We are updating our product_commissions addon to provide greater flexibility for MVE customers (and a little for non-MVE customers). I.e.mostly the ability to set individual/different commissions for specific products or categories with some degree of integration into the Vendor Plans addon.
The addon was originally developed to allow one to track commissions for products or categories and to generate reports of those commissions so you can make payments to suppliers. While it was originally created to provide support to artists for things like photographs, and other digital imagery, it lends itself to being useful in the MVE environment for allowing different commissions by product or category.
So here's what we're working on and since we have the project open, I'd like some input on any other desires you might have.
1) Import of Vendors and Suppliers into the product commissions affiliates data (the addon's sense of who gets commissions). Reference is kept to Vendor/Supplier related id's for further extension.
2) Categories can now select "Vendors" or "Suppliers" in addition to a specific affiliate. This means that the commission will be applied to the underlying Supplier or Vendor of the product versus all products in that category being applied to a specific affiliate (though specific affiliates are still supported).
3) Vendors/Suppliers can have a default commission associated with them. Hence if none of the above commissions are set and a product is related to a specific Vendor/Supplier that Vendor/Supplier's default commission will be used if non-zero. Otherwise no commission will be applied to that product. This can (and probably should be) the same as the Vendor Plans 'commission' amount though we use a slightly different syntax since we support absolute and percentage commissions.
4) We are working on having the option to modify the Vendor Plans payout amount. However, cs-cart seems to be reluctant to give us the hook we have requested but we believe we can work around it with some minor caveats. I.e. any additional revenue not associated with a cart['products'], shipping or payment_surcharge would not be included in calculating the vendor commission. But we will add a hook of our own in the addon to allow for extended commission calculation. This mostly affects addons that can apply custom fees to an order. Those fees would not be commissionable by default.
The current documentation (does not include all changes above) is here.
We welcome any thoughts/ideas you may have. Specifically we'd like to know if you would find this set of features useful and/or any additional thoughts you might have on them. We are also interested in any thoughts you might have in general on Vendor Plan payouts and how they can be better. Our thoughts are things like: Having different commissions for different components (I.e. shipping, payment_surcharge, shipping_freight, products), etc. rather than just one commission percentage for everything and then either it's all or nothing for shipping and/or payment_surcharge.
We are also looking at creating an addon that would Bind a "request to be a vendor" to an order so that when an order is paid it could optionally trigger the activation of the Vendor or simply be an additional step for the Admin to verify BEFORE enabling the Vendor account. But that's a separate addon under consideration.
Look forward to your thoughts.
Tony Birnseth
EZ Merchant Solutions