Stock Control Philosophy

[chestertb]

Hi All,

I have a question about inventory control.

My e-commerce system currently assesses inventory levels on the fly. Optionally, if the item's out of stock, a visitor to the online store simple won't see the product, and if inventory numbers are low, they can not order more than is available.

Purchases are added to the shopping cart via session cookies but the actual inventory levels aren't adjusted until the purchase is completed.

However, how would you handle the purchase if, between the time an item is added to the cart and the time a purchase is completed, someone else completes a purchase and exhausts the inventory?

It must happen occasionally, no matter how many checks or balances are built into the cart, so what to do?

How does, say, Amazon or one of the other high volume on-line retailers handle that?

Cheers
CTB

[criterion9]

You could reduce the inventory temporarily whenever the item(s) are added to a cart and do cleanup by replacing the missing inventory after a period of time or the item(s) are removed from the cart. This would be tricky since users could affect your site for regular users by just adding a bunch of items to their cart even though after a period of time the reduced inventory would be replaced.

[aj_nsc]

You could reduce the inventory temporarily whenever the item(s) are added to a cart and do cleanup by replacing the missing inventory after a period of time or the item(s) are removed from the cart. This would be tricky since users could affect your site for regular users by just adding a bunch of items to their cart even though after a period of time the reduced inventory would be replaced.

Bingo, that's how to do it. For the issue of your items not being displayed on the site if they are out of stock, you could keep two running totals of inventory, actual inventory left in stock, and inventory that is in line to be purchased. If inventory left in stock is greater equal to the inventory in line to be purchased, you could place it up online with a "temporarily unavailable" notice...

These are all just suggestions, I don't have any idea how much control you have over your system to change it. Good luck.

[chestertb]

Thanks all. Interesting insight. Implementation will significantly increase the complexity of the cart, but I like where it would be going.
Cheers
CTB