What is meant by multi-vendor?

[conurus]

I understand the answer to the question of "when" is "not yet" but my question is a lot stupidier than that. Just "what" is meant by multi-vendor?

Is it just that many vendors can sign up with the Joomla/VM2 system and each can have its own Products, Product Categories, Payment methods, Shipment methods, templates, inventories, and so on?

Or is it some Amazon-style marketplace, where the shopper searches for something, but the same product is available from multiple vendors, and all of them are listed with their prices? For some categories of goods (books, CDs) shipment methods and shipping charges are mandated by the marketplace?

What was the intention and usage scenarios of the multi-vendor feature to begin with?

Thanks for explaining to me in advance.

In my situation let's say I sell some widgets and I have a global network of distributors, each of which may choose to carry a subset of widgets. So I would like the shopper to choose which vendor to deal with but otherwise most of the products are shared among all vendors. I was thinking if every distributor sells the same set of widgets I could just set up one payment method for each distributor without any need for a multi-vendor feature at all?