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Top Selling Products Report


Marcus Hancroft
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Deja Letov wrote:

I don't know if I would even call it a developer issue...because most developers are just doing what they are told to do by execs, at least in larger companies. I find it more of an issue with the team who comes up with the ideas behind it. Then again, mabe I'm wrong and they are the same people. I can tell you in my company, the developers do not decide  the "what" of what happens in reporting, we just implement. Our sales reps and managers know what they need to provide the level of customer service to our clients are and they know what they need to so. Some of it I would never think of to include, but they feel they need it. If the planning team is different then the developer team maybe this could be the issue. If so...we need a new planning team cause they obviously have no idea about what numbers business people need to look at. 

Which, if true (and my experience parallels yours), makes me even more upset. Assuming that the actual code-writers looked over the specs and noticed the obvious oversight, they would then raise the issue and request a "Spec Change" to include the feature. (Assuming there is such a mechanism in place.) Why then would such a change not be granted?

Although, we have seen them add some things based on "Customer Feedback" through the forums and JIRA, so I would suspect such a formal protocol is not in place. Furthermore based on the well-known "Product Owner" mechanism they have in place at LL, that would seem to indicate that the person that "Owns" the Marketplace is Brooke .. and I fail to understand why Brooke wouldn't immediately approve it.

Regardless of where the failure to act originates, no matter who's neck goes on the chopping block, it's a feature that has been requested, justified and is clearly needed since the initial rollout of the Marketplace. Why on EARTH are we still stuck asking for something so crucial and so obvious to proper use of the data?

I'm really leaning toward the belief that the Development Team or whomever it is that determines what gets added and what does not is actively refusing to provide a truly workable and functional system. So many basic, logical, even critical features are just flat ignored. I have a very hard time not coming to the conclusion that they are intentionally refusing to provide full data.

But ... WHY?!?

This is one of those situations where a complete explanation of why this feature is lacking is important. If, as is entirely possible considering how ill-fitting the Spree base platform is for Second Life sales, the statistics are accumulated in "single-bucket counters" then all they have to say is "this feature will require an extensive rewrite of the statistics gathering functions." We'd understand. Instead we've either gotten total silence or the inscrutable "we are studying the issue." 

[Geek-Speak Follows]

Single-bucket Counters are a very simple way to keep track of counts. Basically each product has one counter that is incremented every time the product is viewed or purchased. Because there is no tracking of WHEN it was viewed or purchased, there is no way to provide a date/time filter either. Usually when an implementation uses single-bucket counters, there is a scheduled process that adds the main counter to other counters; one each for the current week, month, quarter, etc.

Considering that they've disabled the Stale Shopping Cart cleanup routine, another scheduled process that is part-and-parcel of any good eCommerce package, they've also probably removed all the scheduled processes that came in the basic Spree implementation .. then added some of their own. It could very well be that when they snipped out a few things, they accidentally amputated a few critical things as well ... and adding them back in at this late stage just isn't possible.

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This really make me curious as to the inner workings of the commerce team. I'd love to know if they do in fact have a separate development and separate planning team. I know for us we CAN'T make those kinds of changes without approval. There are spec documents to approve, execs to ask, permission to be asked. Even on things we see and think  "you know what would be better". We are sometimes told no. I'd love to know exactly who deserves all of our wrath? The developers, the planners or are they one in the same? And again...Hey Rod...yo...call me...I could whip you up an awesome reporting solution and I know exactly what merchants would find important...and if I don't, we could poll them. Ya...I'll be their btich. lol

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Me too. It just baffles me how such basic stuff can continue to be overlooked. I've been involved in markets from life-critical systems to accounting .. even active denial systems for the military. But never was I in a situation where we couldn't "feed back" sensible things to the designers. (Especially when I could look in the mirror and talk to the designer directly.)

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