Hello 
I look forward to going through your google doc and being part of conversation. We would be really excited to have excellent buying group features / modules / integrations as part of the ecosystem!
Unsurprisingly this has come up before now, and there are three things that may be worth looking at in your initial investigations. No one has ever had the time / capacity to pull it altogether properly, but I thought it might be useful if I attempted to at least point you to some threads of thinking / conversation / features.
Firstly, there was some work done already re. integration of Foodsoft with OFN, and pursuing this line could be a consideration for what you’re trying to achieve. See Connecting food cooperatives. I suspect that work on the OFN API is going to be a part of some major projects being cooked up for this year in OFN, so working with that, either with Foodsoft or your own separate application could be an option.
We have done a fair bit of thinking about how some of this might be handled within OFN, and there are some preliminary features already as well as some discussion threads that might be worth a look.
‘Preliminary features’ include group buy, bulk order management and a couple of associated reports - https://openfoodnetwork.org/user-guide/advanced-features/group-buy/ - these are in use with a couple of users but certainly far from what they could be! A couple of threads outlining ‘wishlists’ or things that have come up as ideas for improving these features in OFN are:
From my quick look at it, I recall thinking that Foodsoft had a beautiful interface for seeing and adjusting customer orders, which is also well tested with their users, so from an OFN perspective I’m not sure if integrating with Foodsoft or emulating that interface would be the best next step.
OFN is also currently missing any mechanism that enables the users to see how close the group is to meeting the bulk amount (and adjusting their orders accordingly), but as work has been done on the customer account page and with changes that are coming through with Standing Orders (including the ability for users to adjust their orders before the order cycle has closed) - implementation of that could be quite easy and just an interface thing
This next section might provide some food for thought OR it might be just confusing, in which case just ignore and we can talk it through when we talk
Some key issues that have come up around management of buying groups are being considered in our thinking around ‘products & inventory overhaul’. The big issue we’ve come across is where you have multiple buying groups drawing from the same wholesaler/s, and how easy we can make it for them to - sometimes independently and sometimes interdependently -
a) update their prices and availability to reflect the wholesaler’s price and availability
b) maintain their own ‘versions’ / ‘variants’ of the wholesale products that match how they break it down in their buying group, and how they want to translate prices etc e.g. if a 20kg sack of wheat is available, one buying group might sell it in 1kg and another in a minimum of 5kg. They both want this to update automatically when the underlying product price is updated, and they don’t want to see / have to manage all the other buying groups’ variants.
We’ve made significant progress on the infrastructure that is going to support awesome management of this, including separating a fair bit of functionality into the ‘Inventory’ page rather than products, and the work that’s happening around bulk product/inventory update from csv, but there’s still a lot to do! These notes are not totally up-to-date as there are recent conversations not yet reflected there, but would be great to get some more eyes, brains and fingers working on solving this one in an elegant way. It will be seriously exciting once it is cracked! https://community.openfoodnetwork.org/c/wishlist/p-v-overhaul
Ok that’s enough for now.
Kirsten