Trading In and How to Track 'em
I have spent the day working on adding the ability for customers to offer trade in books at my used book store. Worked out the how to make it function as a business decision and had to then incorporate that into the store itself. I managed to remove some security from a few admin pieces to allow the items to be added, edited, etc using the same basic record layout that the product database uses but into a new table, this way if the offer is accepted and the books arrive I can automate moving them into the inventory. Decided to not have customers upload images as I assume a large percentage would require work to make them presentable and the security issues around uploading hardly make it worth the trouble. I worked up all the code to add/edit/delete the items, tied them together with the customer id - then realized it could be a long time between the offer, it being accepted and the arrival of the trade-ins. Need a secondary identifier to mark each group as unique in case a customer trade-ins another batch of items. Added a timestamp and had to back through everything to make it part of the functionality. Set up the email to be sent when a batch is submitted and the online link in the mail for viewing the batch. Need to finish the offering and acceptance functions and it will go live. The offer is temporaily stored and then once the items arrive and are checked out as ok that credit is assigned to the customer account. I will need to set up the piece that checks the customer credit during the order process. Back to work..
