Quick Stock refresh

[Stereo Steve]

Wouldn't it be good to have a quick stock level upload? If you run your stock levels in sage or whatever and have your back end software update the stock levels in actinic every 10 minutes or so, it would be great to be able to quickly fire this up to the website without uploading anything else.

We run a clearance section on ebay but don't bother on the site because the risk of overselling is far too high. Causes loads of work when you do. So, I can get actinic to download orders into sage and adjust stock every 10 minutes completely automatically. I would love to be able to send those stock levels back up to the site with a quick 30 second upload. Doing a full upload every 10 minutes is just unrealistic for a busy site.

Would go a long way to solving a major drawback with actinic.

[Mike Hughes]

If all that's changed since the last update was the stock levels then a site update should only upload the new cat files (and any HTML pages that changed if you're disabling the buy now button or showing stock availability messages).

In this case though, there's still a lot of time taken to check the pages, re-generate best sellers, etc.

It would be nice if there was an option to only upload new cat files and avoid the HTML checking and generation. This would be a much better option for busy sites.

From what I'm seeing though, the demand for actinic to use an online database comes mostly from people wanting better stock control. Would it not be better for actinic to use an online database just for the stock levels (since these are the only things that change in use). Then there'd be no need to create awkward options for updating the website.

Mike

[Stereo Steve]

Yeah, it would but it seems to be a way off so I was thinking of a 'quick fix' that could maybe be implimented easily.

[Mike Hughes]

I don't see a quick fix to your problem though.

If you control stock externally you have to download orders, run your stock program, update actinic's external links, then update the website. (If you use Actinics stock control it's less complicated as you don't have to run the external stock control program).

To make this a seperate Actinic run time option is probably not that easy as I'd be surprised if all the html checking, code generation etc wasn't interlinked with everything else.

Actinic already use the cat files as a stock level database. They just don't update them dynamically as orders are placed. To change them from txt files to an updated database is really very simple and shouldn't have a huge impact on the rest of the operation.

Mike

[leehack]

Nothing more permanent than a temporary solution, this is a really bad idea, online database is a must and the only solution IMO.

[Ginnys Attic]

Actinic already use the cat files as a stock level database. They just don't update them dynamically as orders are placed. To change them from txt files to an updated database is really very simple and shouldn't have a huge impact on the rest of the operation.
Mike

The other trouble here is even the cat files were updated when a product was sold the products actual static html page would also need to be updated to reflect the stock level accordingly so slighty more complex than just updating the cat files or storing the data in a database. I would have thought a decent php coder could quite easily make a mod to do this and update the html page and i would have thought it is certainly not beyond Actinic to integrate a half way decent stock control system which it appears is one of the most requested (just behind Google Checkout) features.