Hi All,
Just getting started with FlutterFlow and need some guidance. I tried to research this a little before posting but I feel lost. I just need some pointers, some basic do's and don'ts or any advice for me to consider.
We have a grocery store live on Shopify and our physical store inventory is pushed by our EPOS system via a direct integration to Shopify. We also want to add our store to marketplace aggregators to get more business. Most of these platforms are not well designed and even for a price change on a single product, we have to upload the entire product list or menu in their language (we have about 4,500 products). Luckily the marketplaces all have API’s and I can automate these tasks.
What I want to do is build an app where I can map my categories, add the marketplaces as sales channels, and have a products page where I can control additional information such as per channel pricing, additional categories, product images. Update product changes in FF either automatically or manually and push it to the marketplaces automatically/manually.
Categories: On our website we have over 1000 categories to make it easy to navigate via a hierarchy, but the marketplaces cap categories to 100 max with no hierarchy. I feel this part is fairly easy to build. I can manually insert all the categories to a firebase DB and manually map them to new categories and maintain this in a manual way as it rarely changes. The need for this is; all the products on Shopify are already tagged with the categories they belong to, so instead of adding additional tags/process to my shopify store, I can just add a mapping tool within FF.
Sales Channel: Each sale channel has a different commission rate and particular fields they require for their API integrations. I will store all such data here.
Products: Initially I was thinking of doing an automated GET call to shopify on a daily basis to get the most up to date product information and storing the data in Firebase. Will this cost me an arm and a leg with Firebase usage and is there a more efficient way as I have over 4,500 products?
There may only be 10 products that changed information that day but I have no way to create an automation within Shopify that detects product name, price or image change etc to trigger a http push to my FF app. I can automate product status changes, like a new product was added/deleted or status of product went from Live to Draft to push the product data to FF. (For those not familiar with Shopify, it has a built-in automation tool called Flow where I can build and automate simple condition based tasks/triggers and do a http POST/PUT call).
The other option is, I can add all of the products manually to my Firebase DB and build the automations in Shopify Flow to add/delete or archive products in FF via API calls to sync the product list in Shopify. For product data changes, I can create a Shopify Flow to only trigger when the inventory count of a product increases, meaning we got new stock in and there is a possible price change (this is the most important change to push to marketplaces). With this trigger I can also push all other data such as product name, categories, image etc. I can also train my staff to maintain all changes in FF as they make it in Shopify but I want to automate as much as I can.
Once I have this built, I want to push product data to all of the marketplaces automatically on a daily schedule and build a manual push button should I need to make immediate changes per marketplace.
I then want to build a Picking & Packing App for all orders, whether they come from Shopify or a marketplace, so that my team can scan products with barcodes on their phones in the store to avoid wrong items being picked and the person at the packing station can see the progress on a dashboard and co-ordinate with drivers and dispatch the order for delivery. I can then do further cool things by auto updating the order status on the marketplace and Shopify to avoid the staff having to go to a different app/device or website tab to make such updates.
So my main question really is around the data usage of Firebase and costs to help me decide on the path to take. If you also have any suggestions or advice on the features I am trying to build please let me know.
We are a small family owned grocery store that depends on the local community for their daily or weekly grocery top ups between a big shop and all of the major supermarkets are now trying to kill our business with their on-demand local deliveries via either their own platforms or marketplaces and they have all of the tech stack and buying power to their advantage. This is our little fight back to stay relevant for the future and introduce the same efficiencies in our business as they have. Just pointing this out so you can also feel better for helping me with your suggestions!! 😀