Consignment Feature

**JABevan** · 19 Nov 2006, 11:42 PM

I would like to see a Consignment Add-on that is designed to expand the User and Admin capabilities/features for store owners who sell products under consignment. Something designed to calculate payments to Suppliers who may offer a variety of products at different commission or payment rates, and provide Suppliers a unique Supplier Login area to track sales, orders, payments, etc.

Most shopping carts can track product sales with an affiliate feature, but a consignment feature would go one step further by allowing store owners to assign a Supplier to a particular product, as well as, set a range of payment rates in order to easily make payment to the supplier after order fulfillment. Once the product and payment rates are established, payments to Suppliers should be automatically calculated and ideally the Admin would simply click on the payment link to pay suppliers through PayPal or EFT.

A summary page should provide the Admin a listing of all payments due to suppliers, as well as a newsletter option to suppliers, payment history, etc.

I'd like to see a Supplier sign-up page with a boiler plate contract and form to fill out (product category, description, etc.) and upload a photo of their product for approval. It would be nice if these requests could be kept in a locker somewhere so there's a record of consignment agreements per product.

**Fred9V** · 23 Nov 2006, 11:19 PM

Such a feature added to Zen-Cart would be totally awesome. Half of my store is filled with products under consignment and that would ease things so much! I'm sure this contrib would benefit to a lot of stores owners!

**benz001** · 11 Dec 2006, 09:36 AM

This would be great - but a challenging mod!
One store I'm involved with works mainly as a wholesaler selling largely via consignment, this brings the other side of consignment into the picture.

The cart works fine for normal retail sales but really falls down trying to track wholesale customer orders and consignment orders, reconciling retail and wholesale is a real pain as I can't find a good way to run them both from the same system and they both pull from the same inventory.

To start of a wishlist, the workflow for could be something like:

1. Sales person (or even the customer) completes shopping cart and selects consignment as a payment option (this should be an option you can set against a customers profile)

2. Against that order as well as their order history, the customer or sales person can print a consignment list report, this would explode each item into a single line in a table with blank columns for "Date Sold", "Invoice Number", "Date Paid" as well as the normal Item Numbers, prices and names. In the simple version they can print this report and use it to track sales in their shop, then email/fax back at the end of the month.

3. In the better version they can tick off each item online as it sells from their account with the store and (typically once a month) move all tick items into a shopping cart to actually pay for them.

**GearStudios** · 31 Jan 2007, 05:10 AM

Currently I have a store that sells high ticket items. We have customers that want us to sell their items as consignment. Any one customer may have at most 2 items that they want us to sell. I have started tackling this to see what I can come up with. I have all but solved some issues. One issue is how to keep track of which item belongs to which customer. I am thinking of using the customer_id as the model number in this instance. I am trying to keep this very simple to see how it works out.

Has anyone else attempted this?

**jewelrylady** · 31 Jan 2007, 05:28 AM

How does consignment work exactly? Someone just asked me today If I would consign my jewelry. But I told her I wasnt sure, she said if it didnt sell at her store she would mail them back to me. is that right?

**GearStudios** · 31 Jan 2007, 08:20 PM

An arrangement whereby merchandise owned by one party (the consignor) is sold by another party (the consignee), usually on a commission basis.

**shortlatte** · 4 Feb 2007, 08:50 PM

This would definitely be a fabulous perk - I sell virtual products and pay manufacturers based on what they sell - kinda like commission.

Anyhow - definitely would be cool - but I can see how it would be a challenging mod...

**magneteye** · 7 Mar 2007, 12:38 AM

Is anyone working on a Consignment mod or have any ideas?

I am developing a site for an online consignment shop. They want to have a Consignor ID that is associated with that consignors items. They want the Consignor to be able to login, upload new items for review, see their items for sale, the status, and view a history.

Anyone running a consignment shop using zen cart? Tips?

Thanks!

Matt

**zskiman** · 27 Jun 2008, 02:42 PM

i am very interested in a module like this and willing to help as much as i can on this sort of project.

We run an online bookstore and a module like this is something that we could use to have customers sell used books on our sight, much the way amazon does.

some of the key points that i thought were neccessary to make this work are

- adding a field to customers acct that holds the customers account balance- this way a customer can choose to either have the funds from sale of used item transfered to a paypal acct or used towards the purchase of items in our shopping cart.

- buyer would pay shipping fees, and we would have seller print out shipping tag to send sold items, acct penalty would have to exhist to ensure prompt shipment, funds would have to remain locked until transaction completes.

- shipping module would have to figure the starting and end location to ensure proper shipping fees are charged.

i have been scowering the web looking for simalar projects and also looking through oscoomerces sight to see if theres anything similar that could be ported. anyone that may have any ideas or suggestions or feels that this is a project that they may want to contribute to please send me a mssg.