What I want to do is create a marketplace for multiple stores in my area and give each store their own site within my marketplace. However it is not my intention to have them actually sell merchandise through the site, I want the site (mine and theirs) to be "catalog only", meaning displaying products but with no checkout/cart. Most of the shops on my site have their own independent sites, or they provide services (like tattoo shops) and have no physical products, or they don't want to sell online at all. I just want them to be able to display products/services they carry or offer.
I did see the setting to disable the checkout in your documentation, but is there more to it than that?
I really don't need a lot of the features offered by Sellacious or other multivendor platforms, but I do still want to provide the ability for stores to register their stores on the site, create a shop, set up products (for display only), interact with customers, etc.