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Stock management program
The Ecommerce Plus templates incorporate a handy
stock management program. This allows you to set the number of
items
in stock and
when
the last item is added to the cart the "Buy" button
is replaced by an "Out of Stock" message.
If your store is down to the last item in stock
it will allow more than one person to add the item to cart but
it will be the the first person to check out who will be able to
purchase.
If the other person also attempts to checkout then they will be
warned that the item is no longer available and update the cart
contents accordingly.
The number of items left in stock is shown in the product admin
section - each product will have a number after it like this:
PC Keyboard (6)
The number will decrease with each sale.
It is necessary to "turn on" the stock management in your Main Admin
page to use this feature.
You can use stock management on product options
as well as on the overall product. On
the products admin page if you are using stock management you should
see a drop down menu Which allows you to choose between "In
Stock" that will set the stock level for the overall
product and "By Options" which will set stock levels
by the stock of the product options.
An important thing to note is that if you share an option between
2 products the options stock is shared between 2 products. This
could be useful if you have say only 20 disk drives, each of which
could go in one of 5 different models of PC. However, if this is
not what you intend then on the product options admin page we have
also provided a "Clone" button to quickly create a copy
of one product option. Using the Option Working Name you will also
be able to distinguish these internally.
Stock management will indicate if a request
to add to cart can only be partially completed. For instance if
someone wants 10 of an item, but only 6 are available. The number
of items in stock can be shown on the products page with an addition
to includes.asp / includes.php It
is also possible to not show out of stock products on the products
page but keep them in the products admin page for future use.
Notify Me When Back In Stock
This features was introduced in Version 6 and allows
the customer to be notified by email when the stock is again available.
To enable this feature you will need to add the following to vsadmin/includes.asp
notifybackinstock=TRUE
or to vsadmin/includes.php
$notifybackinstock=TRUE;
This will change the "Out of Stock" message to
a clcikable link that will bring up a window looking like this
Each time a customer uses this feature the request
is recorded in the store control panel. The number of requests
is available in the dashboard and the details of the products are
also viewable
The email that the customer receives can be formatted
through the email messaging admin page. The pop up window the customer
sees uses the same css classes as
the cart, search etc. The "Notify Me" link can be changed
to an image through the includes.asp or includes.php file.
IMPORTANT NOTE
If you find that orders are remaining out of
stock after the time stipulated in the main admin settings then
go to the admin orders page and do a search for
unauthorized and cancelled orders and delete all of them. Then
hit the "purge
deleted" button and that will free up the stock again.
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