Commission rate, etc

I can understand your confusion regarding the product page price fields. They are currently implemented as a sort of proof-of-concept. These fields are pretty custom to the particular store offering marketplace features, so I was unsure of an abstract solution that would apply to all. Allow me to explain my thoughts behind the fields I currently have implemented:

List Price: This is where seller would enter their MSRP.

Commission Rate: (I guess rate is a bit of a misnomer--this is not the same as the one defined globally in store admin). This is a cover for the Ubercart core "cost" price field. The idea is that a seller will enter the amount they want to be paid for the sale of the item in this "commission" field. For example, a wholesaler may want to list their product on your store that they want $50 for. Their MSRP (list price and starting sell price) is $100. They would enter $50 in the commission rate box on product node page. What does this have to do with the globally defined commission rate? That is used to validate the seller's product submission. Say the wholesaler was greedy and wanted $90 for the item (and the global commission rate is set at 75%). The form would not validate and tell the seller to lower cost or increase sell price. The "cost" field cannot be eliminated because that is what Ubercart Marketplace uses as the amount to pay sellers. An alternative that I can imagine would be to hide "cost"/"commission rate" field and calculate it automatically based on the global commission rate. There is a reason I did not do this yet, however. See below.

Minimum Sell Price: This field is not displayed on any product page, etc. The idea behind this field was to provide a spot for a seller to enter a minimum allowed advertised price. This is purely a note for administrators. I imagined that a store may want to put some of their items on sale to promote various products etc. When the admin goes and alters the sell prices of various items, how low can they make the advertised sale price? Usually the manufacturer/seller has a price in mind that they do not want the product listed cheaper than to ensure fair competition with their other retailers (for example). A seller can enter $0 if they do not care. Note: changing the sell price or min sell price does not affect the "commission rate" or what the seller will be paid.

I did not make commission rate an automatically generated value for each product because a seller may want to accept less than the global commission rate for their item. Why would they do this? Doing this and having a reasonably low min sell price would (in theory) encourage the store admin to put a sale on the said item. Strong motivation would be present because store admin would not be losing any money (since the global commission rate was not fully exploited by seller).

Sorry for the confusion and I hope I clarified my thoughts. Obviously this arrangement will not work for everyone and could use more explanation on the product page. HOWEVER, these fields are fairly easy to change and suit to each individuals goals. Let me know what kind of arrangement you are envisioning and I can see if it would be done best by adding more options to my arrangement (to make it more flexible) or if a custom fix is in store for your project. It sounds like you don't want your sellers to worry about commission and just have a global rate for all and automatically fill in the commission rate field on product pages. I am open to assisting in making this better and/or helping you with your specific situation.

Let me know. By the way, good to hear its working for you! Also, could you please clarify what you mean regarding the potential bug "I also noticed that unchecking fields such as list price in the UC store admin - config - product settings has no effect on the submit product form display."

I think a good compromise would be the Default for the commission price - have the field already completed with the calculated dollar amount. That way they can still adjust it to their liking. (The help text could be something like "The default is based on the normal x% set by the store administrator. You can edit the amount here".. or maybe something a little more concise.)

That would be my thought, anyway.

I implemented your idea and a plethora of other combinations into BETA1.

Options available are:
Autocomplete: hide commission field and calculate upon submit based on specified price field.
Autofill: show commission field and allow edits with verification, but autofill with jquery.

These options (and more) are configurable under store configuration -> seller settings.

I don't think I will ever get the wording right on all the fields for everyone, so I would recommend the string overrides module, although I am still working on the defaults.

Thanks for testing and the suggestions. Let me know if these work better.

Thanks again for such a nice add-on for UC!

About the last paragraph: could you please clarify what you mean regarding the potential bug "I also noticed that unchecking fields such as list price in the UC store admin - config - product settings has no effect on the submit product form display."

I also think that the "list price" field might be not necessary for many cases, so it would be nice to provide a way to hide it in the product information form. Basically, it would be really nice if the admin can customize the seller's product submission form fields instead of just providing a "Hide extra fields" option.

Dealing with turning on and off list price is on my todo list for the next release. As far as full customization of all fields, at the moment I think that is unnecessary. It would be nice in a future version of Marketplace, but at the moment all the fields that are hid by that option either have no relevance to a seller or are not currently implemented by Marketplace so would be useless.

I agree with you most of the fields are useless, but I think the dimension and weight field might be helpful, of course one can always include this in the description. I really like this add-on and hope it gets mature soon. I would be glad to help test when I have the time.

I will take your recommendations. I am trying my best to move this to a rich 1.0 release, but I have a few other projects to attend to before I can give it more dedicated time. Thanks for offering to test...testers are great.

In BETA2 I added an option to turn off List Price field. Commission rates also are now customizable based on seller role and product class.

Along those same lines, would it be possible to restrict what products are considered "marketplace" products by Taxonomy? (Or Product class, would be good too.)

I'm asking because if I edit a node that was previously created before Marketplace was installed (I am logged in as an Administrator; have not tried as User 1 yet) I am seeing "Seller commission" instead of Cost field. In other words it's treating a regular "product" as a "marketplace product" and I think these should be differentiated some how. Taxonomy was the first way that came to mind, but a Product Class select field would be good also.

Great idea torgosPizza. I will pick up development a week from now (I am going out of town) and will then implement this. I can see how this would be very useful. At it's current state, even though the fields are renamed to "Seller commission," etc., they are the same fields for the administrator just with a different name (w/ "allow admin commission override" in seller settings, they are identical functionally). I will probably end up doing it by product class and simply limit my implementation of hook_form_alter() and hook_nodeapi(). Thanks for the suggestion.

This is a fairly old support request. I think most of these requests have been addressed or are discussed in other open issues. Feel free to open a new issue if I have missed anything.