Each instance of OFN will have its own business model. As we get further into this, there will be aspects of the business model that are best managed as super-admin users in configuration, and some perhaps best managed by developers turning config setting on and off.
Work is underway to have a customisable / CMS front-end so the messaging, text, blog etc are easily manageable by the instance manager. Other questions that instances / organisation might have different answers to include:
- should Producers be able to sign-up themselves? for profiles? for shops?
- should Hubs be able to sign-up themselves?
- can anyone set their enterprise to whatever type they want?
- how much should different enterprises pay, and how is this managed?
- do we need different reports if people are trying to extract info to invoice users
The most immediate question of these is the third - how much do different users pay, and how do they pay?
An increasingly high-priority for the Australian team is to set up a payment module (for users) within ofn itself, so that we don’t have to extract user info and invoice, and so we can use the existing payment methods in the system to collect this money.
I’m outlining below a couple of possible approaches to this - hoping to stimulate discussion on which ones best lend themselves to customisation in different instances - speak now or forever hold your peace . .
As an Enterprise User, I can see how much I will / have been charged
Calculating payments
The factors likely to affect payment structures for every instance are:
- User is Owner of one or more Enterprises (the Owner is responsible for payment}
- ‘#’ of enterprises a User owns
- Enterprise ‘Types’ of those Enterprises e.g. are they selling products online or not, their own or also others
- Turnover in a given period
I think we need a basic structure to reveal this, with ability for the ‘rules’ to be configured at an instance level. So the view could be something like the sketch below, with the circled numbers being customisable at instance level - see sketch
The ‘rules’ are then set at each instance. So for Australia,
- Monthly cost is 2% of turnover capped at $50. Only complete months are payable
- We want an additional payment structure which is an optional extra service package e.g. extra $50 a month
- How do customers pay. Easiest way to do this for Aus at the moment is to put a link to a pin payments form and they just enter credit card. I suspect we could pretty easily send it through to any payment method in the system (e.g. paypal)
Where does this form go?
Option 1: My Account
As a logged in User, I already have an Account page, which currently only shows my previous orders. We could we start the process of turning this into a User Dashboard - separate this into multiple tabs so that we have My Orders, My Shops, . . and one for My Enterprises
The intention is to eventually turn this page into a Customer Dashboard, with more social elements (e.g. ability to follow Producers, Hubs etc) . . so I suspect it might be confusing to start managing ‘enterprise-side’ functions here
Option 2: Enterprises tab
Pros: quite a lot of the required info is already here, but this page is pretty clunky, and perhaps even increasingly obsolete, so we’d probably just be making a mess
Option 3: Enterprise Type Selector Dashboard?
We’re about to give this an overhaul (including working out how to make visible to multi-enterprise owner), would this be the best place to access account and payment info?
currently can’t even see it if you have more than one enterprise, will update this when i have a screen shot
QUESTIONS:
- could something like this work for your proposed business model?
- anything obvious we should tweak to make it more easily adaptable?
@NickWeir @lin_d_hop @CynthiaReynolds @MyriamBoure @lawrence
Here are my comments!
Usually we find if we sit with it, wallow in it, and take a few sensible steps the complexity starts to fall out into simpler patterns . . so my proposed steps are this