Allow only one customer category per catalog?

[lecoqlibre]

Do we want a catalog to only contain catalog-items/offers offered to only a certain customer category?

Currently catalog items can be offered to different customer categories. Do we really need this as it can make the UI/UX a bit more complicated?

What use cases do you have @datafoodconsortium/standard_maintainers? Do the producers want to manage different customer categories inside their catalogs ? How do they use the catalog feature ? For instance are they making catalog per season or catalog by customer category (like one for individuals and one for professionals) ?

Allowing only one customer category per catalog would make the UI/UX simpler but we have to be sure that it is sufficient.

[RaggedStaff]

The CustomerCategory links to the Offer, not the CatalogItem. Offer is specifically built around a Price- my understanding of that being that differentCustomerCategoriescan be offered the sameCatalogItem` at different price points (e.g. discounts for members, armed forces personnel or 1st responders).

I see that as different to having separate catalogs, which might relate to seasonal availability of products, or perhaps a different brand/offer (e.g. retail vs wholesale).

[mkllnk]

What use cases do you have?

The Open Food Network uses tags to offer discounts to customers in different ways. So if a customer is tagged as member then they may receive a discount during checkout. In our data model, customers can have multiple tags. And the catalog can be associated to multiple tags.

We were thinking that we could model these tags as customer category. In that case our model would allow multiple categories per catalog.

For example, I could imagine a catalog being available for staff and wholesale customers. But looking at the ontology, this could be easily modeled by having an offer per category. So potatoes are offered to the public at $3, offered to staff members at $2 and offered to wholesale customers at $2.

I'm not sure I understand the original question because I don't exactly know your plans. Are you thinking of linking a customer category to a catalog object instead of offer? So we would need a catalog per customer category, duplicate catalog items per product for each catalog and an offer for each catalog item? That sounds like a lot of data duplication.