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[fyrestorm]

Why do you think that saving the cart is a problem?

Because I dont want the customers to hold onto an item if they are still in a decision to buy them or not. If a customer chooses not to buy the item then i lose the sale of another customer that does have the intention to buy.
I wanted to make the cart that if u leave the site, then the cart becomes empty and the items in the cart becomes available again.



Thanks Dr Byte. I will give your suggestion a go ^_^

[DrByte]

Zen Cart does not remove items from inventory until the customer receives an order confirmation. This typically means the customer must complete payment before inventory is affected.

If the item is out of stock at the time the cart is restored from history, the customer is notified.

Retaining a shopping history will not affect inventory.

[hporsch]

I have a similar issue with the way Zen Cart handles inventory and the customer's basket. We have been operating an online store using Miva Merchant for several years and are looking for an estore package to replace it since Miva Merchant seems to be losing support and is almost impossible to customize.

It is our opinion that inventory levels should be updated once a customer adds something to their basket and, if they leave the store without completing the purchase, those item counts should be added back so they are available to other shoppers.

The goal of a ecommerce software should be to try an emulate the real world shopping experience close as possible if we are to get conversion rates up.

Consider the scenario of a store that sells products that are constantly going in and out of stock, like a grocery store. If a customer puts that last 4 cans of soup in their basket, there should be NO SOUP FOR YOU if you come across the product after them because the shelf is empty. Now if that first customer happens to abandon their shopping cart in the virtual "aisle" of the store, there should be a point where our loyal stock boy comes by and puts the items in that cart back on the shelf for other customers to buy.

In the Zen world, two customers could possibly but the same 4 cans in each of their carts because neither has checked out yet. What happens then?

Storing a cart should also be an option because we all know that the actual conversion rate of sales is quite low and the online store could have tons of abandoned carts tying up inventory.

We are not huge fans of Miva Merchant but is does control inventory reasonable well. We ship out over 1,000 orders a year and our rate of items filled versus items ordered is almost 100%.

We are still going to continue our evaluation of Zen Cart as a possible replacement for Miva but this inventory control could be a show stopper right off.

[Kim]

The inventory control is something we inherited from osc and is being evaluated for future changes. Thank you for the input.