Vendor categories

Good evening,

I am building a marketplace where restaurants can create their own online stores and sell direct to customers without a website or a delivery service etc.

I need to be able to create the following:

1) A list of restaurants by city
2) A list of restaurants by cuisine
3) Links from both to individual pages, which would have all the items offered by that restaurant in a module.

I need to know, step by step, how I would create the vendor categories for this, based on this:

Mode: Vendor products only visible thanks to the vendor page

If you only want products visible in the vendor page, it means that the vendors products shouldn't be under the product category category which is display by default for the product listings.
At this moment using the vendor category will be useful. The vendor page will display a synchronized product listing module and will be able to display the vendor products.

This is from the setup page. www.hikashop.com/support/documentation/1...html#tuto_first_conf

I need the following information:

1) Where do I go to create the vendor categories? Do I click on "vendor category" and create each city with the cuisines as subcategories of that, and the individual restaurants as a subcategory of each of those cuisines?
2) If this is correct, how do I create the menu items that will only show the city with it's cuisine subcategories, and then when someone clicks through to a cuisine, the restaurants in each cuisine type (I also assume I can add each restaurant to several cuisine categories)
3) What is the step by step process to display the products / menu of each restaurant on the vendor page?
4) I also need to display their contact information. How do I customize what shows on each page?

When it comes to the menus, how do I show each vendor category "layer" as a menu item on the site? I want to allow people to choose their city, then their cuisine, then their restaurant, and then go to the vendor page. When I try to use the "Vendor Categores" menu type from Hikamarket, I can't choose a category, and it wants me to log in to view. So that doesn't appear to be how it works.

Please answer each question in detail, and provide step by step instructions. Your documentation is fairly vague, so I need to know, in detail, how this works.

Thanks

UPDATE!

I have figured out how to use the vendor categories to create menu items. The problem is when I get to the lowest menu, nothing is showing up.

So I've created cities, and then cuisines as a vendor sub category of that.

Then I created a test restaurant as a subcategory under that. But when I go to that page, it's not showing me anything. This page should show the vendor information and the products / menu items they have.

How do I make that happen?

You can see the various menu levels here:

City: restaurantdirect.ca/cities/calgary
Per cuisine: restaurantdirect.ca/cities/calgary/category/116-baked-goods
Test restaurant: restaurantdirect.ca/cities/calgary/category/116-baked-goods

Do I need to create modules of some kind to show the products on that page? If so, which ones, and how?

Thanks.

Jerome wrote: ...If you are using category listing to display your vendors ; you can use that option to replace the link to the "vendor categories" to the vendor page instead of the category page.
This option is useful when you can't use vendor listing due to special category organization...