Back ordering not performing

[Sly9er]

Hi guys,
I am having an issue with the "allow back ordering" function.
I have Actinic Business perfoming maintainance on my computer,
and ordering functions on my clients computer.
I have enabled automatic stock monitoring and have set all the
stock levels (various levels), warning levels (also various),
and I have set all the suspend ording levels to 0.
I set all the suspend ording levels to 0, because my client wants
to allow back ordering. But even when I allow back ordering, the
products that are below 0, produce an "out of stock" message. And
the "quantity box" disappears, disabling the ability to take any
"back orders".
I just tried an experiment:
I currently have a product that is listed as -89 for a stock level,
100 for a warning level, and 0 for a suspend level.
I did a test of setting the suspend level to -100, and that
re-enabled the quantity box and got rid of the "out of stock" message,
but I have the feeling that as soon as the stock level goes to -101,
ordering for that product will be suspended again.
We want to allow back ordering, and I have read about it, and there
seems to be a great system for back ordering, but I don't see how it
is of any use to me if the product goes into the "suspend ordering"
mode.
**If "back ordering" is enabled, shouldn't the customer still be
able to order that product online anyway, and not see the "out of stock"
message? What am I missing here?
You can see the product in question, (Promotional brochure with CD-ROM),
at this URL:
http://life-line.org/acatalog/Insurance_Matters.html
It is the second one of two, at the bottom.
Hope to hear from you all soon - John King

[Jan]

I don't think that the backordering system overrides the stock suspend level in the way that you want it to.

If you set a suspend level then the item will be suspended when the order level reaches or passes that value.

If you enable backordering it simple enables the backordering functionality within Actinic order processing.

A workaround would be to set the stock suspend value to -1000 or something else that would keep the stock unsuspended. I have a vague recollection of a bug in Actinic with negative stock suspend levels but from your earlier email it seems to be working for you, if you do have problems the other way to do it would be to add a large number to the stock.

A nice enhancement to Actinic would be to allow stock monitoring to keep a count of the stock but allow the user to choose to disable the suspend order feature.(and maybe the warning level but maybe not).

Regards,

[Sly9er]

Thank you for replying so quickly Jan. I see what you mean about the back ordering function only working from within Actinc Business, and not on the web site.
So I have one more question. You are probably familier with the way you can make the "reference" numbers show up while in the catalog view window.
Well... is there a way i could make a custom tag show up in the same place to indicate, just as a note to myself, that I have placed a customvar in the template of that product?
I guess I am going to have to manually add a note, that I have already made up, into the html code. And it sure would be helpful if I could see it in catalog view, rather than going to each page to try and remember.
Call me lazy, but I am starting to get a growing list of clients, and anything to make things easier would be really helpful.
Hope to hear from you soon - John King

[Jan]

I don't know of a way to do this. The tree interface is hardcoded in the application so you cannot add extra fields to the display.

You could add a character onto the end of the product reference if you wanted to see this information in the tree.

Regards