Product availability (seasonal)

[nicksab]

hey everyone,

I have a flower wholesale shop and I am using ZC 1.5.1

Due to the product I am selling, I am having issue with product availability.

Some of my product are not always available. I know I can remove them manually but is there a way to do it automatically.

For example, Product A is only available from March to September every year and Product B is only available from January to May every year.

How can I go about setting this up? Any add-on that could work?

Thank you for your help

[mc12345678]

So there is code that already prevents the display of a product until it has "arrived", but the issue you have is that it needs to also go away at a certain time not necessarily at a certain stock level... The first condition is addressed by providing an available date that is in the future on the product_info page, though that takes care of this or the coming year, not next year/season.


There have been some in the past that have asked for such a "end" time for a product, but I can not recall what has been done to specifically make that possible. I don't think it would take much to add a field for an "expiration" and then even if necessary to basically automatically increase the date of both fields by a year when the expiration date has been reached...


Sum total, one additional field in the table that contains the start at field, some additional code to reverse the process (disable product) that is performed to enable the product and at same time to increment both fields by one year (or if necessary a yet additional field to identify how far out to bump both dates. Gets more complicated if they don't shift in parallel, but maybe get the picture.


I don't know of any existing plugin, but would suggest continuing to search the plugin section either directly or by your favorite web search engine.

[nicksab]

thanks for getting back to me. Looks like it is not going to be as easy as I thought. ugh.

[DrByte]

The quickest approach would be to set the products as disabled (out of stock) and configure your store such that out-of-stock items don't display.

Then when it comes time to flip the seasons, toggle that out-of-stock flag to on or off accordingly.



Another thing to consider is SEO. Instead of having products disappear when out-of-stock, it may be better to display a message "seasonal item; temporarily unavailable until Spring" ... as one of a handful of considerations for SEO purposes.