Current state of Variant Overrides:
‘Variant overrides’ enable a stock level and price of a variant to be overridden in a specific Hub. This means that the Producer and Product information is kept intact and it is the same Product / Variant, but:
a Hub can retain the P/V in stock, and draw from the amount that they have (not the amount that the Producer has- e.g. if they have some in storage, even though the producer has zero)
a Hub can override the price set by the Producer (for example if they want to do a special on it)
Variant overrides are set using the Overrides tab, under Products ( in the horizontal blue menu).
A hub must have E2E-VariantOverrides permission from the producer to over-ride their stock levels or price.
A hubs distributor also needs E2E-VariantOverrides if they are to stock the product at overriden prices/quantities
What to expect when stocking variant over-rides in your shop:
If a shop stocks a product, and that product has a variant over-ride, the system will present the price and available ‘on hand’ quantity in the over-ride, not the original product.
As customers place orders, the on hand quantity in the over-ride will reduce, until stock out. Then the product will no longer be available in the shop (even if the original product still has ‘on hand’ stock)
The original product’s on hand quantity and price remain unchanged.
The over-riden price will carry through checkout, order confirmation, and admin’s orders and reports.
At OFN Norway we see a need for non-producer hubs to manage a stock and it does not seem the platform currently can handle it (your post is the closest I could find linked to this topic so I will continue it).
I can split this in the following sub-functionalities
Filling the stock: a hub may decide to order more than his/her customers have ordered of a specific products for several reasons (products we know will not be available for the next order cycle because seasonal or on high demand, products that can only be ordered by bulk and the bulk size is not reached but the hub still decides to buy the product to be able to order) - these additional products would automatically fill the stock of the hub
Example: if customers order 6 cakes but they can only be bought by bulk of 10 then the hub could still buy 10 and 4 would go to its stock
Selling items from the stock: if an item is in the stock it would be sold from there first
Example: the hub has 4 cakes in stock and on the next order cycle the customers order 18 cakes
-> 4 would come from the stock
-> 14 would be ordered to the supplier (and if cakes are only orderable by 10 as in the previous example the hub can decide to order only 10 and 4 cakes will not be delivered or order 20 and stock 6)
View and manage stock: it should be possible for a hub to visualize and manually update the list of products it has in stock.
One more difficulty I see is how to manage differences in product prices between order cycles. If a hub bought cakes for 1 month ago at $10 but they are now sold at $5 by the supplier then at what price should they be sold to end users? Somewhere between $5 and $10(could be configurable), meaning a small loss for the hub when de-stocking but this could be covered by a “stock fee” the hub could add on all product to cover for such loss and for the cost of maintaining a stock.
Many use cases I probably forgot… We are currently managing our stock in a google sheet and seeing this integrated in the platform would be nice. Not sure this is in the global backlog but it fits definitely in ours OFN Scandinavia Backlog
(Edit: corrected link above)
Thanks Olivier! These seem to be use cases that the system doesn’t seamlessly deal with currently, although workarounds are possible. I’ve made this page the ‘wishlist’ page for variant overrides. I’d encourage you link this page to the Norway Backlog page and indicate how urgent these functionalities are for you. I’ll also flag @oeoeaio who might have more of an idea of whether these features are covered in planned variant over-ride updates.