At OFN Norway we see a need for non-producer hubs to manage a stock and it does not seem the platform currently can handle it (your post is the closest I could find linked to this topic so I will continue it).
I can split this in the following sub-functionalities
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Filling the stock: a hub may decide to order more than his/her customers have ordered of a specific products for several reasons (products we know will not be available for the next order cycle because seasonal or on high demand, products that can only be ordered by bulk and the bulk size is not reached but the hub still decides to buy the product to be able to order) - these additional products would automatically fill the stock of the hub
Example: if customers order 6 cakes but they can only be bought by bulk of 10 then the hub could still buy 10 and 4 would go to its stock -
Selling items from the stock: if an item is in the stock it would be sold from there first
Example: the hub has 4 cakes in stock and on the next order cycle the customers order 18 cakes
-> 4 would come from the stock
-> 14 would be ordered to the supplier (and if cakes are only orderable by 10 as in the previous example the hub can decide to order only 10 and 4 cakes will not be delivered or order 20 and stock 6) -
View and manage stock: it should be possible for a hub to visualize and manually update the list of products it has in stock.
One more difficulty I see is how to manage differences in product prices between order cycles. If a hub bought cakes for 1 month ago at $10 but they are now sold at $5 by the supplier then at what price should they be sold to end users? Somewhere between $5 and $10(could be configurable), meaning a small loss for the hub when de-stocking but this could be covered by a “stock fee” the hub could add on all product to cover for such loss and for the cost of maintaining a stock.
Many use cases I probably forgot… We are currently managing our stock in a google sheet and seeing this integrated in the platform would be nice. Not sure this is in the global backlog but it fits definitely in ours OFN Scandinavia Backlog
(Edit: corrected link above)