Bulk and group buying - wishlist

Software improvement 1-Voting Candidates
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21

HI @Kirsten,

Any news on my last post, #20? I appreciate you’re very busy, so no worries if you can’t get back to me for a while.

To summarise post #20, I’m especially interested in:

  1. Are you expecting FC-R to always enter a base price of $6 (not $7.80) for 1x jar, in the example you gave?
  2. Yes, I would like a wishlist page for “add the ability to add a variant to an order from bulk order management.” It would be make the substitutions workflow a lot simpler for us, and hopefully other BGs.
  3. Does using a second hub for “unallocated” work out fine for you? It’s definitely my preferred option (the other option does not work at all currently due to the bug).

Thanks,
Tim

22

Hi Gang,

@timrwtaylor probably best I answer the question regarding FC pricing, and i have to admit it’s not an easy one to answer. We’ve had many discussions regarding fees, cost price, retail price and wholesale price. At this point, we intend to list all items at wholesale price, and if and when we alter to retail price, we will deal with that with fees & overrides.

However, please note that our wholesale mark up from cost is not always a pure percentage. For instance, some items simply would not sell if we put our normal mark up on them, so we reduce that mark up to make the product more affordable for our customers. This makes using the fees system in OFN difficult for us, and at this stage we have opted not to use it. But having read your description regarding individual items, i think that we will need to use it for those cases in order to make it easier for our Buyer’s Clubs.

So, my proposal is that if we are offering a bulk purchase of an item, as well as an individual or smaller variant, then we will utilise the OFN fees system to bring it up to the correct price for wholesale. Retail will be an entirely different beast and we will just have to deal with that later.

Examples
x = master variant wholesale price
y = packing fee/mark up for non-bulk

Box of Kale - 20 units = $x
Box of Kale - 10 units = $x/2 +$y

Buchi Kombucha x 12 bottles - $x
Buchi Kimbucha x 1 bottle = $x/12 + $y

This will mean that the price we set for a single item usually sold in bulk will be an exact divisional price for that unit, we can then apply our ‘mark up’ or ‘packing fee’ as a fee.

Meaning that based on your example: if we sold 6 x jars for $36 then the single jar would be $6, and we would add the $1.80 as our fee.

I hope that that will make your job a little easier. And, if we are all happy with this, then please feel free to create single items as additional variants to existing products with the price as per the example above.

23

@timrwtaylor if you see any single variants in there with the wrong price (based on the above) please feel free to alter them :smile: I have very limited time allocated to OFN each week so i might not have a chance to find them/enter them today.

24

@timrwtaylor - sorry about the delay in response, the pre-holiday to do list just seems to get longer rather than shorter!!

quick responses to your 3 questions above:

  1. I think / hope @lisahill has covered - thanks!!
  2. have created page here for feature request - highly unlikely we will be able to do this unless / until someone pays for it, or we have a bunch more subscribed buying groups asking for it. Perhaps go and hit the little heart thing and we can start using that as a ‘vote’, and let us know if you want a quote :smile:
  3. Yep no problem to have a 2nd hub
  • It would be ideal if @lisahill could do the ‘new enterprise’ bit for you as they own the producers, so the E2E links will be automatically in place for new hubs created by Food Connect. If you do it, we’ll have to do them manually again
  • Lisa if you put @timrwtaylor as the contact email it should make him a manager and we can swap him to owner later -
  • Also, good pick up on the Order Cycle issue, and fixing it fitted quite nicely with something else Rohan has been working on this week, so it should be ok by later next week
  • so when someone changes order cycles it will prompt and clear the cart if they select ok. This is not the ‘ultimate’ fix (would be ideal to have people able to manage multiple carts, or have it check and prompt for items that can’t transfer) but that’s quite a way away
  1. That reminds me of something you mentioned in an email a while back about your cart being cleared when you logged out and in - that shouldn’t happen, e.g. your cart should be saved when you log out. when I checked it it was working ok, so could you perhaps check again and send some more info if you’re really sure it’s not? (either create an issue under ‘bug’ here, or create an issue on github - https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork)

Hopefully you and @lisahill have enough to keep you going until I’m back from holiday on the 20th August (yay holiday!!), but if you have any other things to check I will be able to respond until about midday monday and will try very hard to do so!

25

I’ve had a similar complaint from a customer in Tasmania (through Susie’s hub). The customer is not aware that she cannot put a decimal in, and when she does she doesn’t get an alert, but the item is removed from her cart. Have created a Github for this…#659

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as discussed in git #659 (and previously with Tim) this is far from a trivial thing to change (to allow partial units), and also actually not ideal for a lot of reasons. Implementing a warning so that people realise what’s happening is scheduled, https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/542

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@FoodConnectWholesale

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I’m a bit confused because you can set prices per weight - and then the consumer orders however many units of whatever weight you set - like if i set a price per 1g, they could order 100 of them, or if I set a price per 100 g, they could order 1 of them. And then of course when you actually weight out the cheese, or whatever you go in and adjust the order and it re-calculates. Am I missing something? I don’t see why this doesn’t work - it is exactly like in a farmers’ market - no?

I agree that a problem we have is when a hub buys something from a wholesaler in bulk and needs to divide it down into smaller units - would be good to find a solution to this (taken from discussion at:
Bulk and group buying - wishlist)

One good example in our case garlic. FC-W sell it in a unit size of 1kg for $29/kg, but we want to offer it in multiples of 100g at $2.90+15% = $3.34 per 100g.

It’s necessary for us to have the 100g variant, because otherwise anyone that wanted any garlic would need to order 1kg, then let us know (outside of OFN) that they actually only want 100g.

It’s easy enough for us to create our own 100g variant (in Bulk Edit Products) and add it to our order cycle. But we would have the following problems:

  1. When creating the variant for the first time I have to manually divide the FC-W by 10. I could get that wrong.
  2. If FC-W update the price of the 1kg price, that won’t affect my variant. ie in Bulk Edit Product the base price would remain at $2.90 for 100g even if FC-W increase their 1kg price to $30 my variant will still have a base price of $2.90.
  3. If I do notice that FC-W have updated their wholesale 1kg price, and then I go and edit the base price of my 100g variant in Bulk Edit Product, that affects the shopfront straight away. This could cause a problem for my last week’s unallocated order cycle that’s still open…
29

@oeoeaio @sstead and I have done a lot of thinking about this and think we know how to do it, but it’s part of bigger ‘inventory 2.0’ work and we are waiting/wanting to have in depth discussion w @enricostn and @sauloperez about it, along with others interested in buying groups. Attempting to pull together this spec is very high on my priority list once my other work has cleared, and will undoubtedly be a major discussion area in december. We are also in discussion with non-ofn but allied partners about this functionality, so questions about where ofn starts and stops, apis, micro-services and apps will all play in here. Exciting, but huge.

30

Thanks @Kirsten! I’ll take a look at the whole thread.

Meanwhile, could you take a look at the discussion in
Allow non integer quantities to be ordered ? I hope it is something we can work on pretty soon, as a first step. It is something that all buying groups we’re working with so far are concerned about.