Showing Real Time Stock Display on Filter / Search Results

[GraemeKustom]

Hey all,

Anyone found any magical way of achieving this?

Currently running a V10 installation but it's time to drag my site to the new version. Current site uses a combination of Norman's hack to turn search results into buyable products, and an old plugin from Todd Designs that allowed Real Time Stock levels to be displayed on additional pages, and those combined meant I could run searches that looked and behaved exactly like section pages, with both add to cart and stock info available to see without having to click through to the product page.

I get that the search / filter stuff works differently in later versions, and that's it not as simple as just calling the RTS to display on the filter, it brings up a coding error and doesn't work. At the moment though, the 2016 design means that I can set up a filter, or type in a search, but can't see if the item is actually available until clicking through to the next page, and I think that's really offputting to customers - admittedly my stock levels can vary a lot, so there's often items listed, but not always available right away. Would expect it to get frustrating for customers to keep going back and forth from filtered page to product page just to see what they actually can buy.

Anyone cracked it already, or think they can, or maybe any inside knowledge that this is high up on the to do list for the next release?

Would have thought this would be something that a lot of people would want, but happy to accept that I may be in the minority and if it needs to be bespoke work so be it. Way beyond my skills so ready and willing to pay any genius able to deliver

Cheers,

Graeme

[Mike Hughes]

I can think of two ways of approaching this and I'm sure there are probably others.

1. You can exclude 'out of stock' products from the results.

2. Use PHP to add the required information to the product description (for example) based on the available stock. i.e. you could add either 'Sold Out' or '3 in stock' and include some formatting as appropriate.

The first option is a standard feature of sellerdeck.

The second one is going to be hard as the content is handled dynamically so you can't put the PHP in the search results layout. I remember Gabe at one time had some PHP that reached into the database so potentially you could add the required text to the product description or product name by doing that. It is complicated though and I'm not convinced it's going to be the best approach.

Edit: What I think would work (although not in RT) is to

1. Use PHP to add '** 3 In Stock**' or '** Sold Out **' to the product name field in the database as appropriate. (I think this is possible in sellerdeck - It could easily be done by an external program such as excel)

2. Use another PHP routine in your normal layouts to parse the product name and remove the addded text where you don't want it displayed.

Mike

[GraemeKustom]

Hi Mike

Thanks for the feedback!

Admittedly the goal would be to display the realtime stock level, so as not to be in a position for items that are 1 in stock, sell, and so if the website was not refreshed (say, overnight) it would be displaying the wrong stock level if it wasn't using the RTS mode.

I have a worrying feeling I'm expecting too much from Sellerdeck on this one, I'd messaged both drillpine and Tod Designs who have done custom work for us in the past but been advised that it's (to paraphrase) pretty complicated.

Trouble is being that I already have the RTS working great on the current site, on product pages, section pages, search results, but the site itself is getting dated as it was originally built in 2009 and upgraded with RTS in 2011 and the whole thing looks past it's date so I don't want to stick with it much longer.

But don't want to be going one step forward, one step back

[Mike Hughes]

I suspect to do this in RT you'll need to edit the AJAX/ Jquery that sellerdeck uses to show the RTS values.

It shouldn't be too difficult for someone who knows what they're doing (which rules me out). The current routines are set to pick up their limited subset of product data and the stock data has already been made available for the normal RTS display.

For reliability and ease of use I'd probably suggest putting in a feature request to sellerdeck. It seems like a useful feature to have (along with some other bits it would be nice to access in the filtered results) and if Sellerdeck have structured the code properly it shouldn't be too difficult for them to add in some extra fields.

Mike

[GraemeKustom]

For reliability and ease of use I'd probably suggest putting in a feature request to sellerdeck. It seems like a useful feature to have (along with some other bits it would be nice to access in the filtered results) and if Sellerdeck have structured the code properly it shouldn't be too difficult for them to add in some extra fields.

Totally agreed about useful - I think it's crazy it's not already implemented, it's like one of the basic rules of web sales to be able to show customers info quickly without them having to make extra clicks to find out if something is available or not.

It's on the wishlist now - reference (WL-493) should anyone else want to +1 their agreement.

I made a ticket this morning and advised to contact sales to speak about managed services - maybe something they can do bespoke, will advise on outcome once I've done that.

'Managed services' sounds worryingly expensive but shall see!

[malbro]

Totally agreed about useful - I think it's crazy it's not already implemented, it's like one of the basic rules of web sales to be able to show customers info quickly without them having to make extra clicks to find out if something is available or not.

It's on the wishlist now - reference (WL-493) should anyone else want to +1 their agreement.

I made a ticket this morning and advised to contact sales to speak about managed services - maybe something they can do bespoke, will advise on outcome once I've done that.

'Managed services' sounds worryingly expensive but shall see!

This should be possible as the latest RTS includes calls to get product stock for each product, an ajax call from the search javascript should be able to do this for you.