Ubercart

Thanks for your insight Cayenne. I looked into Who Bought What--it is good and appears to be some nice reporting queries; We will need something to manage multiple shipments in an order. Upon trying a partial proof of concept, I found that I had to use version 3 of uc_views (in dev as of this post) to get anywhere. It allows me to filter actual purchased products, based on a nodereference in the product node, and output customer data as well as most anything else related. This easily solves a major part of the problem.

However there is still the issue of having to add/change status and tracking data to each product ordered in a View. It looks like I could add another table to the system to store this info per ordered product, and write to the Views API to add the joins to the view being built.

However Ubercart can handle multiple shipments/packages per order and has a lot of functionality there, though it looks like this is done manually after the order is placed, through admin screens, and there is no views functionality that I see.

Perhaps the best method is to create an action, triggered by checkout, that looks to the associated vendor of a product and automatically creates shipments for the order for every vendor of the products in the order. You would need to make assumptions perhaps, like the vendor would ship all items together in one package. Otherwise you might create a value in the product node indicating that it ships in its own package or something.

I do have a question whether setting up shipping quotes for each vendor, or product class for each vendor, might not provide more functionality. But I don't see these providing anything I need.

I do not see shipment/package info available in views. This I assume must be programmed with the Views API. If we want to create an interface for vendors to input data easily into the order product feed page, we would have to create special handlers and turn the view output into a form. We could of course bypass views as well, but experience has shown that the extra effort of using views greatly reduces work down the road and creates all kinds of extra great functionality. To avoid creating special handlers, we could provide a link for the vendor to edit the shipment/package info using existing ubercart forms (would need some custom permission handling then). You might need to provide training if that were the method, so I am not sure that is feasible.

Hope this thinking through the issue in writing is helpful to someone at some point.