I don't think Prestashop would fit in very well into what you want, it may work well as your main store for your Portal but to base everything around Prestashop? I don't think so.. You'd really be better off building from scratch, looking at maybe intergrating Wordpress with what you want, [it'll make the user system, blogs, and customization a breeze for you] As for stats, there's plenty of good stat systems out there, they usually only take a line of Javascript to get going. check out haveamint.com[$20 per domain] or Google Analytics [free].
Mainly, if I was doing what you were attempting, I wouldn't use Prestashop at all. You can integrate Paypal yourself to handle payments.. It would end up as a huge headache for you. But thats just my opinion.