Stock and choices

[Martin]

Hi

Can anyone on here help me with my new website?

I am building a dedicated website for memory cards www.allmemorycards.co.uk but I have hit a problem.

On my older site, www.tiktak-it.co.uk I allow flash memory product lines to be purchased by customers if I have no stock. If it’s 0 or -20 stock level.

On my new site I thought it would be great to use Choices. I read the advanced user guide on how to show a choice as out of stock. That works only if stock monitoring is enabled and with the Actinic default settings a customer can buy if it is 0 stock, but not negative. To enable a customer to buy if a product line is negative stock I have to turn stock monitoring off. This has the effect of no longer displaying the out of stock message.

The thing is with flash memory, every now and again demand for one particular make and model goes through the roof, such as 2GB Sandisk Gaming Pro Duo cards when the PSP was released. If I haven’t got them my competitors are also having trouble getting them.

For this reason I think it is important that a product line states it is not in stock, and a delay is likely. Not being able to take back orders means they go elsewhere who will take their money and they’ll wait with them.

Now on www.tiktak-it.co.uk I simply use the StockLevel variable, but there is no equivalent for a permutation. The closest variable is IsAssociatedProductInStock, which does not work when I disable stock monitoring, I use Line 50 for that anyway.

Is it possible to create a variable?


Cheers

Martin

[Martin]

This is simply fixed by using AssociatedProduct::StockLevel is anyone cares.

See the top product on the web page below for the result.
http://www.allmemorycards.co.uk/acat...act_Flash.html

Actinic support told me a few months ago such a simple thing was not possible.

[Mike Hughes]

Martin,

Thanks for posting the solution to this. So many times people work things out and don't bother to post back.

I can see this being useful to me later on so it's good to know it can be done.

I quite like the stock levels/leadtime in the dropdown list. Is this covered by actinic and if not can you post the code you use?

Mike

[Martin]

Hi Mike

In the design page click on the drop down box and you should get "<Drop Down Permutation Entry" shown in the layout, double click it.

Then I added "block if AssociatedProduct::StockLevel in stock/block" and " block if 2 - 5 days delivery/block" after the price infromation.
The if statements being simply AssociatedProduct::StockLevel > 0 and AssociatedProduct::StockLevel < 1 respectively.

Martin