dashCommerce

There have been some folks who have expressed a dislike for how we handle attributes - tied to the product and locked once you sleect them all. I came up with this because the attributes are used to create the Sku - so changing the attributes would invalidate the existing Sku's and you would lose visibility into your inventory. I looked at other products and they seemed to take the apporach of creating duplicates of the product. This seemed clumsy to me. Is there a way to get some more flexibility in there without screwing up the inventory portion of it?

What I think is to give an option to use Inventory for the whole site so that if someone doesn't need inventory they don't have to bother with it.

Now it should be easy to add more items to an attribute and then update the existing item SKU's without breaking anything (You just have to add the ones that are missing).

Now adding new attributes HERE is where the problem start...

The problem with adding new attributes is that the Sku's are created based on the order of the attributes, so if you add an attribute and re-order it, then that would invalidate the existing Sku's. So if you are always just appending Sku's, then I see where we may be able to make it work.

I agree that inventory should be optional, but I am thinking the option should be at the product level. You still want a sku for a product - regardless of whether or not you keep inventory. My feeling with the current design is that it allowed for effectively not keeping inventory - with the allow negative inventory.

I don't hear too much about the inventory management as it is, but I do hear about not being able to modify attributes, For me it's simple, just disable the old product and create a new one, but other's don't see it that way. Maybe we can fix it, maybe we can't.

I am in the process of developing a very simple inventory system.  I basically ignore the inventory field (sorry Chris) and have added my own fields to the sku table (Ex. Qty_OnHand, Qty_OnOrder, Qty_OnHold).

I also added a table called inventory log which has fields like:

DateTimeStamp
SkuID
JournalCode
Qty
Reference

The Journal Codes are:

• RCV - Receive Inventory
• PUR - Purchase Inventory
• SHP - Ship Inventory
• ORD - Order Inventory
• ADJ - Adjust Inventory

With the exception of things like credit and debit memos, return of goods sold, return of goods purchased, it is a inventory system that I have sucessfully set up for a few desktop applications.

Like a subsidiary ledger - everything that goes in and out of inventory has a journal record in the inventory log.  Similar to how you have a SQL Server Log File in which you can recoup everything up to a certain point, I recaclulate inventory totals based on the log file. 

I modified the check out process to create ORD (Ordered) inventory log records for each item ordered.  This places items on hold and does not reduce inventory but reduces how much is available.  I will have to modify the shipping notification process so that if will reduce the QTY on Hand but also reduce the QTY on Hold.

I am also in the process of writing a web page that will upload a QuickBooks Inventory, Purchasing, and Receiving Report (in text format) and parse those reports for the purpose of adding new inventory, double checking tallys, adding PUR (Purchase records) and RCV (Receiving Records) and the recalculate inventory.

A Product having multiple skus does pose a factor.  I think it would be great to be able to group several products together that could be added to cart.  For example:

If you had 4 Products with BaseSkus: BrownBeltSM, BrownBeltM, BrownBeltLG, BrownBeltXL, then you can bring up, let's say the Small Brown Belt by default.  Clicking on a dropdown of SM,M,LG,XL would in affect switch the product.  All the Sku stuff could be made transparent (or scrap it altogether).

Louis

I'm working now at refactoring the whole inventory part to an InventoryService so that it should be easier to switch to another implementation not that this will be just pop in a new provider thing but if someone needs this then he will be able to do this alot easier.

And I created a InventoryProvider that will just throw away the whole inventory stuff for the users that don't need it (this will be an option in SiteSettings)