B-Stock Management

[Dave_s]

Hi everyone!

I'm searching for a way to manage b-stock items. When a customer returns a product, we need a mechanism to easily sell that item for a reduced price. Until now, we create a completely separate item for this with a special pricing. This approach is very cumbersome and not transparent to the customer.

What we really want is a simple dropdown selection on the page of the regular product, where a customer can choose to buy the reduced b-stock item instead of the regular product. I imagine something based on the combination of attributes (b-stock: true/false; b-price: 123.00), which if set, trigger the frontend to present the b-stock option and maybe append something to the sku if ordered.

I've already tried something with a configurable product, but this is way too complicated for such a basic functionality. We can't be the only store which has to deal with returned items.

[Aitoc]

Hi @Dave_s,

While there are no ready solutions that come to my mind, I can see some ways of solving your issue with returned stock.

For example, you can add a custom checkbox to the product or checkout page that will apply a discount to the total price if checked. The box will have a text description that clarifies the situations with returned items. This will be custom development work of course, but it seems like a relatively small and inexpensive job.

Another way is to set push notifications in your store and offer a discount code for everyone who wants to get a returned item and pay less.

Not every user allows push notifications, so you might consider a promo banner on your main page that offers the same deal.

These workarounds do not take into account stock levels of course. To add this functionality, you might dig deeper and opt in for a multi warehouse inventory module. This module will allow you to create separate warehouses with separate stock in your admin panel. While physically this might be one single warehouse, its stock would be separated into two virtual warehouses that update individually. You'd still need custom development service to relate your backend to frontend in this case, so all in all this is also a bulky solution. It would work great once set up, but the initial preparation process might be cumbersome.

Hope that this wall of text will give you some great ideas.