Automated process for Orders and Stock Stauts

Question 1

Interested in seeing if and/or anyone else has any thoughts on this:

My site will strictly be drop shipping. What I am interested in doing is:

1. When an order is placed, they are redirected to Paypal to complete the transaction.

2. Redirected back to a landing page

1a) Once the payment has been sent, I would like it to send an email (pre_configured) to be sent to the actual manufacture where we'd place the order with. This will eliminate the "need" for us to actually make a call or email the order in. Now bare in mind that I will be working with a few different manufactures, so said means of contacting the manufacture would change based on actual product. Trying to make it as much of an automated process as possible.

Question 2:

With being said that we drop ship and dont actually have "product on-hand", what are the thoughts somehow linking the manufactures stock_status (pending it's on the site and current status) to the stock_status on my site?

As we dont want to get into issues that we take an order and then find out that it is out of stock and/or wont be back in stock for weeks.

Any solutions/suggestions/thoughts would be great.

Thanks in advance! :smile:

No takers on this one nor anyone else that stricylt drop ships from multi_sources?

Most of what you want is acheivable with a single cooperative shipper but consider:

What will happen if an order is from more than one shipper?
What if a product is available from more than one shipper?
What if a shipper has more than one warehouse?

These are all conditions that can be encountered with many of the shippers around.

Trying to make this automated is complicated by each of these and many others not referenced.
You can begin to look at the programming complexity by flow charting a decision tree for a manual determination. All of the manual decisions would then have to be coded