Enterprises can create and apply custom 'tags' to products and variants

Products / Variants

The primary / immediate use of tagging in relation to products and variants would be to enable more descriptive information, that can then be used to filter in the shopfront e.g. avoiding an attempt to create detailed sub-categories.

Enterprises create their own tags e.g. leafy greens; fish; pork; red meat . . whatever suits them

Usage

  • would be good to let enterprises set-up and manage their own tags
  • also encouraging them to use tags that are the same as others . . because then we’ll be able to do cooler system wide stuff with it. so suggestive ‘tag’ as they’re typing offering those already in the system

Tags could possible be used for more diverse product identification as well . .

  • available to standing orders
  • wholesale customers only

This might prevent us creating a zillion different ‘flags’ to manage these features, or might not be the best approach, not sure

Next Steps

Consider once existing tagging gems have been explored, will be done in relation to Customer interface

Tagging is also an option for implementation of:

@RohanM was there a particular gem you had in mind to look at for this?
@pmackay - is this on your radar?
@summerscope - could you attach one of the mock-ups of where you’d looked at how product tags could appear in shopfront? still relevant or have we moved on too much?

Had a good chat with @RohanM last night. We discussed the idea of using Spree roles for customers so they can be assigned roles of “member” or “volunteer”. This might be a different approach than a generic tagging system though that could be applied to customers or products.

Hey @openfoodnetwork etc this is a screen grab of product modal with property tag + category tags applied:

oh sorry. i just realised you mean classic metadata tags separate from properties & categories.

here’s an early mock up to give you an idea:

I can see tags like that being useful for products.

Does this need separating into different discussions for users and products?

yep ok, separating into two topics, both on the wishlist

might even be three - because there is quite a lot of interest in using the tags on customers for handling delivery runs and other misc questions. But then question is whether this is the right vehicle for handling customer ‘types’ like member / volunteer etc

now a new page in the wishlist re. customers can be ‘members’ or ‘volunteers’ - Customers can be ‘members’, ‘volunteers’, ‘staff’ etc

hey @oeoeaio and @sstead - is this done? if so, can one of you move it to dev/done? Thanks :slight_smile:

@Kirsten Not sure really, tags can be added to variants, but they are not visible system wide, and they do not appear on the shopfront…

Products and variants can be tagged in inventory. These tags I think can be used in tag rules which affect the shopfront.

Not clear to me whether there would be value in
a) allowing tags to be added to products / variants
b) making those available somehow in shopfront (possibly linked to sub-categories)

Interesting old thread - hadn’t seen this before. Trying to imagine use cases. As it stands now, tagging can determine which variants show in an OC, and potentially for different customer types (eg. wholesale vs retail). This is already VERY powerful and flexible. It seems to me what we don’t have is good ways to search shopfronts with lots of products. So - if tags would help meet the sub-category need, I think it would be very useful. But - not being techie on this - I still don’t understand why spree has sub-categories if they don’t work - wouldn’t it be easier just to get spree sub categories to work. Why don’t they work? For example, when I search spree for this - the instructions suggest the levels of taxons work: https://guides.spreecommerce.org/user/configuring_taxonomies.html

This is not my understanding of the utility of tagging. Tagging in our current thinking is a CRM process - we use them to manage relationships between customers and OCs.

I think the sorting and structuring of products/variants should not be managed by tags but instead through categories and labels. My feeling is if tree-categories wasn’t broken and search worked better we would have the functionality we need.

Technically the tag model could play a role in sorting/structuring products/variants but I think we would end up in the kind of mess we are currently finding ourselves with the Customer model. If we were to go down that would I would want to keep the ProductCategory Tagging totally separate to CRM Tagging. Makes me nervous…