Shopping cart for reselling multiple distributors' catalogs?

[TheToe]

Hello. I am looking into building a shopping cart for a brick-and-mortar retail store.

Instead of selling products from the store's inventory, they want to sell products directly from their distributors' catalogs. I don't have much info on the distributors now, but their catalogs could range from a couple of SKUs to a data feed of a large, subcategorized inventory... and anything in-between.

They want the orders to be processed in the shopping cart, but then to get fulfilled by the multiple distributors. This means that the products will have to either be drop-shipped from the distributors, or aggregated by a third-party shipper such as UPS. So the cart has to be able to deal with that as well.

Does anyone know what shopping carts (and cart extensions) I should be looking at to create this sort of functionality? I am not exactly a high-end developer, so something easy yet flexible sure would be great. Oh, and a free solution would be favored as well, as the budget for this is small. (And toss in some world peace while you're at it. )

Has anyone else set up something like this?

[temi]

I think its highly unlikely that you will find a shopping cart that will do all the stuff you require out of the box, the most likely scenario is that you find a shopping cart that could do most of the stuff but with a bit of modification it will do everything you want it to do 100%.
Your budget for this project also matters. Check out boss cart ecommerce software, they do have a free shopping cart which could most of the stuff you descibed about and maybe with some modification do absolutely everything you need.

Good luck.