Same Product with multiple manufacturers

[Menace]

Hello!
I am thinking about this problem since I decided to set up my shop. I am using Virtuemart 2.0.6 with Joomla 2.5.4

I have around 5000 products, the shop is setup as catalogue. The problem is, that each product can be bought from different manufacturers (or vendors) and customers should have the opportunity to choose where they want to buy from. An overwiew after clicking on a product should look like this:

Product XXXXXXXXXX
Here is the description of the product, a Picture  and some additional information.

Buy from Vendor 1 $19.99
Buy from Vendor 2 $24.99
...

The only thing that came to my mind as a workaround so far was to create a category for each product. In the backend that means "Buy from Vendor 1 $19.99" is my final product and I manage to list theses products by using a virtuemart categoryview for the product itself while using the category description in the backend for showing the Description of the product as shown in my example.

I am not happy with this solution as I do not feel very comfortable with creating 5000 additional categories. I think I am braindead by thinking about all that stuff for weeks now and maybe I can't see really through it anymore. Is there a way to achieve this in a smarter and more comfortable way?

Thank you very much and sorry for my bad english.

Martin

[_dj]

hi have you solved the issue of assigning multiple manufactures to a single product...i need this..pls help