Stock Monitoring single items

[Catweevil]

I have been asked to set up a cart for a small art and craft business. Many of the items they produce will be one-offs, therefore I need to be able to carefully monitor stock so that one-off items can only be bought once and then appear to be out of stock until I can remove them (unless they can be automatically removed from the site?). At the moment I am only able to see how to set up stock monitoring to report when stock gets down to a set level. I know I can set minimum and maximum ordering levels, but I need to make an item unavailable once an order has been received. Any suggestions? Any help appreciated!

[Jan]

If you have set up stock monitoring on an item you have to download orders and then upload the catalog to get the item to go out of stock. You can also set the maximum quantity that can be purchased in the product details, set this to 1 to stop more than one being ordered at a time.

We have a product that will automate this process for you. It is called One Stop Automation (with the stock control part being available as a separate module called Stock Control Mole), you can find more details and a free trial at this URL :

http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/One...r-Actinic.html

Regards,

[wjcampbe]

set this to 1 to stop more than one being ordered at a time.

but - unfortunately, by every visitor to the website - end result, 300 orders for a one-off item.

To reduce the bad feeling this might generate [even if only slightly], I would strongly emphasise the fact that this is a on-off product and will be sold on a first come - first served basis.

I would also recommend you take advantage of Jan's software to automate the updating of the website stock, to minimise the delay between successful purchase and implementation of the 'out of stock' notice.

[Catweevil]

Thanks for this. Looks like I'll need to control stock via a separate database linked to Actinic. Better look into that.

Cheers.

[wjcampbe]

Separate database will not help in any way. Actinic pages do not change until they are refreshed from the Actinic desktop interface.

There is no way of linking an online database into the site. The only way to get fresher information is to increase the frequency of downloads from/uploads to the site.

[davebaldock]

Separate pc's

What can I do if I have the stock section and the catalogue section on different machines? Because I have different staff doing different things, I have been told this arrangement will be fine, but now I know how Actinic deals with stock control ie you have to download the order and then upload the adjusted stock level i can see that it is no good, hence 3 people ordering a item we only have one of.
Presumably I would have to put automation, should I choose to get it, on the machine handling stock and then send a snapshot to it from the catalogue machine every time there is a new product, update etc.
Is there a simpler way other than putting the stock and catalogue on the same machine?
Thanks
Dave

[Jan]

What can I do if I have the stock section and the catalogue section on different machines?

That is when you need to set up a separate database for stock monitoring and share it between the two machines.

Regards,

[davebaldock]

merging catalogue and orders

What's the best way to pull the catalogue and the orders together if they have been on separate machines for some time?

[Jan]

All you should need to do it to take a snapshot from the design machine and import it into the orders machine, making sure that you do not tick the box to overwrite all orders. Then you have a combined snapshot of design and orders, which you can import onto the machine that you now want to work with. Before you do this though, take a snapshot from both machines so that if something does go wrong you can go back to where you were.

Regards,

[davebaldock]

Thanks Jan. Will do that today.
Dave