[mv] Re: How to internationalize pricing properly?

[Toni Mueller <support-minivend@oeko.net>]

******    message to minivend-users from Toni Mueller <support-minivend@oeko.net>     ******



Hello!

First, thank you for pointing to CommonAdjust.

On Thu, Aug 17, 2000 at 09:37:57AM -0400, Mike Heins wrote:
> Quoting Toni Mueller (support-minivend@oeko.net):
> > How does you tackle this problem? How do you model the
> > different tax laws, customs, currency problems, and
> > transport costs around pricing?

I would like to offer a product that has a different price
depending on where you want to buy it, and would also
like to be able to take into account taxes and customs
and such. Europeans may think of the case where a car
costs wildly different amounts of money depending on
which country one buys it in.

> You mentioned Locale, so I assume you have looked at setting
> PriceDivide and PriceField per locale.

Yes. I already have augmented the products table to include
a currency string like "USD" in every column to denote the
currency the price is in.

> I still don't get how you plan on modeling the rules, but you can

The actual rules will be determined by the user of the shop.
He says what goods he wants to offer at which price, and how
the price should vary when selling to foreign countries.

> That will pull a base price out of the appropriate products table, then
> run your adjust UserTag which is expected to return a CommonAdjust
> atom adjusting, not setting, the price. The current base price is
> available as $s, the quantity as $q, and the item hash as $item. That
> last is important, because if you wanted to display each item's price
> in a separate currency you could.

Ok. :)


> every price calculation.  When I have done this, I usually do a once-a-day
> setting of PriceDivide in a locale table.

Of course I don't want to do real-time updates. But what I want is
to avoid daily manual updates of a locale table for a dozen (more?)
currencies. I also don't want to need to restart/reconfigure the
server every day, so I want one program to put this into a data base
and Minivend to grab it from there.

> All of this messes up the subtotals and total_costs. But it would
> not be too difficult to define order Route definitions to charge
> each type separately.

Hmm. So there _is_ something left to be done ;)


Thank you!


Best Regards,
--Toni++

PS: I'm looking at Interchange with greedy eyes. Should I go for it
    _now_? Or how much will change in the next six months that will void
    my development efforts and/or create maintenance needs?

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