[pauldodman]

Hi Joel
No, for most people these are two totally different things.
A provider is just a retailer, whereas the manufacturer would be the brand of goods sold by that manufacturer.
So your providers might be "Joel's Car sales", "Paul's New Cars", whereas the manufacturers would be Ford, Toyota, Renault, etc.

If you wanted to split your shop up into Provider sections, you'd need to be using X-Cart PRO, possibly along with BCSE's X-Mall add-on.