Can we improve the operation of the shop page when market cycle is closed?
Options:
I have been searching for a way to not lose potential customers who find a closed shop. So without the capacity in OFN, I’ve been offering enterprises (for a fee) to build a mailchimp landing page to build their customer list. Then (in addition to social media promo…) I put the link to the mailchimp sign up page in the closed shopfront message. So - would be great to do this righ in OFN, and I love the greying out idea - and ability to see the products but not order. Another nice feature would be if they could easily send the link to the shop to a friend or post on social media - right from within the closed shopfront. Giving users and shoppers easier ways to share/tweet/post… an ofn shop link would be good.
I would say though, that if we are going to build customer lists in OFN, there are some things to think about - all of the privacy issues for example. One reason I like mailchimp is that they take care of all of that (confirming signup, unsubscribe anytime). With the mc link - they can also forward it to a friend, or post on social media automatically… You can also integrate mailchip with a shopfront to do product ‘sales’ and promotions. (I haven’t takled this yet). Maybe all of this is standard and what we’d have in mind - which would be great - its just I find mailchimp does this so easily and well. BUT - mailchimp owns the list. Part of the OFN-CAN ‘service’ we offer to hub then, is to make sure we download and maintain the list outside of mailchimp. (There are stories of mailchimp losing lists out there.)
Seems there are a couple of themes here — ‘keeping’ potential customers who come across a closed shop; building and using mailing lists (beyond the current capacity) for shops in OFN; tools to promote shopfronts on OFN
I think we need both a UX and a dev insight about how hard that is… with the OC logic I’m not sure how hard it is to keep last product greyed out. Especially as you can have multiple OC in parallel so which one would the product be sourced from when closed shop? Maybe the last closed date OC? I will comment on the discourse page directly. I woudl treat that as a feature, happy to get it prioritize but we need to understand the need first, the potential solutions, and then choose one and incept with devs and UX.
What is the need/problem?
Problem is that hubs lose customers because when they arrive on close shop they have no clue about what the shop sells and have no way to keep in touch. Some leads are lots.*
So the need is to keep those visitors interested in buying by enabling them to get notified when new sales open and/or have a glimpse of the products she could be able to buy…
Potential solutions:
Wouldn’t be basically be looking at a ‘view only’ order cycle here? I know I’ve looked at this option in the manual, but it seems like more trouble than it’s worth every week to set it up, remove all the shipping options, then have to put all the shipping options back in place for the actual OC every week. If there was a way to do basically that … only automatically when there is no active cycle, that would rock.
New potential shoppers not being able to see the types of products being offered when the shop is closed doesn’t really make them want to sign up, or come back, when the OC is actually open again.
I think the devs would have the best insight into how difficult it would be to achieve this though.
I TOTALLY forgot about the ‘view only’ potential. Nice observation! If the process of activating view only (so deactivating shipping, payment options) could be automated - we’d have a closed shop that shows products that gets automatically activated each time an OC closes. Then, we’d just need to be able to re-activate these things in the OC when it re-opens.
Given the discussions above, the proposition of what we want to do needs to be clarified so we know what we want to prioritize and why, so back to curation.
I think an automatically displayed ‘disabled’ version of the last open order cycle, when none is currently open for the shop/hub, would be the best way to go. The data to pull information from would already exist, but the quantity fields would be disabled. Basically a conditional ‘disabled’ in the HTML, which appears to already be there: (copied from an open shopping page)
<input id="variants_4755" integer="" min="0" name="variants[4755]" ng-disabled="!variant.on_demand && variant.count_on_hand == 0" ng-model="variant.line_item.quantity" ofn-disable-scroll="" ofn-on-hand="9999" placeholder="0" type="number" class="ng-pristine ng-valid ng-empty ng-valid-min ng-touched" style="">
So maybe another condition in that disabled="" bit would be a way to make that work?
I’m just trying to think of what may be the easiest way to do it, and that’s what springs to mind.
With the bug currently being experienced (https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/issues/3314) where unticking the shipping/payment methods on an enterprise does not get saved, the view-only option is currently broken.
Sounds like it’s more complicated than the options simply not being saved. Hope that can be solved, as it would at least be an option for hubs/shops who would like to use it.