"Show Sold Out" breaks Product Listing alignment?

Hi,

I'm helping a company fix some problems with their site that was professionally skinned. The contractor that skinned it is no longer in business.

They are running v1.3.8 and have the HTML wysiwyg product editor installed, no other mods that I can see. As I am picking up after someone else, I have no notes on what code changes were possibly made but, I'm hoping someone here can narrow down where the error lies.

I have not upgraded the site to 1.3.9 because I don't know if their skin job will break or not. The only hints I've found in the template files refer to 1.3.7.

Ok, so onto the issue.

The company had been allowing customers to buy products that were not in stock and backorder times got out of hand, so now they want to stop allowing backorders to blindly take place. I said that wouldn't be a problem as I could flip a couple switches and it would prevent customers from ordering items you marked with quantity 0.

So I go into Admin > Config > Stock and change:
Check stock - true
Allow checkout - false
Show Sold Out Image - 1

After making the changes I lowered a product to 0 quantity and refreshed the product. Looked good in product info. Then tried another product; and when I browsed to the sub category product list items that were sold out had the sold out small image throwing off the alignment of the columns.

Here's before:

And here is after:

I looked at button_sold_out_sm.gif and it was a 1x1 invisible pic, hence why it isn't showing. I copied over the original from default template and the same thing occurs. It is as if the row of the next product begins immediately after the location of the sold out small button.

Could I please get some guidance on where I should be looking to get this resolved?

In fact, I wouldn't mind modifying the product list so that it doesn't show the button when sold out image is enabled -- and just have only the add to cart button replaced in the product info.

I tried to use the Call for Price feature (thinking I could just replace the button image and text as a work around) but it too causes the same alignment issue when activated.

Other possibly relevant settings in Admin > Config > Prod Listing:
Display Prod Price/Add Cart - 3
Display Add Cart Button - 0
Display Multi Qty Box - 0

Thank you in advance for the help.

Since the site has a custom template, it's unlikely anyone here will be able to help much with just a screenshot. A link to the site would help.

The site is: http://www.spikestactical.com/new/z/

I have turned off Show Sold Out though since it was impacting too many product listings.

If you need it turned on for differential analysis, I can arrange a time to flip it long enough to get the information and then turn it off again.

Thanks again for the response. Hope I can get the assistance to solve this.

Bumpity bump?

AS I said, we'll need to see the problem. Since most of us here pop in and help out when we can, it's hard to make an appointment to turn something on or off.

If you can turn it on, and leave it on until someone replies, that should work. Might wait until tomorrow, though, as things slow down here on the weekends.

Unfortunately with 100,000 hits and 100 orders per day with an average value or 500$, I wouldn't be able to leave it on.

Instead I think I should kindly change my request for help on removing the check for sold out sm on the product listing page. I would like to comment that out so it doesn't attempt to change the layout for any products that are sold out and should eliminate the problem.

Customers will still see it sold out when they go into the product info and the Add Cart button is replaced.

Could someone please point out where I would need to go in order to remove this? The previous person that worked this template over already enabled the 1x1 invisible pixel trick and it does not work, it too breaks the formatting, so the only option I see around this without leaving the problem exposed would be to remove the sold out check in product listing.

Thank you again.