Stock Control/Payment Management Problem

[grahamg]

Hi All
I am building a website for a client that processes about 1000 transactions a week on one of the sky shoppping channels. The nature of the business means that they only carry about 30% of stock at anytime. The problem I am having is managing such a huge amout of incomplete orders and back orders. Ideally I would like for the back orders to be automatically processed when the stock becomes avavliable but dont think this functionality is avaliable, I will be using Protx.
I was wondering if anyone else has encounterd this situation and if so how you handled it?

Thanks Graham

[Jan]

You could use a custom order processor (automatic processing) or a custom report (manual processing) to check for orders that have been backordered and look to see if stock is now available. What happened next would depend on what you mean by automatically processed - how about this for a scenario

Automated :-

Get a list of backorder products
Look at the first one
IF all of the products are now in stock,
Mark the products as shipped
Print the packing list
Print the invoice
Mark the invoice as printed
Mark the orders as complete
Continue through the list until all have been checked.

Manual :-

Create a report that lists all backorders orders where all of the product now have a stock level of zero or more. Print it out and work through the products checking to see which can be processed.

One problem will be knowing which can be processed because if my memory serves me right the stock levels will go negative if you order to many, so you would have to work out how many 'to many' that you had and deduct the negative value from it to work out whether you could ship it. It must be difficult to do this by hand.

Regards,