The Use Case is partial fulfillment of orders.

About to install Commerce, just want to sense-check how I'll configure to get this functionality. The idea of individual statuses for line items was mentioned here: http://www.drupalcommerce.org/node/79 but I haven't seen anything else on it.

Our specific scenario is that we run a community bulk food buyers group, using Ubercart 6 (http://www.dulra.org/ecoshop). We don't carry stock: customers order online and once a week we pull up a simple view which collect all products that have been ordered in the past week, ie line items from orders with Status "New Order" "Processing" or "Payment Received". This list of products is submitted to our supplier, who then ship the items to us. When we break these shipments out into individual customer orders. Invariably there are some missing items, so we will need to flag these for reorder the following week.

So my approach would be to have a status for individual line items as well as the overall order status. Orders that are still incomplete could have line items with a mix of statuses, we'd want an easy way to update all line item statuses for the current week's orders (single screen rather than going into individual orders), and be able to use these when generating the list of products to be ordered for the following week. It would also be good to generate a email (Rules?) to the customer informing him of the delay.

Possibly related Use Case is where an item that was ordered is no longer available. Ideally we'd be able to signify this by a simple change of status in the same line item list, set up a Rule that would update the corresponding order total, and under certain conditions, trigger a Paypal refund and email to the customer explaining the situation.

I'm about to install Commerce quickstart and try doing this, but if there's a ready-made solution or a better approach to addressing this Use Case, I'd love to hear about it!

Mike