Limited Edition/too many buyers

[doodlebee]

I have a question about a *potential* problem I see for a client.

I'm working on their site right now (it's not live yet) - and when i was looking for information on Limited Edition items, I found a couple of issues that were raised that made me question the client on this possibility.

Basically, she's selling a products that - when she puts them up for sale - customers *race* to buy as much as they can. She has a limited quantity, and she displayed this prominently on her current site (and it will also be prominent on her new site) - but still people get upset when they're beaten to the punch by someone else, and she sells out before they can buy (which happens *very* frequently).

Now I'm worried that people will get more upset when they are sold something, only to be told later that there was a glitch in the system. Here's an example scenario:

There are 5 items left. Customer 1 places the last 5 items in their cart. Customer 2 is on at the same time, and also places the 5 items in their cart. Both go through the checkout process at the same time, and both get charged for the items, because both were on at the same time, and neither knew the other was buying the last 5 items (does this make sense?)

What do we do about this? I've found other threads on this issue, but none with a solution that I could see. We'll be running 1.3.7. How has anyone else gotten around this issue? I suggested to the client that she may have 100 items for sale, but only *say* she has 80. That would cut down on the issue, and if this problem happens, then she has some "backup" to distribute. If any is actually left over, she could save it and use it as product giveaways or content prizes or something later on.But she would much rather have the system check the stock at each step of the checkout process against what's in the customer's cart, so if it *does* go out of stock during checkout, the end user can be notified.

Anyone have any info or ideas on this?

[harry2cool]

In this case, instead of 5, fill in the Quantity as 2 and then you can re-stock with 2 more and finally 1.

What is this product by the way ?

[doodlebee]

Yes, but wouldn't that require extra "manual labor" (for lack of a better term! LOL) Her product (since you asked - it's hand-dyed yarn - she can only make so much dye and once it's gone, it's gone) is in high demand. She has some colors that are "stock" items, but every few months she releases a "Limited Edition" stock. When she does so, people literally sell her out in a matter of minutes. I think her last batch sold out completely within 20 minutes. Trying to keep up in that "restocking" method would be pretty hard, I think. And still, she would have the issue of people trying to buy at the same time - even if she did start with "2", there's a chance that 5 other people are buying that "2" at the same time, which means she'd still end up with a -7 stock.

I'm just wondering what the best method would be for this issue. Saying she has 20% less (as I mentioned above - but still would run the risk of negatove stock if too many people went on at once)...maybe taking pre-orders instead, so she knows exactly how much to make (but then she runs the risk of having to make *way* too many - this stuff is really in demand and she ends up with a lot of upset people because they didn't come and shop for the Limited Edition stuff soon enough - so she'd be slaving, basically - and to put a "cap" on it would end up with the same problem)

Is there not any way we could check the stock quantity with each step of the checkout process? How do others handle this problem?

[doodlebee]

For the record, I got a solution. I've tested it, as well, and it functions just fine. There's a spot in the admin area where it'll check stock levels before each step of the checkout process. My husband and I tested it out the other night, and every time I "bought" something out from under him, when he clicked "next" to continue his checkout process, it would tell him the item was out of stock. We even tested it so that we both "bought" an item at the same time, and I won. Both of our "cards" wer eprocessing, and I got the item, but his came back with "out of stock".

So it's already built-in...yay!