Reporting and metrics (OCC-164)

[Piedone]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Not a problem, per se, just that there's a barrier in you as a webshop owner being able to get details about how your shop performs.

Describe the solution you'd like

I personally don't run an e-commerce site, so I'm just starting the discussion about the concept. I'd imagine we'd have reports, and charts about purchases, inventory, or (have the ability to) integrate with external systems for this. Perhaps we can take the best ideas from Shopify.

In Nwazet.Commerce, @bleroy has built a feature like this, see here.

Describe alternatives you've considered

This is all the thought I've put into this :).

Jira issue

[sarahelsaig]

We should lean on Audit Trail for the event logging side of the equation. I think OC already has built-in Audit Trail events for content item creation and update, right? Of course we should add other (optional) events like Order Status Updated, Cart Updated, inventory events, etc.
Generating reports and charts shouldn't be a responsibility of OCC, although once we have all the parts we should include a sample configuration in the setup recipe. For example if there is some module that uses Queries to return data series and then display that as charts (could be a new feature for Lombiq.ChartJs?) then we can enable that module and add OCC-specific queries in a recipe.

[Piedone]

Audit Trail can do the logging, yep; and for content items this happens already (I'd add things like people updating their shopping cart).

Some charts and reporting can be done by the payment provider, but only if it has information not just about the raw sales volume, but also about item and customers. So, you need to be able to ask it questions like "What are my most popular items by number of sales? What are my most successful items by the sales volume in $? Where do the people live who are my customers?"

Inventory management (e.g. what are the items we're running low on?) needs its own reporting in OCC.

[sarahelsaig]

I didn't mean reporting done by the payment provider. We have to provide the data points (like what are the best selling products in a time period? in Nwazet) but then presenting this on HTML/PDF/XLSX as charts or tables is not a task specific to OCC. Even if we have to implement it, probably shouldn't be under the OrchardCore.Commerce namespace because that's functionality non-commerce OC sites can use just as well.

[Piedone]

I can't comment on the namespaces or other structuring, perhaps yes. What's necessary in the end, is that people using OCC can see reports like the ones mentioned above (but I'm just throwing in ideas, I don't run an e-commerce site), regardless of where the code lives or whether we need to implement it or we can use external services.

I mentioned reporting available via the payment provider because that might be a way out without coding reporting ourselves, since something like Stripe can already do reporting (but it might need more details coming from OCC to be really useful). (See e.g. here.