posted on July 20, 2009 05:51:11 PM new
I noticed this before and thought it was a one time fluke, but it isn't. The store marks things "out of stock" when someone merely puts things in the shopping cart. When the user/shopper navigates away from the page the item still remains marked as out of stock. This should probably be marked as a priority on the fix list...
i.e. To be more specific, the items should ONLY be marked as "out of stock" when the shopper actually pays for the item, otherwise we the sellers have to go back and mark the item in stock even though it hasn't sold.
The system should make the items unavailable while in the shopping cart, but if the cart is abandoned it should be adding those back to become available. This way buyers can't add items that are unavailable, nor should the items remain unavailable if they fail to check out for them.
Are any of these still showing unavailable in your store? (any samples of this that you have would be useful for testing.)
posted on July 21, 2009 08:18:01 AM new
I agree with your statement above, they should be marked as out of stock when someone is in the process of checking out, but they remain out of stock indefinitely.
Here is what I did and the test scenarios I set up for you to test.
1) I put the item in the cart then hit checkout and opened up a new window with the items. I could see the item was marked "out of stock". I did not enter any buyer information. I then deleted my cookies and all temporary files from my computer, closed all windows. Opened up a new window (modernhomeart.com) went to "products" and the item was still marked out of stock.
2) After doing the above, I rebooted my machine went back in and it was still marked out of stock.
Testing:
I set up two separate items for you to test with on my page, I called them "Test 1" and "Test 2" with test graphics. I performed the same steps on "Test 1" item as I described above for the original item that had the issue so you can see that it is out of stock from actions on my end. I see the order on my side in vendio was created but no buyer data exists for that item since I did not put in any.
Please try the same with Test 2 item which currently has a quantity of 1 in stock. I will also set up a Test 3 with a high quantity so you could try it several times if needed, it's really the decrement you care about.
posted on July 21, 2009 08:50:14 AM new
I should have also added:
The item DOES get put back into inventory when the user manually deletes it from their cart but only after they have put in their shipping information.
The user _can't_ delete the item from the cart unless they put in the shipping OR delete the cookie information which is pretty strange, why would you be restricted from taking the item out of your shopping cart? Deleting the cookies as the message states, does not make the item disappear or correct the inventory though, so only the option of adding in the shipping info and THEN deleting works.
Sorry for the confusion, your right in that this is how it currently behaves. There is a fix in the works for this and a few other scenario's related to this issue and we hope to have a fix live on the site in the very near future. (my mistake was thinking this was already pushed live.)
For right now, if you go to your Orders - Sold Items page you can select these abandoned shopping carts and use the 'cancel' button to invalidate the order.
You can delete those items, or if you wanted to keep them for your own testing purposes later - just edit them and set them to being 'not visible in store'.
