Out of Stock items - We need ideas - Help.

[Invizix]

Greetings,

We have an online store, with 3,000+ products, one of our suppliers whom drop ships seems to always be running out of stock on items, they don't supply an "out of stock" CVS file or anything like that. We don't know of any other supplier who carries the same product lines (vitamins, herbs, healthfoods, etc) and drop ships, so we are kinda stuck with them, and hoping they start supplying an out of stock CVS file.

We already have an "Out of Stock Policy" up and running, and we are tediously going through all 3,000+ one at a time seeing what is out of stock, and reflecting that on our website, however as I said this is very tedious.

We thought about just keeping everything shown as in stock, and email and/or call the customer and tell them when an item(s) they order is out of stock, however this may give us a bad rep, which is something we don't want or need.

Can anyone suggest a few ideas we can use and/or suggest a quicker way of doing this? We tried EZ-Populate but that is just as time consuming (I think so anyway.) If anyone knows of some EZ-Populate / CVS secrets on how to change stock levels faster please, do tell!

HELP!

Thanks in advance for any and all helpful suggestions and/or information.

[Invizix]

Anyone? Anyone at all that can suggest some ideas on what we can do? We lost an order today due to the supplier being out of stock.

[wolfsz]

Hi there
I don't really understand what you need help with? Is it how to show stock level in ZC, general advice on stock keeping or how to report stock levels in ZC in a better manner?

[Invizix]

Hi there
I don't really understand what you need help with? Is it how to show stock level in ZC, general advice on stock keeping or how to report stock levels in ZC in a better manner?

Hi,

I guess we are looking on general advice on stock keeping, AND report stock levels in a better manner. We use several drop shippers, and lately there is one were the stock levels have been depleated fast, and in massive quantities, more than we can keep up with.

[yellow1912]

So do you have real time access to the stock level of this distributor?

[Invizix]

So do you have real time access to the stock level of this distributor?

No, they only list "out of stock" on their website, but no CVS file, no date/time when item will be back in stock, etc. It's very frustrating.

[Kim]

Honestly? Find another supplier or post those products from this supplier with a notice that they may be out of stock all the time.

[paulm]

they only list "out of stock" on their website, but no CVS file

I would scrape their site (if it's worth the trouble)

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

[anjordan77]

Any clue what scraper to pick up to update the database every day? I would like to be able to scrape various websites which may or may not have the same products, and i'd like it to automatically update according to their stock level each day.