I have a hub with multiple suppliers (incoming) and multiple distributors. Many of the suppliers sell to different hubs and their delivery to hub costs vary. How to reflect this in OFN shops?
I tried using E2E transport fee - calculated by price sack - but result is that each of the supplier’s products in the shopfront ends up showing the minimum price sack fee. (So price sack, flat fees…) don’t work at incoming.
@CynthiaReynolds had the brilliant suggestion that different suppliers to a hub could have different transport fees, calcuated as a percentage, based on how close/far they are (so local suppliers would set lower percentage fee for the hubs they are closer to, and higher to the ones further away) Marvelous idea - privileges local products.
But, its a bit of a guess in advance - what percentage added to their product list will yield suffiencient revenue to compensate them for the delivery to the hub? A supplier knows that delivery to the hub (whether it is a load of 50 units or 5 units) costs them the same.
Is there a way that a supplier can signal a E2E fee to a hub - that is a flat fee per delivery - without it showing in the shop. For example - so that a transport fee shows on the supplier’s invoice to the hub - not to the customer. It is then up to the hub to figure out how to pass the cost to the customer or not. @mags @MyriamBoure @sstead
I think this is a bit too complicated to manage through OFN, and to be honest sounds like a complicated way to run a business! My experience of working with suppliers is that delivery costs are generally merged into the price-per-unit offered to the purchasing business, with a minimum order level set to prevent loss-incurring deliveries.
The inventory tool and E2E relationships can be used so that suppliers are charging different base prices to different enterprises, depending on how far away they are, but this needs to be calculated on a case by case basis.
a little clarification, @tschumilas we use that as an sales/markup fee which is how we enable local producers to have an advantage over the regional ones.
understand - I have a demo hub doing the same thing now too - still a E2E ‘enterprise’ fee (so it shows up in the pie chart) - versus a ‘shipping’ fee that shows up at checkout for consumers who choose the option. So - it shows in the price - so same intent - to privilege local over distant products through a lower price.
The issue is how to arrive at the fee - what percentage makes sense - because the actual costs of transporting the goods to the hub/pickup point are fixed, and no one knows how much is sold until after the cycle - so the producer/hub coordinator has to guess at how much they’ll sell in order to set a percentage that reflects their costs. I’m hoping that with some experience, and collectively across hubs, we’ll be able to ‘crowd source’ information on actual transport costs for smaller scaled producers using various vehicles… (I’d love to show the CO2 emissions of food production and transport in OFN in the future.) Thanks for putting me onto this approach - @CynthiaReynolds