Sunsetting inventory - key steps

[Rachel]

Dear @instance_managers

As some of you may know, the delivery circle is working on a better and simplified product management experience. As we are approaching another achievement towards the big milestone Network 2.0, here are some important info you need to take into account.

Context

Currently hubs are using admin/products and sometimes also admin/inventory to handle their product info.

Inventory is mainly used when:

• hubs want to tag their variants
• hubs want to set a shop with difference stock or price info compared to admin/products

While being quite powerful, this feature as always been source of errors in setting up shops (not to mention you can’t disabling it properly…)

Moreover, it’s not easy to set up and the setup cannot be duplicated: e.g. if you want to set up a dedicated shop for B2B sales, you need to do one inventory per shop and manually set and update all your prices/stock info for as many shops as you have.

Tags on variant

Since v5.0.26 Poppy Seeds, as instance manager you can activate for everyone or some users the ability to add variant tags on admin/products by turning the toggle /admin/feature-toggle/features/variant_tag ON (see below if you don’t know how).

this work is behind a feature toggle because it’s not finished yet: tags are NOT YET working with tag rules. @rioug is actively working on this.
They still are usefull if you want to use them to easily filter the product list. But don’t activate it to users who are using tag rules and might get confused by why they are not working with their existing tag rules.

Once this is completely released it won’t be necessary to use inventory to have the ability to use tags (apologies I can’t give a date here yet: the team is working under a very tiny budget, with very few hours per week).

Given you can duplicate a variant and tag it towards different consumers, we believe some other scenarios of using inventory will stop as well.

The only inventory features that won’t be possible with variant tags are the one involving permissions from producers to hubs. This is another milestone, but also concerns a smaller share of inventory users.

To avoid the majority of users getting confused by inventory when onboarding we will start to hide the feature for all new users.

Hiding inventory feature

Starting August 11th, all NEWLY REGISTERED users won’t see the inventory feature anymore.

If during their onboarding you feel they need it, you can still activate it to them, by turning the feature toggle ON for them:

• As super admin go on this page (if you are not connected the page will throw an error 500 to you) : /admin/feature-toggle/features/inventory.

• There you can conditionally enable the feature for specific users by pressing “add an actor” and then type Spree::User;USERID you can find user IDs in the User menu. Search for an email, select the user, in the URL you will find the ID, example:/admin/users/21179/edit 21179 is the ID here.
  Adding this user means typing Spree::User;21179

• When you are done you should end up with something like this:
  

  

if you do that PLEASE comment here and tell us why you did it: this will help us understand what are the use cases for inventory we have missed.

Next steps

One tags on variants will be released, we will go one step further in disabling inventory: we will hide it for all users who are not using it currently.
Each of you will receive a list of users who might be using it (I say might, as we can’t disable the feature once we have started using it we are not sure who is using it ).
At this stage we would love for you to contact them and see if they could start using the product page only or if they really need inventory, and again report the use case here. But more on that later, let’s get variant tags done first!

Please feel free to ask ANY questions here, but also any resources you might produce (e.g. user guide update links). Thank you all for your help on this

[Emma]

If users are currently using the inventory feature to tag their products, will these tags transfer onto the Product list page?

[Rachel]

Hi @Emma so for August 11th as we are only targeting newly registered users, they will not have used inventory before.

Once tags are released, we will automatically turn inventory off for all those who are not using it.

For the list of users who are using it and for whom using the product page will be easier, I’m afraid we won’t have an automated solution. I guess in many cases people will want to create new variants in the products page and we won’t be able to link those variants to the ones in inventory. But maybe I’m wrong, I will definitely work this through with the team and report back once we know for sure. Thanks for you patience!

[BethanOFN]

Hi @Rachel, exciting stuff!

I have a UK user who currently exclusively manages their products through the inventory whose use case is as follows:

• Predominantly B2B seller
• Large product list of ~1000 products
• Products go in and out of stock frequently
• Rather than manually update stock levels for all products, or add/remove them from an order cycle, the user instead ‘hides’ and ‘adds’ products to their inventory when they go in and out of stock
• They use the inventory therefore as a ‘product library’. This minimises their admin and makes their product list much more manageable.

The user was very worried about Inventory not being available in future and having to use Products instead, which they view as challenging because of the size of their products list.

Is there potential to add show/hide functionality to Products, as we currently have in Inventory? We do get feedback in general that the Products list is tricky to use for larger hubs and particularly for seasonal produce (e.g. many vegetables unavailable in winter, but users don’t want to delete them from their products list). Adding a ‘hide’ option would help both for this user’s case but also for other users. I understand that the inventory is essentially another layer on top of a producer/hub’s produce, so can foresee issues with how ‘hide’ would work for a hub with access to a producer’s products, but if it were limited to ‘manage products’ enterprise permissions then this might work…?

[Rachel]

Hi @BethanOFN thanks for the feedback!

For a first step, we were thinking that tags could replace the hide feature. As you can basically create a tag that is called “on sale” and filter the product list with this tag only.
Same for seasons, you could create one tags per season. We are working on making tag works with tag rules, but you can also choose to not attach any rules to the tag and just use them to filter the product list (and this is already working in production when you turn the toggle ON).

In the work we are doing on the order cycles, this is also why we added in the brief that we should be able to filter the OC product list by tags.

Now I’m not saying that we can’t add an “available for sales” toggle in admin/products. This exist in other SFS softwares. I just want to make sure this is relevant for us. One interesting aspect is that it could filter the list of products available for OCs beforehand. And reduce the load of products on OC side.

Rather than manually update stock levels for all products, or add/remove them from an order cycle, the user instead ‘hides’ and ‘adds’ products to their inventory when they go in and out of stock

Just to be sure I understand: you mean by this that all their products are “on demand” right?

[BethanOFN]

Just to be sure I understand: you mean by this that all their products are “on demand” right?

No their products are mostly limited stock, but they just maintain a more manageable product list by using show/hide in inventory (e.g. a list of ~300 products in inventory, versus ~800 hidden). Hiding a product from the inventory takes one click, so this is easier than typing in or clicking reduce on the stock count until it’s zeroed and then clicking save. For order cycles, taking the hub themselves (who are also a producer) as a specific example this means that at incoming products they can select from their 53 inventory products rather than the 392 products in their products list, which is far more manageable & quicker to load. I can definitely see the really valuable use case for tags and filtering for seasons and other purposes, but I think that a show/hide toggle would be really valuable for making product lists and OC selections more user friendly.

Side note that I’m very excited about tags & tag rules on variants and I’m looking forward to sharing this with users