Gap: E-Commerce & Product Fulfillment

Status: 🔴 Out of Scope Priority: Low (future consideration) Estimated Effort: TBD

What's Missing

The platform has a product catalog (physical goods like resistance bands, braces, supplements) and can associate products with service plans. But it does not handle:

• Order management — no order lifecycle (pending → confirmed → shipped → delivered)
• Standalone product sales — no way to sell a product outside of a service plan
• Fulfillment tracking — no shipping status, tracking numbers, or delivery confirmation
• Courier integration — no connection to shipping providers for automated status updates
• Product payment processing — no checkout flow for physical products
• Inventory management — no stock tracking
• Shopping cart / storefront — no patient-facing product browsing or purchasing

Current State

Products exist as a reference catalog only:

• products table stores name, description, price, and metadata
• service_plan_products associates products with service plans (informational)
• appointment.additional_product_ids records specialist product recommendations
• Product sales and fulfillment happen offline — at the clinic counter or through external channels

Why Out of Scope

This is a clinical platform, not an e-commerce platform. The core value is telerehabilitation, scheduling, and clinical workflows. Building a fulfillment system (order management, shipping integration, inventory) would add significant complexity with minimal clinical value. Clinics that need e-commerce can use external tools (Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.) alongside the platform.

If Revisited

If product fulfillment becomes necessary (e.g., clinics selling devices directly through the platform), consider:

1. Simple internal tracking — a patient_product_orders table with basic status (pending → delivered), managed manually by staff. No courier integration.
2. External integration — connect to an existing e-commerce platform via webhooks/API for order and fulfillment management.
3. Full e-commerce — build a storefront, cart, checkout, and fulfillment system. This is a major undertaking and should be treated as a separate product initiative.

Option 1 is the most likely path if needed — staff marks "we gave the patient the resistance band" in the system. But even this is deferred until there's a concrete need.

Previously Documented (Removed)

The following were previously documented in the services feature spec and schema but have been removed:

• patient_product_orders table with full fulfillment lifecycle
• Standalone product sales flow
• Automatic order creation on service plan enrollment
• Fulfillment queue for staff
• RLS policies for patient_product_orders