A Backend for a Bitcoin store
This project aims to eventually become a bitcoin based store api, including sections for inventory managment, product searches, accepting bitcoin payments, and fulfillment.
Currently, very little of this functionality is present.
Inventory Management
Somewhere, our store has a warehouse that holds products that we want to sell. We need to track these products in order to sell them.
Generally, there are two large categories of products - fungible and non-fungible. Fungible products are ones where the individual product items are essentially interchangeable. These products are identified by a SKU, they have a short name, a long description, a per-unit-price (usually in USD), and a shipping weight. However, the quantity on hand can just be represented by a number. An example of a fungible item:
Wooden Pencil, Yellow, #2, Pre-Sharpened, 30-pack SKU 12341234 Unit Price: $3.00 Shipping Weight: 0.1 kg Color: Yellow Amount in Stock: 973
Non-fungible inventory has more or less the same data descibing a product, but each item of inventory is unique, and as such it has a serial number that is unique to its product line. Also, non-fungible items may have individual descriptions. An example of a non-fungible item:
Motorcyle, Honda CB750F SKU 91919191 Shipping Weight: 200 kg
Stock Item: SKU 91919191 Color: Yellow SN: VIN1234134134 Notes: Stratches on the clearcoat on the fuel tank. Price: $3200
The inventory api should include methods to add new products, edit existing products. For fungible products, there should be a way to update the current supply. For non-fungible products there should be a way to add and edit particular product items.
Also, in anticipation of interfacing with a shopping cart, there should be some api calls that can be used to reserve some products while the user shops. These reservations can be ended in at least three different ways - the first way happens when a purchase is finalized, and the items are then removed from the inventory and transferred to the (as yet unwritten) fullfillment service. The second way is that the user can explicity remove an item from his cart, in which case the cart will arrange to call the inventory api removing the reservation. In the third case, reservations are only valid for a certain amount of time (perhaps an hour). After that time, a backend cleanup job will come through and automatically remove the reservation.
Product Searches
TBD
Bitcoin Payments
TBD
Fulfillment
TBD