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wp-e-commerce / WP-e-Commerce

WP eCommerce - The most popular independent eCommerce platform for WordPress
https://wpecommerce.org
GNU General Public License v2.0
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New Feature Discussion #374

Closed JustinSainton closed 11 years ago

JustinSainton commented 11 years ago

This ticket will die - either being resurrected as a poll somewhere, or as several spin-off tickets. That said - we've done a TON of work over the last several releases to fix bugs, shore up code, improve APIs, etc. Lots of stuff that should make developers and servers happy.

We're just now starting to clean up some UI cruft and make it pretty again. Mega props to @InstinctBrett for that.

Make no mistake, the vision for the near future (next 6-12 months) is to continue eliminating legacy cruft, improving APIs, etc. That said - we need to slowly start thinking about what our users need for features again. I'm almost always the first one to turn down a feature request and say "Make it a plugin!", but I've been playing with a handful of other e-commerce systems, and here is a short list of features I think would be really interesting to consider for core.

benhuson commented 11 years ago

Some of my rambling thoughts...

Scheduled sales is nice. I've seen scheduling done in other bespoke CMS as releases which was nice when you wanted to manage lots of scheduled items for a launch date. Maybe something to think about.... ie You create a 'release' with scheduled and expiry times, then you can assign things to that 'release' which will automatically publish when the release triggers. The benefit of that is you can amend the release date which will affect everything, rather than having to edit the schedule of individual products - ideal if you are having a store sale.

The other bit of useful sale functionality would be to be able to apply percentage prices to all products by category in bulk - ie discount everything in the 'shirts' category by 30%. I know this can be done as coupons but it would be better if it could be shown discounted on the site. I think this is plugin territory - would just apply sales prices to products but bear in mind any API that might be needed to hook into schedule functionality above.

I've not seen a grouped product implementation I like yet either, but good functionality to have.

+1 for backorders at some point

I would also love to get product order per category sorted too as I've mentioned with @JustinSainton. I know you mentioned you had an implementation working. For me (and our clients) this is a priority feature so I'm happy to take a look and test this. Are you easily able to share how you achieved this or some initial code you used?

JustinSainton commented 11 years ago

LOVE your implementation suggestions on scheduled releases. That's brilliant. I think if we have consensus, since none of these are major architectural changes, let's plan for these in 3.8.9. Let's get @InstinctBrett dreaming up some UI for these.

On Tuesday, April 30, 2013, Ben Huson wrote:

Some of my rambling thoughts...

Scheduled sales is nice. I've seen scheduling done in other bespoke CMS as releases which was nice when you wanted to manage lots of scheduled items for a launch date. Maybe something to think about.... ie You create a 'release' with scheduled and expiry times, then you can assign things to that 'release' which will automatically publish when the release triggers. The benefit of that is you can amend the release date which will affect everything, rather than having to edit the schedule of individual products - ideal if you are having a store sale.

The other bit of useful sale functionality would be to be able to apply percentage prices to all products by category in bulk - ie discount everything in the 'shirts' category by 30%. I know this can be done as coupons but it would be better if it could be shown discounted on the site. I think this is plugin territory - would just apply sales prices to products but bear in mind any API that might be needed to hook into schedule functionality above.

I've not seen a grouped product implementation I like yet either, but good functionality to have.

+1 for backorders at some point

I would also love to get product order per category sorted too as I've mentioned with @JustinSainton https://github.com/JustinSainton. I know you mentioned you had an implementation working. For me (and our clients) this is a priority feature so I'm happy to take a look and test this. Are you easily able to share how you achieved this or some initial code you used?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/wp-e-commerce/WP-e-Commerce/issues/374#issuecomment-17261498 .

Thanks,

M. Justin Sainton Zao Web Design, LLC Principal / Project Manager http://www.zaowebdesign.com (c) 971.222.6330 (f) 1.413.723.0396

instinct commented 11 years ago

I think Ben was also asking for any initial code you might have used as well - so if you can share that with Ben we can think about UI inhouse :))

d

On 1/05/2013, at 12:04 PM, JustinSainton notifications@github.com wrote:

LOVE your implementation suggestions on scheduled releases. That's brilliant. I think if we have consensus, since none of these are major architectural changes, let's plan for these in 3.8.9. Let's get @InstinctBrett dreaming up some UI for these.

On Tuesday, April 30, 2013, Ben Huson wrote:

Some of my rambling thoughts...

Scheduled sales is nice. I've seen scheduling done in other bespoke CMS as releases which was nice when you wanted to manage lots of scheduled items for a launch date. Maybe something to think about.... ie You create a 'release' with scheduled and expiry times, then you can assign things to that 'release' which will automatically publish when the release triggers. The benefit of that is you can amend the release date which will affect everything, rather than having to edit the schedule of individual products - ideal if you are having a store sale.

The other bit of useful sale functionality would be to be able to apply percentage prices to all products by category in bulk - ie discount everything in the 'shirts' category by 30%. I know this can be done as coupons but it would be better if it could be shown discounted on the site. I think this is plugin territory - would just apply sales prices to products but bear in mind any API that might be needed to hook into schedule functionality above.

I've not seen a grouped product implementation I like yet either, but good functionality to have.

+1 for backorders at some point

I would also love to get product order per category sorted too as I've mentioned with @JustinSainton https://github.com/JustinSainton. I know you mentioned you had an implementation working. For me (and our clients) this is a priority feature so I'm happy to take a look and test this. Are you easily able to share how you achieved this or some initial code you used?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/wp-e-commerce/WP-e-Commerce/issues/374#issuecomment-17261498 .

Thanks,

M. Justin Sainton Zao Web Design, LLC Principal / Project Manager http://www.zaowebdesign.com (c) 971.222.6330 (f) 1.413.723.0396 — Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

JustinSainton commented 11 years ago

Ah right, re: the product-per-category sorting - there's not really any new UI for that (which is to say, we already have the UI to drag and drop products and filter by category.) It's just code. I'll dig it up.

instinct commented 11 years ago

Thanks man!!!

d

On 1/05/2013, at 12:57 PM, JustinSainton notifications@github.com wrote:

Ah right, re: the product-per-category sorting - there's not really any new UI for that (which is to say, we already have the UI to drag and drop products and filter by category.) It's just code. I'll dig it up.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

Weeb commented 11 years ago

YES please, This feature would be fantastic!!

On 1 maj 2013, at 03:43, Instinct Entertainment notifications@github.com wrote:

Thanks man!!!

d

On 1/05/2013, at 12:57 PM, JustinSainton notifications@github.com wrote:

Ah right, re: the product-per-category sorting - there's not really any new UI for that (which is to say, we already have the UI to drag and drop products and filter by category.) It's just code. I'll dig it up.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

instinct commented 11 years ago

Hand it over Justin ;))

Sent from my iPhone

On 1/05/2013, at 6:27 PM, Pontus Ekman notifications@github.com wrote:

YES please, This feature would be fantastic!!

On 1 maj 2013, at 03:43, Instinct Entertainment notifications@github.com wrote:

Thanks man!!!

d

On 1/05/2013, at 12:57 PM, JustinSainton notifications@github.com wrote:

Ah right, re: the product-per-category sorting - there's not really any new UI for that (which is to say, we already have the UI to drag and drop products and filter by category.) It's just code. I'll dig it up.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub. — Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

benhuson commented 11 years ago

@JustinSainton Wasn't thinking about the UI at this stage, just the functionality to save to to db and hook into query to order.

I wrote a quick-n-dirty plugin to do product ordering a bit like the pageMash plugin. Select a category which shows you a simple list of products you can drag into order. I wrote it mainly to get round the issue of product list admin pages grinding to a halt when trying to order by drag-n-drop with loads of products - this was much lighter as it just loaded the product names and image.

ozoneboy commented 11 years ago

What about adding a wholesale price to products so we have "wholesale price, retail price, sale price" which will allow admin to run off sales reports and calculate actual cost of goods sold and the respective profit? It just makes sense to have all the figures in one system. For example, I have a farmers market store that buys produce from many different wholesalers (the prices can change from week to week), we add our markup, sell weekly orders. Because there is often surplus produce left over (that I eat, yum) and margins are often small, we can't just compare the supplier invoice to our total sales because it doesn't factor in the surplus or wastage, so it's hard to see exactly where money is being made or lost. Having the wholesale price on hand also makes it easier when putting a product on sale so you don't sell it below cost (unless that's your intention). Don't know if any other systems out there have this, but it could be a point of difference that would appeal to many businesses.

JustinSainton commented 11 years ago

Hi @ozoneboy,

That's a great idea. I think I recall that a Wholesale Pricing plugin already exists (I think it might be more modeled around giving logged in wholesalers different pricing levels than others) - but I think that might be close to what you're needing.

1bigidea commented 11 years ago

Let's be careful of the nomenclature.

Wholesale pricing typically represents a new pricing level (i.e. for distributors) as in the Wholesale pricing plugin.

In this use case, we are talking about Cost of Goods Sold [COGS](i.e. cost of acquiring the product for sale).

I would suggest that this is suitable as a quick plugin for wpec. For this use case, it is a simple calculation. For others, a lot more complicated and the data is likely to come from the accounting system or other outside source. The plugin for this use case - can quickly provide a means of capturing cost and running the report (as well as showing net profit on the purchase log.)

On May 1, 2013, at 8:13 AM, JustinSainton notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi @ozoneboy,

That's a great idea. I think I recall that a Wholesale Pricing plugin already exists (I think it might be more modeled around giving logged in wholesalers different pricing levels than others) - but I think that might be close to what you're needing.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

benhuson commented 11 years ago

I also think this is probably best suited to a plugin.

ozoneboy commented 11 years ago

You're spot on @1bigidea. The Wholesale Pricing plugin doesn't address this issue and as far as I'm aware there isn't an existing plugin, which is surprising because this is really a core element for running a business. So I guess there's a great opportunity if someone wants to develop a plugin! : )

JustinSainton commented 11 years ago

Awesome - sounds like a great plugin idea. I think these are some solid user-facing issues for 3.9.0. Let's split these up into tickets and assign them.

1bigidea commented 11 years ago

Ok - since I shot my mouth off. I'll turn out a quick "Simple Margins" plugin this month.

On May 1, 2013, at 1:31 PM, Grant Pascoe notifications@github.com wrote:

You're spot on @1bigidea. The Wholesale Pricing plugin doesn't address this issue and as far as I'm aware there isn't an existing plugin, which is surprising because this is really a core element for running a business. So I guess there's a great opportunity if someone wants to develop a plugin! : )

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

instinct commented 11 years ago

haha! thanks Tom :P

d

On 2/05/2013, at 9:45 AM, Tom Ransom notifications@github.com wrote:

Ok - since I shot my mouth off. I'll turn out a quick "Simple Margins" plugin this month.

On May 1, 2013, at 1:31 PM, Grant Pascoe notifications@github.com wrote:

You're spot on @1bigidea. The Wholesale Pricing plugin doesn't address this issue and as far as I'm aware there isn't an existing plugin, which is surprising because this is really a core element for running a business. So I guess there's a great opportunity if someone wants to develop a plugin! : )

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

JustinSainton commented 11 years ago

Made new tickets for everything (see original comment for references). 3.9.0 is going to be awesome! Users will love new features. Developers will love the newly exposed APIs and theme engine. Such good times!