Recommerce orders are dynamic and non-linear: from pick-pack-ship-receive-inspect-refurbish-restock

Karri: The third fundamental is that orders are non-linear and dynamic.

Tuomo: It's connected to that life cycle thinking that individual items have life cycles, but so do orders. Let's say in linear commerce the order life cycle is quite often it's just pick, pack and ship. You have something, someone buys it, you need to pick it up, you need to pack it and then you need to ship it to the right place. But in re-commerce we have the pick, pack, ship, receive, inspect, grade, maybe re-forberish, maybe re-stock or maybe re-cycle. We start to have maybe if-else kind of logic built into it and doesn't necessarily start from pick, it might start from receiving and kind of figuring out what an item is, what is it made out of. It is extremely product specific whether you need to go through all of the phases or some of the phases. It's even brand specific in some operations. So the life cycle is a lot more dynamic in terms of what happens next. It's defined by a complex ruleset. Also the stages are not like it's more circular in nature when you look at it as a whole. So for example, booking or giving out stuff and then you're assuming that they come back. That's kind of connected to the idea. It kind of comes from it defines and also comes from the temporality that things are circular in nature and what happens between two customer usages is a lot more dynamic environment. Especially the more large scale refurbishment you for example run. It might be that you have a network of refurbishers that you use and then there's a complex ruleset on where items go, to which refurbishers based on model or again grading or market or whatever. So that's kind of the dynamic nature and the more complex nature of order fulfilment. The most complex thing that I might figure out is like a single customer inside a single order like a checkout or purchase might trade in an old item, might buy a subscription to a phone and buy a few add-on products like a gorilla glass and maybe a subscription to a refurbishment insurance or whatever. So your checkout has one product coming in, one physical product going out, one going out in form of a booking or subscription, one being digital service. You have a lot more complex baskets also happening. All kind of happening the same context of an order if we think that an order is being defined by a customer doing a checkout for example in your online store.

Karri: And it can also, let's say somebody just comes and actually sells you if you have a buyback program. They just sell you so the checkout might actually be just completely reverse.

Tuomo: Yeah, it's kind of, I'm checking out an order where I'm assuming to give you an item worth $100. As a consumer when I leave that checkout I'm kind of leaving with the idea that I will get $100 if my declaration of the item matches the merchant's assumption of the condition and the pricing they've defined there. So even in that simple sounding example that it's a buyback that hey I'm coming and I'm selling my used, let's say like a phone, default, let's say that based on my definition it's worth $100 but that might actually not be like the checkout is that hey I'm giving you a phone and you give me $100 but it actually, the first thing might be that it's inspected and created and that's when you kind of confirm that is it actually worth $100 or less or more. And then is that $100 paid in cashback or discounts or whatever. But it's a lot more complex and dynamic when it comes to orders also. And then we could throw in the aspect that if you are running for example a rental business, let's say a ski resort is running their rentals. An order can also have multiple people in it. If I'm renting, let's say, our family would go out renting skis. Each one of us would have different size of skis and all of those need to be assigned to individual customers. They might be prepared based on our skill levels and orders are not only more dynamic in what they can hold as a value proposition but also they can involve a lot more customers. That also brings a lot of complexity. So you have zero to unlimited number of customers, zero to unlimited amount of catalog items, zero to unlimited number of inventory articles. And the inventory articles can be going out or coming in. And then your pricing might be temporal, it might have deposits in it and you might be giving out cash. So it's a lot more dynamic and complex, order object.

Karri: And I assume also the pricing can be also dynamic so based on the seasonality or what?

Tuomo: Yeah, like in old school linear world it could be like loyalty status, sure. But then if you're selling access to goods, so for example, short-term rentals, the pricing might, it's usually connected to the duration. Renting something for a day and a week usually has a different rate to be used. So temporality is kind of riddled in all of this.