CSA/buying group: enable to see the list of buyers for an OC

Software improvement
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A hub manager is organizing and supplying 10 buying groups to deliver oranges, mangos, and other fruits he pick up himself in small organic farms.

He used to work with excel spreadsheets for each buying group. Every customer of a buying group would see the name, email and phone of the other buyers, and as it’s in the countryside, they would arrange together to “ride-share” the products, one would collect at the pick-up point the products for 5 families and deliver them.
We want to support this!

So we need to make it possible for hubs to share the list of buyers for an order cycle .

Here is what I suggest:

  • the hub should have an option in his set up menu, below “public” or “members only”, “share the list of OC buyers among buyers”
  • first the hub should be “members only” to avoid that people’s contacts are publicly visible, OR it should be communicated super clearly that if you buy through this buying group, your contact details will be shared with the other members.
  • ideally, the member could choose in his account if he wants not to share his contact details with the other buyers (a checkbox to check if you don’t want to share your contact detail)
  • After an OC is closed, if the member login he can see in his account the history of his orders, so he would see the line for the last order, and aside, we could add a link “see the list of buyers for this OC”, and when he click on the link, it would open a page/pop-in/PDF
  • which would have been generated from an export of the list of buyers for the OC with name, email, phone and city.

What do other think about that?
The user I’m talking about could be willing to finance this development (depend on the estimation of course). Does any other instance would need that feature and is ready to chip in as well?

Ping @sstead @Kirsten @NickWeir @lin_d_hop @CynthiaReynolds @tschumilas

1 Like
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As usual this is a great idea @MyriamBoure. I think there are buying clubs here that would also want to operate more like a community - where they know each other etc – and as long as the consumer decides if they want their contact details shared or not, this seems great to me.

On a sort of related note - suppliers for food hubs here tend to be smaller scaled, and spread over great distances. Right now, in most of the food hubs I work with, suppliers can see each others product, price and stock details in the hub shops. They like that. For one reason - they can put more stock on offer if they see another supplier’s stock is ‘sold out’. But second, these suppliers often trade off deliveries of each others products to the hub.

So - I wonder if we might consider the same optional transparency for ‘incoming’ into an OC? I know that could be a different thing technically. I just keep looking for ways that OFN can facilitate this kind of community building among suppliers/producers.

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Thank you @tschumilas :slight_smile: About the producer inventories sharing I suggest you open a separate thread on it maybe (and link it to this one) as, as you said, I think it’s a whole story in itself, I’ll be happy to contribute to that discussion :slight_smile:

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Interesting idea, I can’t remember any users in Australia asking for a similar tool. I know the members of one small buying group in Australia share pickup logistics with other members, but this is done informally.

@MyriamBoure the 10 hub user you refer to may find the ‘customers > Addresses’ report useful. It lists customer contact details and their hub on a per-order cycle basis. Obviously privacy permission to share these customer details needs to be managed.

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Yes, that’s why we need this feature @sstead, today the hub manager sends the report to the users manually so that they can arrange themselves, but permissions are not managed… it’s ok as before they used to do that in a spreadsheet where everyone was seeing everything, so they are used to it, but it’s not super clean, and as he has 10 hubs, he has to do it manually for every hub every week…