Order quantity greater than stock level

[martinkay]

Just a quick query, what is supposed to happen if a customer adds a quantity of an item to their basket which is more than the remaining stock level, and, the system is set to suspend when less than 1; will it still let them place the order, and is there any warning given?

[acompton]

I believe it lets them place the order, without a warning. I certainly does in V7 (which I use) and one of the reasons I haven't bothered to upgrade, is this 'feature' has never been resolved (and its big nuisance for me). There is an offline back-ordering system that lets you handle fallout from these types of order.

[RuralWeb]

lots of posts on this subject. actinic has stock monitoring not stock control. If you have the setup you describe customers can buy a million items with any warning. Only when you download the order is the stock level updated. If you require a high level of stock control then actinic is not for you

[martinkay]

I appreciate that, and I know that it's not an exact science because you may have done an off-line sale and not updated Actinic for instance, however I just wondered if there could be some sort of message along the lines of "hello, you seem to have added more of these to your cart than may be available, please check with the retailer to confirm stock levels" if number ordered > stock apparently remaining.

[RuralWeb]

have you searched the forum or read the aug which will show the available options.

[martinkay]

There's nothing in the AUG as far as I can see, or the KB. In the forum the only solutions I can see are "Jan's stock control mole" but I didn't really want to shell out extra cash for something which is surely just a few extra lines in the Actinic perl script somewhere. It's a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, having a separate routine to copy available stock to max orderable and keep uploading at regular intervals. In my case, something will sit on a shelf for months on end, I have one left, and then a customer orders two of them and wonders why he has been allowed to buy and pay for two when only one is available. I just need a friendly message "may be only 1 left, is this okay?" to show in the checkout process to prevent any possible accusations of customers' money being taken under false pretences.

[leehack]

Probably best to add the current stock levels onto your product layout then, using the stock level variables that are available.

[RuralWeb]

I see lee reads the aug

[martinkay]

I know I could put the stock levels on the product layout, but for many of the slow-churn items I do only have one or two in stock, for reasons of space, and I think it would look bad if lots of my products had a "stock remaining: 1" line on them - it also tells my competitors selling the same products which ones are not selling very fast, as we're always checking out each others' sites and prices. So I'd prefer that a low stock level was only notified to the customers who need to know. Anyway it seems that's not possible without the "mole". Thank you for your time gentlemen.

[Jan]

but I didn't really want to shell out extra cash for something which is surely just a few extra lines in the Actinic perl script somewhere

Even if you add something to the script to check the current order against the number in stock then you can still oversell because 10 customers could come along and buy the same item. You have to upload and download in order to get the online stock updated with sales- unless you are planning to keep a track of 'sold' stock online.

Regards,

[Darren B]

Jan has some great tools that will automate upload and download to help keep stock more real time (see the post above for details)

But i can see that stock monitoring is being confused again for stock control.

Actinic can never prevent you from ordering more than avaliable without some serious changes, these changes are going to cost and i doubt it will be a couple of lines of script changes if it was im sure this would have already been done by now.

[martinkay]

Well for the moment I have found a form of words for a low stock notification for the lowest stock items and added in a condition to the product layout. It won't alert customers when they want to order 5 and I've only got 4 for example but it's a start. If it becomes more of an issue I will get in touch with you Jan.

[NormanRouxel]

Another way might be to add some JavaScript to the product form that pops up an alert if the stocklevel is lower than a certain level. This makes it harder for competitors to see your stock. E.g. In your <head> area put

<script type="text/javascript">
<!-- 
function stockwarn(slevel){
  if(slevel < 2) 
   {
   alert('Only ' + slevel + ' in stock!');
   }
  return true;
}
// -->
</script>

And in your product FORM tag put

onsubmit="return stockwarn(<actinic:variable name="StockLevel" />);"

If you were using Quantity on Product Page, you could expand this to detect the amount entered and use that in the comparison.

[martinkay]

That sounds just the ticket, I will give that a try, thanks Norman.

[TraceyHand]

Right, I logged into this over the weekend but couldn't bring myself to post a long reply from my phone so, now I'm home, here goes!

Actinic itself 'monitors' stock, at the back end, nothing more. It doesn't control stock or how much people order online, period.

If your stock is crucial, you have 2 options.
a) Don't use Actinic
b) Use an add-on such as Mole End's "Stock control mole"

In order to strictly control stock, you need to
a) ensure product stock levels are up to date at all times and
b) ensure that your max qty orderable (in the 'details' tab) remains at the same level (or lower) as your stock level to avoid order ordering.

The only way to do this is to download after EVERY order and upload EVERY time stock levels change.
However, doing this in Actinic alone will NOT be enough as it doesn't match the max qty orderable to the total stock level meaning someone can order more than you have in stock (I've been griping about this for YEARS)

Mole End's Stock Control Mole, however, DOES do this (it's an optional setting) which means that you can schedule your downloads and choose if you want to upload after every order, upload every time stock levels change or upload every time something goes out of stock.
You can also get it to match that all important 'max qty orderable' level to the number in stock to avoid a single customer overordering.

Mine is set to do this every 10 mins (it checks the server for order files before actioning the 'download' sequence in Actinic) and it uploads if/when stock is affected (which, in my case, is every time)

If your stock control, even on only a few items, is important, then you NEED this.

It's not infallible.
If you're a VERY busy store then more than one customer 'could' feasibly come along and order at the same time, or before the 'mole' has downloaded/uploaded new levels.
If your standard store upload takes a LONG time, then this is also going to be an issue (it shouldn't, however, if all it's doing is altering stock levels but it does depend on your store/design/other factors)

Basically, if stock 'control' ONLINE is so important that the above isn't enough to keep it manageable then, IMO, Actinic is the wrong software to be using.

Just my opinion, obviously. As someone who stocks over a thousand 'one-off' items, I truly sympathise with anyone who has stock issues, I do.

Who knows? Maybe V20 will have realtime stock control