Winter '14 Bulk Grain Buy

Just so everyone is aware, I've been working on some functionality to handle group buys.  I'm going to try and hack it out in the next couple days while I'm on PTO for this one but we can always use Google Docs like in the past.  Either way, we need to get a price sheet and I'll need help importing it into the site.  That will most likely take someone putting the price sheet in Excel format and I'll bulk import it.

So once we get a catalog, what I need is for someone to put together a spreadsheet with all of the products in something similar to the following.  I'll be ready with a system to handle bulk buys online.  Its done, I'm testing right now.  I'm also trying to add some split management functionality but that may end up being a future feature. 

Does anyone know how they calculate how full a pallet is for non-grain items?  I know we haven't allowed those in the past but I want to include that functionality for future proofing.

Let me get a final template excel attached up here in the next day or two so its in the proper format.  Here's a little bit of a preview of the functionality from the test environment.  All of the products are fake crap I put in for testing purposes.  

If we're doing the pickup, are we goign to allow people to order other things?  Either way we should include some star san for the club. Also, I need to know ASAP if we're doing the pickup ourselves or if we're going to ship it.  If we're shipping it via freight that means I need to track the completeness of pallets vs. not worrying about it.  Please let me know soon. 

No idea, what I'd like to get a definitive answer on is for the things that aren't sacks of grain, how should we calculate whether the pallet is full or not.  I believe that we've used 52 sacks per pallet in the past for the other buys but it would be nice to be able to include other stuff in that too. 

Doh!  Hit submit too soon!  

Ok, I'm just going to keep it simple and add a $3.00 fee to every item as a "delivery charge" in the online system. That way we can cover any other unknown incidentals.  Anyone have any thoughts on that? 

I have a feeling we're going to have some pent up demand and keeping it to 1 pallet may be tough. 

I stored my 3 sacks at home and have no intention of doing otherwise again.

Some more screenshots.  I got a ton done this weekend, we're at just above 1,000 lines of code (not including comments). I have made it so the system can track multiple group buys and allow moderators to manage them independently.  This way we can do several throughout the year without the need to reset every time. 

We can also add a set of fees to every item (as shown below).  Right now I have added a percentage fee of 2.9% to every order to cover the cost of our payment processors (both Paypal and Stripe charge 2.9%).  We also have added $3.00 to each item as Dave had commented that in the past it was about $2.90 per item to cover the charge of the pallet, materials, and freight.  

At this point what I need from people are comments on the things you see below.  All I have left is finishing up a system that allows the group buy manager to track the orders and see who has ordered what.  Most of the backend code for that is done, I just need to write a front-end.  I'm going to need some people to do some beta testing for me probably later this week.  Don't worry, I have some fake credit card numbers that our processor (Stripe) can use so you can even go all the way to checking out and finishing your purchase.  Let me know if you have any good comments, thanks!

Looks great Lucas.  I can run some tests if you want.

So I was talking with Dave yesterday and discussing the non-grain items on the South Holland list.  Dave orders things for Horse Thief regularly and says that they're often out of the non-grain items.  If we want to include the other items someone is going to have to go through and check the availability of these things and then refund people's money for the stuff that isn't available.  Additionally, that also means that we're going to need to have a waiting list for extras as that may cause a pallet to go unfilled.  It sounds like they almost always have all of the grain, and this is part of the reason we limited it to just grain in the past.  Does anyone have any thoughts?  Its more manual effort for us to allow people to get other stuff but coudl be nice if someone is willing to do the legwork.  Let me know your thoughts.

On a second note, Dave was able to share some thoughts with me about testing the system, has anyone else had a chance?

So it looks like a couple people have gotten to test the system, I've also tested it a fair amount (although that's not worth much since I'll do it the "right" way every time).  I don't want to start the two group buys until people are comfortable with getting them going as I want to make sure we minimize issues.

I've also done some testing with two concurrent buys on the test site as Evan suggested and I can't see any issues, so I think we're ok there but would still like some others to test.

Finally, have we identified the folks that are going to manage the group buy, put in the orders, etc?  The website will take care of letting people make orders, but someone is still going to have to take the list to Mid Country, coordinate everything, etc.