Backordered items.

[gene]

Is there any other way where the product template can inform customers that an item selected is on backorder or qty is 0 instead of the message found in the Shopping Cart page?

[Jim]

In order to be able to display the quantity of an item you could use one of the following tags in your product template.
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[-- ProductInventoryPopUp {link text} --]
Create a link which will make a pop-up window (200px x 100px) displaying the Quantity On Hand. If you do not specify text to use for the link, the default text is Inventory. The pop-up window would look something like this:
inventory pop-up window example


[-- ProductInventoryActual path_to_shopping_cart_cgi {description text} --]
Display current Quantity On Hand on the page using Server Side Includes (SSI). This tag creates an SSI #include tag, so your Web server must be configured to allow SSI (contact your Hosting Provider for help on doing this). The optional description text appears before the actual quantity. If you do not specify text to use, the default text is Inventory. For example, if you included the tag like this:

[-- ProductInventoryActual /cgi-bin/sc "available" --]
The output might look something like this:

available: 32
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The second method requires that server side includes are supported by your hosting company.

Another option would be to create a custom product template that checks the quantity on hand and displays a "backordered" or "out of stock" message when the page is published. Depending on how frequently you publish the store this method could be fairly accurate.