With hundreds of vendors and tens of thousands of products, MainStem decided to make procuring on the platform a bit easier by installing product relationships.
All sorts of business types within the cannabis industry come to MainStem for all of their supplies, everything except the bud. In building the supplier core network, we knew their would be redundancies when it came to the products so in order to create a procurement platform we needed to make comparing individual items more streamlined. MainStem landed on product grouping; a visible relationship between a parent and its child products.
A parent product is the generic item, has no price and is not purchasable. The parent is basically the glue that holds its children together. Each one of the product cards below is considered a parent product. The key is the "View Suppliers" button, which will then pop up a modal to show all of the suppliers who offer that product.
A child product is the sellable item, it has a price/SKU, weight, etc all of the product details. The child is what the customers compare with other children within the same parent product. Each outline represents a child product that a supplier offers. This modal allows our customers to quickly review their available choices for an individual product. Product grouping helps all of our suppliers in a similar way; customers will see their options every time they shop.
Product grouping streamlines the procuring of tens of thousands of products for our customers. Rather than having several tabs open to compare details of the same product, with MainStem our customers can quickly make their purchasing decisions because they are able to view all suppliers of a given product. Because shoppers are viewing all suppliers when making their decisions, shoppers are granted greater visibility with product grouping as well.