One of our smaller farmers sells their produce to local restaurants. She will often have only a small amount of each product available each week e.g. 10kg of lettuce total. She wants to make sure all of her customers get some of the lettuce, rather than one person ordering all of it.
Who does it impact
Shop managers trying to spread limited stock over many customers fairly.
What is the current impact of this problem
Additional time is spent a) training customers about how much they’re allowed to order and b) adjusting orders after they’ve been placed to make them fair.
@sstead I have seen that issue as well but in a case where the producer was selling through various hubs and wanting to limit quantity available for each hub. That would be manageable by using the inventory feature (not super practical, but if all hubs gove access to their inventory to producer she can adjust quantities there for each OC…).
There is definitely an inception work to do on it and I think this is part of the network feature. We said we start with the “pricing table” (enabling a producer to propose different prices to different customers) and I do believe it is a more painful issue for more users. And stock management will be connected to product chain feature.
We can still start to do some inception on how this would be handled and list potential solutions (ex option 1 could be : as you have “on hand” quantity, you can have “max allowed” but then need to adapt shopfront behavior to avoid to be able to go above the max quantity ordered… but @Rachel and I have some big inceptions going on at the moment so we can queue that for a bit later, unless someone else want to incept
I haven’t had any inquiries about this - but I think the need is out there for sm scale producers selling direct to consumers or wholesale to restaurants - and where the inventory tool doesn’t apply because they aren’t selling to a hub/aggregator. And I think its a common desire for those producers to ‘spread limited stock around’. I know I do this with organic strawberries. I will sell them all anyway for sure. BUT i want all my good customers to get some - partly because its fair, but also because they’ll stay good customers and buy other thigs form me. So - I like the idea of heading towards this functionality.
