Inventory Tracking Not Updating 100% of the time

[PineconeJeff]

Hello,
I've been searching the forums for topics about inventory tracking and problems with it not updating properly and only found a few users mentioning seeing other posts about this.

Anyway, we have ShopSite Pro 8.0.1 and have found the inventory tracking numbers either not updating, not updating to the correct numbers, or they are accurate.

Any information or anyone having similar problems (and solutions) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Jeff

[Jim]

When inventory tracking was first introduced in ShopSite it would check the quantity on hand only when an item was added to the cart. The inventory quantity was only reduced when the item was finally paid for as indicated by the thankyou screen being displayed. There would be a time when several shoppers could have added the same item to the cart at the around the same time, when there was still inventory for an item, and until they checked out the item would remain in their cart so they could still finalize the purchase the item. This could result in more items being sold than you actually had in stock.

This issue has been resolved in the 9.0 version of ShopSite by doing another check at the thankyou stage of the checkout process and if the quantity on hand was at the minimum the order will not be processed and the shopper will be returned to the first shopping cart screen with a message explaining the reason.

So to solve your issue you will need to upgrade to the latest version of ShopSite.

[PineconeJeff]

Ah, this is great news! Thanks for the answer!

On a similar note, we've been noticing that "out of stock" "low stock" notifications have been coming in our e-mail even though those items have been taken off of our website for some time now. Could it be that people may have these items in their shopping cart but never checked out and because of that, our back store is getting pinged to check for that item's availability?

[Jim]

I think those two messages would only be sent on adding an item to the cart so they would probably not be coming from uncompleted shopping cart orders. Unfinished shopping carts are kept for a period of time (7days by default) and are then deleted. You can configure this setting under Commerce Setup > Order System > Shopping cart > Keep unfinished shopping carts:.

You say you have taken the products off your site. Does that mean that you removed them from the backoffice of the store? Did you also remove any html pages that they may have been on Occasionally an html page will remain as sort of an orphan (page filename changed but old page not removed) and can still be found by search engines so people could be ordering from such a page.

[PineconeJeff]

Ah... I removed the items from the web page but not the back store. I didn't know about the orphan thing. That makes sense. Thanks for the feedback. I'll check into this.