vendor

Vendor is a word for a person, company, or other entity that sells things. When it’s an individual person selling things from a stall in a street market, the term street vendor is often used. More old-fashioned words for a person who sells things on the street include peddler and hawker.

Perhaps the closest synonym for vender is seller. It gets at exactly what a vendor does—sells things—and it can be used for both individuals and companies.

Similar words include merchant and retailer. More specific words include dealer and supplier, which both are most often used in the context of businesses that sell to other businesses. (They’re sometimes also used in illegal contexts.)

The term third party vendor refers to a business that is authorized to provide goods or services to customers on the behalf of the main business. The term third party is used because the additional business is tangential to the transactional relationship between the primary business and the customer.

Another word for third party vender is third party seller. For example, the retailer Amazon features many third party sellers, some of which you can also buy from directly without using Amazon’s fulfillment services.

The word vendor is a common word in the context of commerce involving all kinds of businesses.

Here are some examples of vendors in a sentence:

• The fair had hundreds of food vendors offering all kinds of delicious fried foods —it was heaven.
• Vendors across the region have been seeing their sales increase by large margins.
• We reached out to our vendors to inquire about the shipping delays.