Be able to create and edit orders in the back office

[MichaelNielsenDK]

I had this request from a client the other day, and was actually surprised to find this was not possible, I just took it for granted that it was. 🤷‍♂️😅

We have many clients using ither ecommerce platforms, that uses this feature frequently, changing prices, quantities, adding/removing products, and even creating orders.

So in my opinion, this should definitely be added to Vendr.

[mattbrailsford]

Thanks for suggesting this @MichaelNielsenDK

I've moved this to a discussion for now as I think there is a lot of thought that would need to go behind this.

TC did have a level of editing orders, but we didn't port that over as I felt it was a half hearted attempt.

We can't currently allow editing of an order that has been processed as it would potentially affect prices that have already been calculated and paid for, but I don't think this is what you are asking for anyway.

The difficulty of allowing the creation of an order directly in the back office is that Vendr really doesn't know what nodes in your system are product nodes and so the question is, how do we allow the store owner to pick the product to add to the order? Do we just show a content picker and allow them to pick any node and then we attempt to add it and extract product info? What should we do if they try to pick a node that isn't a product? Maybe we need some kind of configuration some place else to say "these doc types are products"?

There is also the fact that this is currently entirely Umbraco specific which we do allow a product adapter to replace how product data is extracted so it may not be based on umbraco content nodes at all. So then what? Do we need a new API for picking product nodes in a flexible way so that if you aren't using Umbraco nodes it can all still work?

Lastly, we also need to consider how people have implemented Vendr. When adding products to an order, it's possibly the implementers do other work, such as extracting properties or setting up defaults. By creating orders in the back office, this would potentially bypass your AddToCartController and thus not setup any of those elements.

I'm sure much of this can be worked out, but as I say, I think it's a much more involved discussion that just "make orders editable".

Happy to hear your thoughts on the subject

[mattbrailsford]

Another thing I hadn't mentioned above is how then to have a customer complete an order that the admin creates in the back office? My though is that we'd need to provide the customer some kind of link that would let the customer claim the order and move it into their "current order" session variable. This is doable, but it's doing it in a way that doesn't require something special to be implemented on the front end. It's also doing this in such a way that doesn't inadvertently open a hole where anyone can take on another persons order. There needs to be a security mechanism here.

[MichaelNielsenDK]

We can't currently allow editing of an order that has been processed as it would potentially affect prices that have already been calculated and paid for, but I don't think this is what you are asking for anyway.

Depends on what you mean by 'processed', whether it's 'finalized' or whether the products are shipped and payment has been captured.

The use cases that we see are the following:

• Change price on an orderline, to give the customer a discount
• Remove an orderline, if the customer has called in to change their order
• Add an orderline, if the customer has called in to change their order
• Create a completely new order, if a customer has called in to place an order

I know there's some payment issues, as gateways don't allow you to capture more than the initial value, but that is up to the client to handle, by either sending an invoice, or by manually creating a payment in the gateway and sending a link to the customer.

The difficulty of allowing the creation of an order directly in the back office is that Vendr really doesn't know what nodes in your system are product nodes and so the question is, how do we allow the store owner to pick the product to add to the order? Do we just show a content picker and allow them to pick any node and then we attempt to add it and extract product info? What should we do if they try to pick a node that isn't a product? Maybe we need some kind of configuration some place else to say "these doc types are products"?

Maybe a custom content picker, that has a flat lists of all products, and maybe SKU or Price property can be used to identify which nodes are product nodes.

There is also the fact that this is currently entirely Umbraco specific which we do allow a product adapter to replace how product data is extracted so it may not be based on umbraco content nodes at all. So then what? Do we need a new API for picking product nodes in a flexible way so that if you aren't using Umbraco nodes it can all still work?

I haven't used a product adapter, so I'm not entirely sure how it works with converting external data to something that's readable for Vendr, so I can't really comment on it.

Lastly, we also need to consider how people have implemented Vendr. When adding products to an order, it's possibly the implementers do other work, such as extracting properties or setting up defaults. By creating orders in the back office, this would potentially bypass your AddToCartController and thus not setup any of those elements.

I don't really see this as an issue. If I extract all kinds of data, and sets those on orders or orderlines, I would not expect it to do so when creating orders in the backoffice, as that is custom code I've written, and I know the back office option will be standard.
And if there's properties I need to add to the order or orderlines, I can do so manually.

Another thing I hadn't mentioned above is how then to have a customer complete an order that the admin creates in the back office? My though is that we'd need to provide the customer some kind of link that would let the customer claim the order and move it into their "current order" session variable. This is doable, but it's doing it in a way that doesn't require something special to be implemented on the front end. It's also doing this in such a way that doesn't inadvertently open a hole where anyone can take on another persons order. There needs to be a security mechanism here.

Perhaps clients can decide whether the order is finalized or not, depending on whether they want the customer to visit the site or not.

If they do, then they could send the customer to the payment by sending them a link e.g.:
domain.com/payment?orderid=xyz

Of course you have to have logic on /payment page that fetches the order, and set it as current, before redirecting to the payment method set on the order.

If the customer can't be bothered to visit the site, the client can just create orders as already finalized, and then just send invoices or payment links created in the gateway.

I know there is a lot to consider, especially regarding creating orders, adding products to it and so on.

So perhaps the first step, could be to make it possible to edit/delete orderlines, as this does not require Vendr to know anything about products, it's only editing data that's already there?

[mattbrailsford]

Some really good points there @MichaelNielsenDK so thank you for your feedback on this.

I hadn't considered creating a fully finalized order, so that's an interesting thing to think about too.

I think based on what you are saying is needed, we could still potentially enforce not editing finalized orders, as if an order is finalized, but we have the ability to create orders in the back office, would it suffice to say, if the order is finalized, but the customer wants additional items, could we create a new order? And, maybe we create a mechanism to link those two orders together in some way.

For removing order lines from a finalized order, I think this becomes more a thing of supporting partial refunds, where lines from an order can be refunded and funds returned to the customer if required. This is something I want to add into Vendr, but I need to look at implementing a transaction log for this. Currently there is just a single transaction state on an order, but if we have a log of any transactions, we can potentially handle multiple captures and partial refunds etc from there.

So with this all said, maybe the scope of this feature is purely to create / edit unfinalized orders?

RE the content picker, yea, that was pretty much my thought. A picker, where the default implementation looks up umbraco nodes with an SKU field on it. Could be a good enough initial pass and see how well it plays in the real world as to whether it requires further configuration.

Regarding the payment link, I think in the order editor in the back office, if there is some kind of "send link" button so a link can be sent to a customer, this could probably present a dialog asking you for the cart page location so that when the customer clicks the link, it assigned the order to their session, and then sends them to the cart page so they can complete the order. I guess based on your idea of also supporting fully finalized orders, there would just need to be some other button to handle this scenario.

Regarding first steps, I think the actual first step should be adding support to see unfinalized orders as right now, the orders view only shows finalized orders which we'll need to extend.

Thanks again for your input, it's been really useful here.

Matt