Money Order / Check, Manually deduct Inventory

[anderson]

Hi Zen Cart Community,
Glad to 'see' you all here!! I am very new to Zen Cart, has been playing it around for a few days and found it very user friendly. I am planning to setup up 2 payment options for my customer:
1. Paypal
2. Money Order/Check

Now, i am having some problem with the Money Order/Check payment module, this is my concern as per below.
1. customer select money order /check payment options but never send check/money order, yet the stock inventory has been reduced to out of stock, so its unfair for the buyer using paypal payment options who would like to purchase the same item if the item is out of stock.
2. Someone out there who is too free to mess around my website by simply register an account and placing order all around by making my products to out of stock status.

This is something which i can think of to solve this problem but i have search around and i couldn't find the solution for this.
1. When customer select Money order / check payment options, the order status will go into pending but it doesn't reduce the stock inventory. After that, i have to manually verify with the buyer either by phone or email to sort of like verify whether he is a genuine buyer. Once verified, i will manually deduct the inventory myself.
2. When customer select Paypal options, the stock inventory will automatically deduct after the buyer completed the payment.

I hope this basically explain what i need for my cart.
I really hope some one who has the same experience can share his/her thought on this.

Cheers,
Andy

[aussiesapphire]

I cant answer your question about how to set up what you are looking for. BUT, just wanted to comment that in my experience, the scenario you are worrying might be very unlikely to happen. Depends on your customer base, but I would be concerned that you are being unfair to buyers who may be quick in sending off their payment but for various reasons feel uncomfortable about using their credit card online. They may miss out on their item just because the post is slow. And your suggested way of handling this may take more time anyway when you need to contact them to verify them or cancel order if you run out of stock.

For us, this type of buyer tends to be older and less computer savvy but still valued customers and probably the least likely to want to rip us off. Your demographic may be different but I can count on one hand the number of times, people have placed an order with us using this method but fail to send the payment. You usually get a feeling for the dodgy buyers (ip address not matching physical details, weirdness in the account details, etc) - for us, these kinds of buyers usually use ripped off credit card details and so are not likely to use cheque/money order.

Just a thought... as I mentioned before, your demographic may be quite different from ours.
Over to others to help you edit code to achieve what you need. I am unskilled on that stuff to help.

cheers
Leah

[jcdk]

I also manually updated the stock after a money order

[anderson]

thanks for the thought. you definitely have your point too. cheers.