Alphabetical sorting of products/variants in the Bulk Edit Products/Order Cycle/New Order pages

[Updated by Myriam on 01.2019]

What is the need / problem:

The BEP currently displays products in a non-alphabetical order. Users have requested that they can sort alphabetically so that when they are updating stock/prices from a written alphabetical list they can just run down the products in BEP in the same order. Also they can search their products variants more easily. Especially when a product has multiple variants.
Same in the OC page, to choose what to put in the OC, it’s today a mess as products/variants are not sorted in alphabetical order.
And sames as well when an admin create an order via back office (button + new order on orders page). When they type 3 letters like bread for bread all the variants of the bread product are proposed but in a random order. For a product with 15 variants (like beer or bread) it’s messy to find the good one.

So to sum up the need is to sort alphabetically the products/variants in the back office as well, today it is only sorted alphabetically in the front office.

In 2 words: Faster Stock Updates and OC/order creation

Who does it impact and what is the impact

Managers and producers who manage their catalog.

What is the benefit in focusing on this

Mangers and enterprise users will spend less time updating their stock info, setting up an OC, or capturing a new order.

Potential solutions that will solve this problem

Ability to sort the products/variants alphabetically in BEP, OC, and new order pages - ideal if this was default.


Link to previous discussions on the topic

yes we also had a request from CCC @Rachel about it, it’s probably a pretty small thing, I’ll try to add a vote on it soon to ensure balance between big and small things in the pipe, I’ve bookmarked it to remind me that’s something I want to vote on. Sharing that to share how we can organize our voting strategies :wink:

I added here the ability to see also when creating OC the products / variants in a product in alphabetical order as we had requests again from hubs spending time finding the products they want to add to the OC. I think it’s the same feature as BEP alphabetical order so I added it here.

@SineadOFNUK I updated this post as we had another request and I grouped the three cases reported under the “display products/variants alphabetically in back office” I think this is the same job and need to be done only once for all the places where they are proposed (BEP, OC, new order) can a dev reply to that ? Maybe @luisramos0 or @sauloperez will know ? Can it be just one wishlist or should there be three to prioritize separately ?

For memory here is what was done to sort them on front office: https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/1663

It seems good to me to put these together since they are all about product/variants sorting.

Can we currently set variants in a specific order in the frontoffice? Do we have a request to build that somewhere in discourse?

@luisramos0 today we can order products (not variants) by category (see in shop preference in enterprise setup menu).
There is a whishlist proposal to enable to organise them by producer as well as this has been requested by users: Enable shopfront ordering by producer

but It doesn’t seem that there is a need for variant based ordering in the shopfront.

The need that we understood so far is:

  • on the shopfront to order either by category of producers or producer given my choices, and within that order it’s fine that products are ordered in alphabetical order
  • on backoffice see the products and variants on alphabetical order everywhere

If you think there is a different / complementary need you can open a new wishlist or we can discuss if we need to review some of the current wishlists.

1 Like

Thanks for clarifying @MyriamBoure

I didnt know about “order products by category”.
I see that sort by producer is interesting but at some point we should have custom order of products, right?

This is merchandising. It’s huge in ecommerce, from custom product lists, to data science built lists, it’s closely related to search. It’s not so important in OFN but maybe valuable to set the vision that it’s not just a specific request to “sort by producer”, it’s an area of the product that may or may not evolve into more complex parts. I am sure search will evolve in OFN and we will be talking about product ranks at some point…

FYI you can now sort by name in the product list by clicking on the name of the column (from A to Z but also from Z to A).

We agreed during development that this was the best approach in order to not loose users who really like to have products ordered by creation date (when you just created a product it can indeed be useful).

We will see with user feedback if we need to make it by default. Making it default could be a papercut.

Regarding OC page, we introduced alphabetical ordering in December, but we currently have a regression on it see: https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/4845

Regarding the new order page, I don’t think this problem applies anymore with the Spree v2 layout.

Thus I’m closing this voting candidate. If something larger than a papercut needs to be open we can open a new wishlist.

Shout if you disagree :slight_smile: