Customer can buy more products than available in stock

Posted August 30th, 2007 by privatecorner

Hi, All!

I've read throught different forums, but still don't have clear idea how to make it working correct.

The problem: In the order form a customer can enter more products to buy than is available in stock.

I saw some suggestion about checking and adjusting the quantity with JavaScript (something like http://wosbee.com/node/514), but it seems to be just a workaround and not the correct clear solution:
- JavaScript could be just disabled on the client.
- Moreover if there are 3 items in stock then 2 clients can try to but 2 items each almost at the same time, so we end up with -1 item in stock (but both clients behaviour is correct since 2 < 3). "-1", what does that mean for me as a seller? What a seller is supposed to do in this situation?

From my point of view such things should be checked in transactional way on the server side when a customer tries to confirm an order showing corrected order in case of some items are missing in stock.

Is there any transactional behaviour foreseen for this issue?

May be I'm just missing something here, but for me the most probable use-case is:
1. Customer confirms an order. Let's say customer requested 3 items while only 2 available.
2. He automatically gets a kind of electronic invoice to pay for 3 items.
3. Once he paid the product should be sent to him, but 1 item is missing. And I don't understand what should seller do...He should return money for 1 item back? This is just additional work for a seller person while it could be easily avoided with software.

Or it is supposed to work like this:
1. Customer confirms an order. Let's say again customer requested 3 items while only 2 available.
2. He automatically gets just a confirmation of his order witout invoice.
2a. Later seller checks if the requested quantity can be provided and only afterwards sends the invoice? This is again involving seller into process which should be just automatic from my point of view.

Could you please help me to clear up this issue?
Thansk a lot!
RJoker

Concrete questions to Wosbee team

On August 31st, 2007 privatecorner said:

Hi,
since there is no answers and/or comments I can conclude one of 2 options:
1. My questions are just stupid, so noone want to answer:)
2. The way I've made them is messy, so people don't know what to answer.

Since I want to believe that it's not the first option which takes place in this case, I'd formulate concrete questions to Wosbee team (or members who can talk on behalf of them):

1. Do I miss something in configuration or described behaviour is really taking place in all Wosbee based shops?

If it is just me missing config details, please can you point me to the URL where I can read about correct configuration (I'm not talking about workarounds and patches)?

Otherwise:
2. What is Wosbee recommended way to get it working correctly?
3. Is it concerned by Wosbee as a bug and it will be corrected soon (deadline?) or the official position is "users can live with such behaviour"?
4. What is the most probable use-case from the point of view of Wosbee team (I believe you based your system on some real use-cases)?

I want to say that the system is really great and flexible, you've done a big work. I see, that the system is developing rapidly, what is always a good sign for me. But bugs like this doesn't give a chance to talk about a system seriously from my point of view...

Thanks a lot for your work and your help!
RJoker

Answers on stock levels

On September 2nd, 2007 jaakko said:

RJoker, Your questions are not stupid but just not the most easy ones. ;-)

Making online shop sales process fully automatic and idiot proof is difficult, as would be tuning any complicated sales process (online or offline). Or it would be simple if we could forget all the requirements from customer service and marketing point of view.

Current functionality of Wosbee enables selling products even if the stock level is zero or less. Mainly this is due to the fact that most merchants want to enable this or they don't care about stock levels at all.

If stock levels are critical for a webshop, merchant currelty has 2 choices.

They can set webshop to hide the product when its stock level reaches zero (or some other ammount like "2", that could do the trick for you?)
They can disble the "add to cart" button with some CSS tuning. But still show the product in the webshop with mayby "coming soon" text.

However, the current functionality is not bullet proof as you pointed out. In some cases customers could order products that the merchant just doesn't have. In these cases these orders would have to managed manually.

Currently only solution to avoid this is to set the "hide product" ammount greater than zero (use alarm level). This way product is hidden before its stock level reaches zero. Of course this method also has it weaknesses.

I hope this gave you some answers although it doesn't solve the basic problem.

We have now this on our Wishlist, so it might be solved at some point! Basically we would just add a configuratoin where you could set the webshop to disable (100% proof!) selling products below stock level.

- Jaakko

PS. This answer applies to Wosbee shops that have no integrations to back-ensd systems such as ERP or warehouse management. In Enterprise level solutions that we have implemented and where stock level management plays critical role, this kind of functionality is usually implemented using real-time integratios to back-end systems. So using for example Webservices queries the webshop checks availability (and makes reservation, checks customer specific delivery options, etc...) from another systemt before it enabes the user to confirm order.

RE: Answers on stock levels

On September 2nd, 2007 privatecorner said:

Thanks a lot for the answer, Jaakko.

Off course, as a software developer, I understand that it is sometimes quite difficult to satisfy all the requiremens from all the sides involved into a process.

> Basically we would just add a configuratoin
> where you could set the webshop to disable
> (100% proof!) selling products below stock level.

This would be really great since it will allow to fully automate the order-process and order confirmations. Form technical point of view it should not be that easy, but off course depends on currently existing system. I'm sure you have some transaction handling already, because when an order is confirmed by a customer you deduct the number of items in stock. Without transactions you can't garantee correct calculations in all the cases (several customers confirm orders at the same moment).

When do you think the next Wosbee release is coming?

RJoker