Out of stock not working

[jxm28788]

Strange. I had a product with stock monitoring on. There were 12 in stock (5 warn, 2 suspend) and I selected a quantity of 15 and added to the basket - it didn't give me any errors - then I went to checkout and placed the order.

Now my stock report says there are -3, but the product is not displaying 'out of stock' on the site.

I have other products that are listed as out of stock from earlier testing. I have changed a few things since then, but I don't see why it is no longer working...

[jxm28788]

That's odd. I downloaded the order, reuploaded the site and chose 'browse website' and it updated the items to 'out of stock'.

This leads to several questions, the most obvious ones being -

1) What is the trigger for the 'out of stock' to be displayed? Is it when you download the orders or update the site? Shouldn't the online website keep track of this as it goes along? or is it getting confused because it thinks I am the same customer and something is not being initialised?

2) If the stock level was set to 12, and the stock monitoring was on, why did it let me order 15?

[andypandy]

Actinic doesn't seem to offer real time (on site) stock monitoring.
Which means that customers can order till there hearts content and the only time this will stop is when you retrieve orders with a warning advising you that 1 or more items has gone below the stock level.
You then need to update your site so that this item is then changed to out of stock.
The stock monitoring is pretty useless at the moment as you need to regularly check your orders and update the site as soon as a item goes out of stock.
Hopefully, Actinic will look at adding this in future updates where the website checks stock levels and informs the customer if they can / can't order due to insufficent stock.
So what ever you do, don't plan a holiday to Spain for 2 weeks, as when you get back, you may find several items displaying -50 on retrieving your order

[jmedinger]

Don't get too down on Actinic about this - it is a database maintained on your PC and therefore doesn't have a live connection to an online database and can't be expected to keep live stock levels.

There ARE however ways around this...

An excellent add-on comes from here and allows you to automatically schedule order downloads and catalog uploads which brings you very close to it being a 'live', stock managed database

Cheers

Jos

[andypandy]

Originally posted by jmedinger
Don't get too down on Actinic about this - it is a database maintained on your PC and therefore doesn't have a live connection to an online database and can't be expected to keep live stock levels.

There ARE however ways around this...

An excellent add-on comes from here and allows you to automatically schedule order downloads and catalog uploads which brings you very close to it being a 'live', stock managed database

Cheers

Jos

Hi Jos,

Don't get me wrong, im not knocking Actinic one little bit, its a great piece of software.
The only thing that I was pointing out was basically, the stock management doesn't work real time.
Admitingly, when I 1st got Actinic I did think this was how it worked but later realised that I was incorrect.
Its not a major issue anyway.

[jxm28788]

ok, I guess I misunderstood the way that worked... I think I'm going to have to use that util or raise the suspend level somewhat...