Dual Visibility Settings

The Need

Mills actively separate the markets for their primary products (jumbo rolls) and byproducts (side-trims). A mill selling jumbo rolls in South America will ship side-trims to Southeast Asia specifically to prevent channel conflict. See wiki/concepts/side-trims-and-jumbo-rolls for the full context.

This means a single set of visibility rules per mill is insufficient. The mill needs to configure:

1. Production lot visibility: Which countries/regions can see surplus from planned production runs
2. Side-trim visibility: Which countries/regions can see side-trim inventory (typically entirely different markets)

Design Principles

Visibility as the Top Priority

The Varsovia meeting established that geographic visibility control is the number-one mill concern -- not price, not volume, not terms. If a mill cannot control who sees their surplus, they will not list it.

Trader Opacity Problem

Real-world example: a Chinese trader buys from a mill, claims the paper is going to Morocco, but ships it to Venezuela. The mill unknowingly competes with its own clients. The platform must enforce visibility at the system level, making it impossible for a buyer outside the allowed geography to even see the listing.

Per-Item Overrides

While mill-wide defaults handle most cases, specific surplus items may need their own visibility rules. A particular lot might be restricted to a single country, while the mill's general side-trim inventory is open to a broader region.

Implementation in the MVP

Phase 4 (Geographic Visibility) built the VisibilityRule model with:

• Rule types: allow or deny
• Scope hierarchy: region -> country -> city
• Scope assignment: rules can be mill-wide defaults (surplus_item_id is null) or per-surplus-item overrides
• Price adjustments: optional per-rule price modifier (e.g., higher price for certain regions)
• Integration: the matching algorithm in Phase 3 respects visibility filters, so a buyer in a denied region never sees matches from that mill

Current Limitation

The MVP model uses a single set of visibility rules per mill/item. The "dual" concept -- explicitly separate configuration interfaces for production lots vs. side-trims -- was identified in the Varsovia meeting but is not yet reflected as a first-class UI separation. The underlying model supports it (rules can be attached to individual items), but the UX does not yet guide the mill through configuring two distinct visibility profiles.

Future Enhancement

A future iteration should:

1. Classify surplus items as "production" or "side-trim" (via the surplus_source enum, which already includes side_trim as a value)
2. Provide separate visibility configuration screens: "Where can buyers see your production surplus?" and "Where can buyers see your side-trims?"
3. Apply the appropriate visibility rules automatically based on item classification
4. Show mills a map visualization of their visibility footprint per product category

Sources

• raw/notes/varsovia-meeting -- where the dual visibility concept was discussed

Related

• wiki/concepts/side-trims-and-jumbo-rolls -- the product distinction driving this feature
• wiki/concepts/kyb-upfront -- complementary trust mechanism
• wiki/summaries/varsovia-meeting-summary -- full meeting context
• wiki/summaries/checklist-summary -- Phase 4 visibility implementation
• wiki/summaries/discoveries-summary -- VisibilityRule model details