Over-Selling and Attribute

[oliverm]

I have my hands at the ready to bury my face if needs be...

I have developed my first Actinic site (on Catalog v9.0.2/3) for clients (www.angeljackson.co.uk) and it's all working and orders are coming in thick and fast. I keep keep getting calls to tell me that the site has let people buy more items than are listed in stock. I have set stock monitoring to "on" with suspend below 1. I have been racking my brains trying to figure out what's wrong and today I did a test - downloaded the orders and republished the site. And one of the previously still available but out of stock items disappeared.

Am I going mad...does Actinic REALLY not monitor stock?!?!

If not what workarounds exist? I guess I could write something in sql/php/ajax/javascript to live monitor stock and hide options dynamically but that seems to me to be an absurd amount of effort to fix this.

The company sells high-value, limited-edition items...not the best thing to over sell!

Also, with a product sold with options that affect stock levels (i.e. colour) the product doesn't seem to go out of stock even if all available options are sold out. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong here? Can IsInStock not be made to check this?

Thanks a million for your help!

[TraceyG]

Actinic has never included real time stock monitoring. The stock is monitored on the desktop when orders are downloaded and if an item goes out of stock it is reflected on the website after the next upload. You can get the Mole-End automation plug-in to set the software to download and upload regularly and also set the maximum quantity allowed to be the same as the stock level. However, this would still not prevent two customers ordering at the same time (or before the next update of the site) but will get it close to what you want to achieve. The other alternative would be to show your stock levels online so customers can see that they can't order more than a certain quantity - see this knowledge base article.

[oliverm]

Thanks Tracey - just as I feared! Will look into the Mole-end product.

With regard to the second half of my post, does any one know the answer to this:

_
Also, with a product sold with options that affect stock levels (i.e. colour) the product doesn't seem to go out of stock even if all available options are sold out. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong here? Can IsInStock not be made to check this?
_

Does anyone know of a fix for this?

Many thanks!

[TraceyG]

Hi,

Also, with a product sold with options that affect stock levels (i.e. colour) the product doesn't seem to go out of stock even if all available options are sold out. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong here? Can IsInStock not be made to check this?

Sorry for the late response Oliver but yes, the main product will not go out of stock even if the choices are out of stock. Maybe this knowledgebase article will help. It gives instructions on how to show the choices as out of stock online.

[RuralWeb]

You have used the wrong software IMO - there is no way I would develop a site using actinic for limited stock items for the very reasons you describe.

[PeterThake]

Mal, I run into this problem every day, since I sell limited edition yo-yos. Would you suggest some alternatives, since I think I have outgrown Actinic?PM me? Or post here depending on how likely the post is to be pruned! Cheers!

[Jan]

Hi Oliver,

Have you linked your product permutations to hidden products?

Regards,

[Darren B]

Mal, I run into this problem every day, since I sell limited edition yo-yos. Would you suggest some alternatives, since I think I have outgrown Actinic?PM me? Or post here depending on how likely the post is to be pruned! Cheers!

The only alternatives really are carts with an online DB, this is how alot of the opensource ones work.

Jans mole is the best solution before you go jumping ship and having to redisign your whole site.

[oliverm]

Hi Tracey, Jan and Darren,

Hi Oliver,

Have you linked your product permutations to hidden products?

Regards,

Thanks for the replies. We do indeed have hidden products for the permutations and that's all working. Unfortunately when all the permutations are gone, the Add To Cart button remains. We've had several orders over Christmas for the product without any permutations which makes no sense at all!

The only alternatives really are carts with an online DB, this is how alot of the opensource ones work.

Jans mole is the best solution before you go jumping ship and having to redisign your whole site.

We have purchased the Stock Control Mole-End software, but this doesn't help with over-selling items that only have one permutation left. Is this the software you were referring to?

Does anyone have any other experience of e-commerce software with live stock levels? I've previously only used enterprise level software that is prohibitively expensive for this company. There's a lot of functionality I like about the Actinic products, but it's mainly about the Windows software. I genuinely can't understand the decision to build a non-dynamic web application.

Best,

Oliver

[Jan]

Unfortunately when all the permutations are gone, the Add To Cart button remains.

You should find that when the product is added to cart that a message is displayed saying that the item is out of stock. (Obviously this isn't happening for you).

Have you got stock control enabled on both the main product and the permutation's hidden product?

Regards,

[oliverm]

The main products are not stock controlled...is that wrong? When I put stock monitoring on on the main product (which has no items in stock) I get an out of stock message on the catalog page. Any ideas?

[Jan]

You should have stock monitoring off on the main product but on for the hidden products.

Regards,

[oliverm]

Thanks for your help on this. That is how it's set up. It does give the message if the sold out item is selected and you click Add To Cart, but as our permutations are hidden when sold out this will very rarely occur (they'd have to sell out in between the page loading and Add To Cart button being pressed). I think that some messy client-side Javascript is going to be the only likely solution for this issue...

Regards,

Oliver

[Jan]

Did you see the knowledgebase article that Tracey pointed out to you, this shows you how to hide permutations that are out of stock from the choices list, if they are out of stock, they are automatically removed from the list.

Regards,

[RuralWeb]

I genuinely can't understand the decision to build a non-dynamic web application

Actinic was developed to be very search engine friendly (which it still is) many years ago when database driven sites were crap at getting search engine rankings. To do this they used desktop software to generate and upload static html pages - the downside of this method is that you cannot have real time stock control.

For users who do not need realtime stock control Actinic is the best on the market - if you need stock control look elsewhere. TBH you would would be better cutting your losses and moving to another software package.