Duplicate products- and Hide on Website / Canbe orderied online flags

[BevS97]

Hi,
I am using Actinic 7.0.4

We display all our products 3 times, once by brand, once by product type and once by theme. We don't use the automatic stock control, but when an item goes out of stock, I would like to be able to remove the item from the site -I was planning on using the Hide on Website option, but this doens't reflect on the duplicated products, to they are still available to order.

If I am on a duplicate I can find the Original,but from the original there is no way to find the duplicates, so it is not easy to find all copies of a product to update them (also time-consuming ot do everything 3 times)

I did try soft deleting the items which does soft-delete all copies, but then if you need to permanantly delete something you can't use the purge as all the out of stock stuff is marked for deletion and would be removed.

Any suggestions?
Thanks
Bev
www.scrapbookshop.co.uk

[Duncan Rounding]

Not a great solution - but you can search by product reference to find the duplicates.

Duncan R

[BevS97]

I have found a work around, not ideal but it does work. I don't normally use stock control, but for the out of stock items, if I tick Stock Monitoring and set Suspend Orders if below to 1 then it displays an Out of stock message for all instances of the product, not just the original one.
the items are still displayed but at least they can't be ordered

[TraceyHand]

the items are still displayed but at least they can't be ordered

Which will have the added advantage of showing customers that you *do* sell the item in question, even though it may be out of stock.
I assume these are itesm you then stock again? In which case it means a potential customer may enquire about it or visit at a later date rather than go straight past you to somewhere else?

[BevS97]

We don't automatically restock every item, a lot of stuff is trendy and hot now and stale in a months time, but other stuff is 'classic' and we stock all the time.

If I know for sure we won't be restocking it, then I can just delete it, but I don't do the ordering so I am not always aware of which items will be back in stock and which won't.

[leehack]

We don't automatically restock every item, a lot of stuff is trendy and hot now and stale in a months time, but other stuff is 'classic' and we stock all the time.

If I know for sure we won't be restocking it, then I can just delete it, but I don't do the ordering so I am not always aware of which items will be back in stock and which won't.

Bev

My shop has the same product duplicated in a number of locations, however i have the main products all in one place so i know exactly where to go each time. If one of my product is out of stock, i go to the master product and click on stock control and make sure that it shows none in stock. This then updated all copies of the product to show "out of stock". Its good to show you sell something even if it is out of stock as this gives a 100% better chance of a sale in the future, instead of not showing and reducing the chances of a customer returning at a later date.

You can click on the "stock levels" button and get it to list all products out of stock currently on your site. Put a procedure in place for someone to check this and confirm whether items are back in stock, will never be available again or are still out of stock, but will be back in stock in the future. Take the relevant action on each product and your are up to date.

If the people doing the ordering don't talk to the people maintaining the website, then you are destined for trouble. This would be my first port of call to correct.