Question
Can your integrations handle Multiple Selling Units (MSU)?
If you're unfamiliar with Multiple Selling Units, they address a problem whereby the merchant purchases products by some unit of measure but then can sell in various other units. A prime example could be tubing. I purchase a 200 foot roll of vinyl tubing. Most consumers don’t purchase 200 feet of tubing, so the merchant will sell it by the foot. However, contractors may want that whole roll, but they will purchase at a discounted price because they are buying in bulk. Therefore, the merchant needs to:
- represent the pricing by foot and roll
- alleviate the inventory by the appropriate amount (units and cost)
There are numerous other examples, but this one is common.
The challenge in an integration is to represent the MSU tables/codes for that product. Our ERP system would need to expose the service to MSU’s, so essentially we need to determine how to render the unit online so that if they sell the MSU product, it will handle items 1 & 2 from above.
Answer
We do not yet have an integration that handles Multiple Selling Units, and honestly, I've never even heard of it before. As we work on more and more B2B website and integrations, I'm sure MSU's will come up, and I appreciate you taking the time to explain it to me. My quick assessment is that we'd need to handle Multiple Selling Units in both our Integration Middleware and within the e-commerce platform. Given how much we've been able to customize Magento in the past, we'd be able to do this in Magento for you. However, I'm not sure about the other platforms we support which are Bigcommerce, Shopify and WooCommerce.
These are the kinds of problems we love to solve and, frankly, are pretty darn good at. Please let me know if you'd like us to dive in and solve this for you. Thank you.