Handling Display of Out of Stock Items

[bsnrjones]

My store carries over 4,500 items, and we usually have around 3,500+ items in stock. That means that there could be as many as 1,000 items out of stock.

 

My delima is how to handle these out of stock items. Do I allow them to be shown, or not. I have modded the cart to show quantity available for each item.

 

The problem is that if I set the cart to not show out of stock items, and the search engine happened to pick up the page when the item was in stock the visitor ends up at an empty page that says this product is not available - if the product is now out of stock.

 

So what is everyone else doing? I would be really interested to hear some feedback on this issue.

 

Burke

[ptrau]

PERSONAL OPINION ONLY:

 

Unless the replacement cycle on your products is exceptionaly long, I would show the items and even allow them to be purchased. You can set your backorder policy to display when they view or buy an out-of-stock item and set their expectations accordingly.

 

I would also add "partial shipment" to my order status so that orders don't show as shipped until they are complete. This gives you an easy way to track orders that may have more than one ship date.

 

Just my thoughts.

[pattimcc]

How do I set up OsCommerce to allow customers to create an order on a backordered product but delay the charging of their card until the product is actually in stock and ready to be shipped?

 

Where do I change OsCommerce to display backorders "differently" on the reports and invoices?

 

How are other OsCommerce users dealing with this issue?

 

Thanks a ton in advance,

Patti McCreary

[miles932]

My store carries over 4,500 items, and we usually have around 3,500+ items in stock. That means that there could be as many as 1,000 items out of stock.

 

My delima is how to handle these out of stock items. Do I allow them to be shown, or not. I have modded the cart to show quantity available for each item.

 

The problem is that if I set the cart to not show out of stock items, and the search engine happened to pick up the page when the item was in stock the visitor ends up at an empty page that says this product is not available - if the product is now out of stock.

 

So what is everyone else doing? I would be really interested to hear some feedback on this issue.

 

Burke

 

Could you show me how you made that modification to show the quantity remaining in the product info table within shopping_cart.php? I can't seem to figure it out and i'd appreciate the assistance.

THanks!

[Guest]

it depends on the relationship between you and your supplier.

 

for me: i go right there and pick up my merch, i pick the order myself.. so i have a rough idea of what's there.

 

it's up to my discretion to turn things offline or as "pre-order"

 

 

depending on the item, i will set it to plain-old "online" and just inform the customer a restock can take X amount of time (how frequent the manufacturer's)

 

 

if you get things mailed to you, i would simply put it the item description that the item is available for pre-order only if you are worried about the punishments the search engines will give you.