In Australia we are now having the experience of users wanting to do things with bigger enterprises, and more complex interactions between enterprises, and we are discovering use cases that are challenging our first iteration of ‘networked e-commerce’, particularly the systems of
- products, variants, variant overrides / inventory
- E2E links
We have had quite a few conversations about this and have implemented some responses (e.g. the development of the inventory page), but it’s time for a ‘helicopter’ look at all this to make sure we have the correct architecture in place for ‘networked e-commerce 2.0’
I’ve created the ‘P/V Overhaul’ sub-category to help keep track of the threads of this . .
One of the key challenges here is about interfacing between ‘wholesalers’, ‘hubs’ and ‘buying groups’ and maintaining some information but ‘translating’ or separating other information. While these might seem like quite distinct issues / wishlist items, their design and implementation is all interconnected, and will be affected by any changes to architecture around P/V.
Problem Statements
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As a new enterprise (Hub), I want to use products from a large wholesaler that already exists on OFN. The wholesaler is not managing their own products on OFN (another Hub is) and stock is unlimited / unaffected by the other Hub. I do not want to have to negotiate with this other Hub to add products / variants, update descriptions etc. Why can’t I just have my own ‘private’ copy of the product that I manage myself? see private vs open products
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As an Enterprise User (Hub), I work with large suppliers who send me their updated availability and price lists as xls / csv. It is very time consuming to go through and change each p/v - I would like to upload the csv and have this update my inventory and price (possibly also descriptions), see bulk import of products
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As an Enterprise User, I want the ability for people to order in partial units without creating variants for them all
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As a buying group
- I want availability and price of p/v in an order cycle to flow through into the availability and price of my ‘sub-variants’ so I don’t have to manually re-calculate them all, see buying group applies translations
- I want to easily adjust and place my total order w wholesale hub / FC, see summarise, adjust and place wholesale order
- I want to keep sales for any surplus I have ordered open, see sell surplus
- I want to connect to another buying group software solution e.g. FoodCoop or Lettuceshare, see connecting food cooperatives
@oeoeaio @sstead so this is the new ‘meta’ page to carry the overarching story . . is there anything major I’ve missed?