Bulk products integration

Bulk products are products that are sold in shops without packaging. The consumers fills a container s/he brought her/himself or is offered by the shop. This way the consumer can buy as much as needed and there is no impact on the environment due to the consumer packaging. The shop keeper buys the product in bulk packaging and keeps the containers filled up.

OFF can support these kind of products by creating products without barcode, such as this one. The advent of OFF prices allows us to do things a bit differently.

But this raises also other issues that will be discussed. The end goal is to update OFF with Bulk products entered on OFF Prices.

Bulk product categories

OFF Prices allows the user to enter the prices of bulk products. For each product the user has to specify a category. As the variety of bulk products is not very large, there is no need to expose the user to the complexities of the Categories taxonomy, which consists of 72.000 products. A subset of the categories taxonomy is sufficient for OFF Prices.

Virtually all products are sold with a barcode on the packaging. Which product categories are however also available without "official" barcode. This will be a very small subset of the categories taxonomy. For prices we need to identify these product categories.

The identification of these bulk categories will be done by adding a property to each relevant category. The property sales_format will indicate whether that category is also sold by bulk. This can be by weight (for example almonds), by volume (for example olive oil) or by item (for example lemons).

By adding this property to each category that is sold as bulk, OFF Prices can figure out what categories need to be shown to the user.

Unfortunately the category name corresponding to the bulk product can be very extensive. For instance bulk almonds are only sold shelled, whole, unsalted, unroasted and unblanched. To simplify the category a specific convenience category has been created, called raw almonds.