Medusa currently has "Products". Can it also have "Services"?

[SaadBazaz]

(Based on the issue #2520)

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

A project I'm building; they sell products (e.g. car rims) and also services (e.g. car wash).

Why?

Medusa seems like it'll dominate the upcoming open-source Product space for a while. What if it could also cover "Services", and become an all-in-one E-Commerce (Products + Services) solution? We could have just one Medusa doing it all; Products, Services, User Management, CMS (Strapi), and more.

Describe the solution you'd like

A Service could be a special kind of "Product" which can possibly have:

• No quantity (or infinite quantity)
• Special dates/times (calendar) on which it's available (Like a booking/appointment)
• Inputs from the user
• ??
  Open for discussion.
  This could be an official Medusa Plugin, and could have a special place in the Admin Panel.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• Having separate forms for each service
• Using a 3rd party appointment scheduler
• Google Forms

[srindom]

Would be great to understand in what areas the current product model falls short of being able to support your needs. In the description you give above, I think there would be a reasonably straightforward path to supporting your needs. Namely:

• When adding a "service product" to cart specify the service related properties in metadata. E.g.:
  • item.metadata.date = [appointment date]
  • item.metadata.user_input = { ... object with user details }
• Quantity for the service would always be 1

This would be done with something like:

POST /store/carts/:id/line-items
{
  variant_id: "id to the variant representing the service",
  quantity: 1,
  metadata: {
    ...
  }
}

I understand that defining the properties that could be customized is not supported well right now, but would be good to understand what you think of the approach above?

[SaadBazaz]

Hmm. Well of course that's how it seems like it'll work under the hood. I guess it's more about the user experience. E.g

• being able to filter services Vs products,
• assign/connect Users to services (e.g. an appointment with the employee Paul),
• a "Calendar" view in the medusa dashboard which gives a view of current appointments
• Subscription functionality (reoccurring payments)

This way it might work for a SaaS product, too.

[pmltechpile]

Your solution is ultimately what I have planned to implement for a client of mine that offers cooking classes. Although doable, it seems a bit hacky to what Medusa already offers and reading @SaadBazaz's idea and layout I'd love to see that be a feature as well.

[laurent512]

Would be interested about that too !

[ddresch]

In our case, it is not only the two different types of products. If you think about event business like coaches, hairdressers etc. all businesses who sell time slots (time-based services) also the above example with car wash is like that. Imagine you need to book time slots of like 1 hour etc.

Is there already a kind of integration for use case like that?

[JonathanRiche]

Would also be interested in this as well!

[jwoa]

Same here! Been looking for something like this and it seems like we may have to go the DIY route for now.

[robodove]

The configuration of services is highly domain-specific (some might need dates, some might need much more information or different kind of information)

For medusa this doesn't really make sense to implement, since there is no general purpose solution?
Services are products. If you need to specify additional data around the product, then use the metadata field?

We are doing it that way at least. And our configurator (currently in development) is a mix of physical products + services (installation/construction mainly).

So far the internal tests have been successful. It requires actually developing on your own though, and medusa gives you the options to do so

[robodove]

For calendar integration, consider using apps like cal.com

[robodove]

Well, the amount of physical products depends on the customers needs (we developed a planning tool for that, similar to how IKEA does wardrobe planning).

The installation bit is currently under development, will likely integrate a calendar solution like cal.com to get bookings integrated.

[robodove]

and tbh, for your mentioned use cases in your other comment, like hairdressers, etc. something like cal.com is probably sufficient, since you can also handle payments over there. Fitting medusa into that niche seems odd to me.

[ddresch]

Thanks for your quick response. You are right for a simple one-person hairdresser business, it is not worth the overhead of medusa. The thing is my real use case is the management and selling of escape rooms which is depending on a fixed schedule and multiple (n) rooms per location. I was checking cal.com in the past already and figured it is not the perfect fit, but maybe I need another deep look and tests.

Maybe you know the WooCommerce ecosystem, there we have a Plugin called Bookings which allows you to define so-called bookable products. As I understand cal.com I'm able to define time slots, but I would need to map the actual product with these bookings. Doable of course!

[robodove]

On Cal, you can have multiple calendars, each bookable.
If you wanted to go Medusa <-> Cal, you can create a calendar per room per location.
Rooms in Locations would be Products on the Medusa end, having a calendar on the cal end

For a successful order, users have to have a booking selected on the calendar (your frontend should catch this at least)

[robodove]

Booking, availabilities etc are a huge pain to build, so i would hope that medusa instead focuses on the core - having a general purpose solid ecommerce base!