Variety of order rules?

[mediaconx]

Hello- I'm new and have yet to go live with my first OSC site, and I have a question. I have a customer who has a variety of ways to handle products and I can't figure out a way to handle all the different methods.

 

They have normal items which they stock and restock on a regular basis.

 

The have items that are collectibles and they only get 1 or 2 of them.

 

They have items that are in the pipeline and that want to take pre-orders.

 

I'm confused because initially I thought to turn on the "don't allow items to ship if out of stock". This handles everything in their normal stock and then the special items. They can just put in "2" for the quantity of their special item (or however many they have) and when they are gone, they are gone.

 

However, a pre-order item isn't in stock, so they can't sell it under those rules. They don't have a set quantity to get for pre-order, so making the quantity something false like "100" just to take orders may work, but it would be possible to sell more than they could get. Plus, it could allow you to pre-order something and put it in with the other items in stock. Then, you'd have to ship 2 packages and only paid for 1, since it was all ordered at the same time.

 

Is this the best way to handle this or is there a better way, or have I missed something completely on how it all works?

 

I've searched around for pre-orders in the contributions and on this site, but I didn't find much. Forgive me if I missed something that's already there.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Steve

[mediaconx]

Any ideas? Sorry to bring it back to the top, but it dropped back 7 pages in no time with only a few views.

 

Just wanted to check one last time before leaving this topic alone.