Send Customer an Email When product back in stock

[Andy_Mac]

Having recently done a survey on our customers one thing that a number of users have requested is on option to be notified by e-mail when a product comes back in stock.

Does any one know if this can be done - has any one done it?

Yours hopefully

[drink75]

We just send one manually. Would be great if anyone knows how to automate this though.

[Kermy]

I was looking into this a while ago. I thought of a simple database which stored email addresses against product references, populated by customers supplying their email in a form next to the out of stock product. Then, at the end of the day for example, running a utility which would grab the stock status from actinicCatalog.mdb, upload the data temporarily to the server and compare it with the email database to determine which emails were to be sent.

Sounds plausible but do I have the time...

[Kermy]

I have just thought of a (possibly) better way. A perl script could borrow some of the existing actinic functions to determine if a specific product was in stock. So, by feeding the script with the product references held in the remote database, it could determine which products were previously out of stock, send emails to those customers requesting notification, and then delete the entry from the database. All the user would have to do is run the script once at the end of each day.

Hopefully a perl master will see this and be up to the challenge, I'm not an expert by any means, and have other things i need to get on with