Stock Control Not Working?

Using 6.1.2 Business.

I do not use the stock control function on every product line all of the time, but typically when we get short or indeed OOS of a product line.

Yesterday I had a line item which I appiled a stock level as:

- Estimated stock in hand = 1
- Warn if Below = 0 (default = 2)
- Suspend orders if Below = 0 (default = 1)

However, a customer ordered 3 lines and the order went through. When I looked at the 'estimated stock in hand' fleid, it was showing "-2".

May I ask, is this normal? It does seem to somewhat crazy if a customer can order three items on one order when we only have one in stock. Has anyone else found the same and is there an answer/fix?

If she ordered 1, then I don't think this would have been a problem as the estimated stock in hand would thus be 0 and the next customer would not have been able to order.

Cheers,
Mark

[Kerri]

minus stock quantities

Hi Mark

We get exactly the same problem of negative stock amounts caused when a single customer orders more than the in-stock level of one product.

I've tried not allowing back ordering:

View | Business settings | Ordering tab -
under the order processing section - leave check box blank for "allow back-ordering".

but we still get -2 if one customer in a single transaction orders 3 of that particular product line.

This presents us with problems as we have many limited edition items that when they're gone they're gone - so we end up trying to convince the customer to take a different product or refunding the transaction.

There must be a simple solution to this - can someone please tell us.

Thanks

[Snooze_Shop]

I do not know if this will work in V6 as I'm a pauper running on V4 but I simply set the maximum number that can be ordered to the available stock (you can get overdrawn if two people order the same product etc but if you download / upload regular the I've only had 1 stock out in the past 6 months) - when a new order is received simply reduce the maximum in line with the available stock and upload.

Hope this helps.

[BSO]

Originally posted by Snooze_Shop
I do not know if this will work in V6 as I'm a pauper running on V4 but I simply set the maximum number that can be ordered to the available stock (you can get overdrawn if two people order the same product etc but if you download / upload regular the I've only had 1 stock out in the past 6 months) - when a new order is received simply reduce the maximum in line with the available stock and upload.

Hope this helps.

I do exactly the same, I'm running version 6.1.2 and it works the same way.
As long as you use the above method and upload changes regulary it works very well.
As mentioned it will not work if 2 or more ordered are placed as it only restricts the amount of items that one person can add to the cart.

[Jan]

Actinic does not use the number in stock to disallow orders, it simply makes the item out of stock when you next upload after receiving an order for the item that makes the stock levels go to zero or below.

If stock levels are important to you if might be worth taking a look at a product of mine.

It is an automation mole that allows you to run unattended scheduled order downloads and catalog uploads. You can set it to only upload if the orders just downloaded have caused a product to go out of stock so it quite efficient. Another nice feature is that if you use this program you can display accurate stock levels in the product details which can help make a sale if levels are getting low. Also if you have more than one site you can set it to process them all in turn.

To find out more about the program or try it out for free see
http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/Actinic_Moles.html

I like the idea of setting the maximum order value to the current stock level and will add this into my program as an optional setting in the next few weeks.

Regards,

[m@rk.to]

In a previous post & thread, I asked if Order Manager can be used to poll orders from multiple sites and processed on one copy of OM. May I ask, will this mole allow me to download from multiple sites and process from one copy of Order Manager?

[Jan]

The mole just drives Actinic so follows all of the same rules as Actinic, so no it won't allow you to merge the orders together.

I have another mole that process orders so you could write a program to copy the downloaded orders to a single master site and have this mole download orders and run your program over all of your sites, gives you the end result of all orders in a single site. I have never tried this but Actinic makes copies of all of the product data in the order tables and I can see no reason why so it should not work.

You would be wise to make a wide range of starting order numbers over your sites to make sure that you don't get duplicates.

If you don't want to or don't know how to write the program to merge the orders you could hire me or one of the other consultants on this list to write it for you.

I've also just found another way to do this, you can just copy your .ord files into the acatalog directory of the web site all of the orders to be received by and it downloads them into that one.

Regards