Request for comments on order to cash process diagrams

[inspiran]

Hi All,

Part of creating a good e-commerce framework is having a good understanding of typical order to cash flows. We have started creating several process diagrams to illustrate our understanding of e-commerce business. You can find them on the Wiki and by navigating to following link:

https://github.com/vespolina/vespolina/wiki/Process-flow-diagrams

Do you know variations on the order to cash flow or have comments in general, please don't hesitate and comment.

The Vespolina team.

[Seldaek]

Let me describe my only (horrific) experience with Magento and what we had to build, maybe it helps you in one way or another:

One client had to ship things in a very complicated manner, they sold heavy stuff and had multiple warehouses in the country with different items in each. That means depending on what you ordered, the computation of delivery costs had to take into account exactly which items were in which warehouse, only take the closest-to-buyer warehouse for each item, compute weight in each warehouse and count on how many palettes (those wooden things) it would be stackable, then add the palette price to the cost etc. Now this I believe is nothing the software should take care of, it's obviously an extremely specific case and it should just be implemented on a case by case basis.

The problem was more into the customization of Magento to support this flow. The "one page checkout" feature is very rigid and we needed one more page to configure the type of delivery they wanted (whether they wanted to come pick up the item or not). This option I believe wasn't taken into account in your graphs. In some cases people actually come pick up the goods. We also did the billing out of magento to integrate with the current solution of the client, but I think you took that one into account.

Customizing templates was hell imo, stuff like price rendering for example we wanted to add some custom text around the price and it got really difficult to modify without touching core magento files.

Well I don't quite remember all details, it was a couple years ago now, but I sure hope you can make it a more flexible solution. Good luck with this.

[cordoval]

reading this now i understand a bit of what the FFB is about to solve, nice thanks for this info