Inventory Control

[DianeLeigh]

I really need some help with a particular aspect of Shopsite Inventory control...

I frequently sell a small quantity of a very high-demand item, specifically, concert tickets (Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne). I am having trouble with Shopsite selling more tickets than I have in inventory, because of what seems like a flaw in Shopsite's logic: at the point a buyer tries to put a product in their cart, Shopsite checks to see if there are enough in inventory. However, Shopsite doesn't decrement the inventory until the order is completed. So, for the gap of time while buyers are completing their orders, Shopsite is allowing other buyers to put the same product in their carts, and when the order is completed, no further checking of inventory is done to ensure the product is really still available.

This is from Shopsite's Help:
"ShopSite does not decrement the product inventory until after a customer has completed an order. Because of the time which can pass between adding a product to the cart and completing an order, multiple customers who place orders at the same or close to the same time could place orders for more of an item than you have in inventory. It is a good idea to set your out-of-stock limit high enough above your actual quantity on hand to ensure your ability to fulfill orders placed if such a situation occurs."

In our situation, this advice doesn't help. The last time I sold tickets, I put 25 Bonnie Raitt concert tickets in inventory, and Shopsite sold 42 within minutes. Devastating - we did not have those tickets, and had many very unhappy customers as a result.

Is there any way to either a) decrement the inventory at the time the item is put in the cart, or b) check inventory again before allowing he order to be completed?

Would a Custom CGI be able to do b)? I'm not a programmer - are there folks who could do this for us?

We upgraded to Shopsite Pro specifically to get Inventory control (and we're a very small non-profit, so the license cost was significant to us), so this is very disappointing to us. I just found out that I've got another upcoming ticket sale, SOON, and I need to find a solution to this issue fast!

If anyone could give me any advice, I'd be very, very grateful.

Thanks in advance...

[Jim]

There are no merchant editable cgis that would prevent this situation from happening. But, this issue is being looked at for a future release.

[mokele]

Hi Diane, the one option I can think of off hand would be to use a CALL tag using PHP or Perl from the Shopping Cart page that would access the shopsite database directly and update the inventory control. Accessing the shopsite database is not offically support, can be done, I've done it. It requires having Shopsite 8.x (need version that started using SQLite) and PHP with PDO for SQLite compiled into PHP 5 and the Command Line Interface (CLI) must also be installed. We have all that here at YourHost.com. I think we could help you do this depending on your setup. Email brandon@yourhost.com or eric@yourhost.com or call at 714-842-8511 and ask them about programming pricing.