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Notes:
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Started out the day looking over notes and doing some review. Around 10 am, Eric joined in and we did a GoToMeeting session to go over the database tables for the special tracking accounts (loyalty points and such). We had a good session and I was taking a bunch of notes. Part way through the meeting, my computer did a full reboot (unannounced) and we loss the whole page of unsaved notes. Bummer. Here are a few things that we were talking about: - UI or user interface, that is huge. If you can store it, great, but how is it going to be used, accessed, and/or manipulated. What is the interface and does that help the process? - We have tons of converging projects. We spent quite a bit of time talking about how the smart cart logic, sales and promotions, tiered pricing, discounting models, loyalty points, sub inventory (parent/child inventory), mini conversions, and custom labeling are all somewhat intertwined and all hitting us at once. That is pretty intense, as each of these projects is fairly big by itself. When you combine everything, that really gets pretty intense. - Along with that convergence, we talked about what pieces dealt with what part of the process. We saw that sub inventory, mini conversions, and labeling mostly deal with things that are pre-cart or ways of helping to get things into the cart. The smart cart, sales and promotions, tiered pricing, and discounts are all fairly closely inter-tied together. That is the heart of the shopping cart. The loyalty points and special account tracking options plays in towards the end but still plays a part of the overall cart logic. These things are somewhat post checkout logic but still trickle into the main cart logic. - One of the topics today was why we use parts (normal invoice line items) in the cart to control the loyalty points. We talked about the fact that we don't have anything standard and different companies are using either items and/or different functions. We talked about maybe adding in a new one-to-many relationship to handle all of the visual items dealing with the special accounts. This would be a new one-to-many to the invoices but with a specific purpose. Great idea, we may want to push this further. - Currently, the users are settings up all kinds of buttons, barcode scans, and other flow processes to either assign and/or redeem the loyalty points. We need to remember that part of the interface when building out the next phase of how things work. People (users) want quick access to those loyalty type features and special accounts. As a side note, some of the buttons and current scans force the line quantity to a negative, that helps us reduce and/or redeem the loyalty points. If we went into a different model, we may not need that (standalone option for special accounts). - One other topic of the day was how labeling could potentially create a by-pass to the normal database look-up logic. We are seeing people already use QR codes, barcodes, and other scan options to pull in a quantity, a price, and a sub package. No look-ups are done, it just takes things as is. That is both good and bad. Just noting it here that that may become an issue in the future. |