Inventory Confirmation before customer places and pays for order?

[mike_m29]

I am using version 1.3.9h and am trying to find a way to be able to confirm inventory of an order that a customer makes before they are required to pay for it.

Our store regularly has single quantities of products and could be sold in-store or online.

I am looking for a way that an online customer can create their shopping cart with all the items they need, then we at the store can confirm stock before the order is completed and paid for to ensure that a customer is not paying for an item that is not in stock

Any help on this would be appreciated

[niccol]

Hmmm, not sure how that is going to work. actually the best way of doing it is to keep the zen store as up to date as you can - but you knew that :-)

But, depending on the payment gateway that you use, you could try setting it to 'authorise' rather than 'complete' or 'charge' . basically that should give you the abiltiy to authorise their payment at the time of purchase but actually only make the charge once you have verified that you have the stuff.

If you do this then I would make sure that the customers know that that is what you are doing with clear notices.

[niccol]

in tandem with that you might want to look at the various modules that allow you to edit the orders so that you could remove out of stock items.

I have to say that, as a user, I'd find this all kind of annoying though. If it is on the site I think I should be able to buy it.

[joew36]

We're in the same situation. We sell discontinued products (yarn) and we end up with a lot of box lots, kits, sample clothing, etc. that we only have 1 or 2 of. We let our customers know in all of our newsletters and our regular customers are aware of it. They all tend to be understanding about it.

We also have forums on knitters pages and on Facebook so we and our regular customers can respond to people who don't get the things they want. I really think it helps to be up front about it.

I think it's sort of like the Black Friday sales where it's a bit of a free-for-all. Customers get disappointed but very few actually get mad about it. Those that get the items brag about it online.

[ironman]

You can use the free mod Edit Order. It allows you the edit the orders made by the customer and send the update order confirmation by email.

[mike_m29]

Thanks everyone for the ideas, its a tough situation to be in. Don't want people paying for items that are not in stock and will take a while to order. And don't want to be refunding customers all the time.

I will have a look at the Edit Orders module and see if it will accomplish what I need

Really just want an order confirmation feature that would allow us to confirm all the items in an order before having to pay for it and would be really nice if it had options to Add Items, Subtracts items based upon the customers wishes for special ordering of non in-stock items

Mike

[oregongardener]

Perhaps I missed something, but can't you use the Admin/Configuration/Stock "Check Stock Level" option? (Along with "Subtract Stock", etc.) to prevent customers from ordering more product than you have available?

We don't use it, as it obviously requires a lot of time modifying your Zen Cart inventory per product, but in your case, it may be the answer?

[mully]

Perhaps I missed something, but can't you use the Admin/Configuration/Stock "Check Stock Level" option? (Along with "Subtract Stock", etc.) to prevent customers from ordering more product than you have available?

We don't use it, as it obviously requires a lot of time modifying your Zen Cart inventory per product, but in your case, it may be the answer?

thanks fixed my problem

[niccol]

@oregongardener
the problem is that when you run a real world shop as well as the online store. Unless the zen cart install is updated every time makes a sale in the real world store then there will be a difference between the stock levels in the real world store and the zen cart stock levels.
(out of interest there is also an issue in zen, between the time that someone adds an item to the cart and checks out. But that has been discussed lots in other threads)
so, yes, if you can keep the stock levels in the zen cart install completely up to date then what you say is absolutely true. A lot of stores in reality find it difficult to do that and that was what this question was about.