You can ensure that you never sell products that you do not have in stock or on order by enabling Inventory for your e-store.
Inventory ensures that only products that are available can be purchased.
Enabling Inventory
To enable inventory go to Control Panel > Payment Settings;
- Tick the Enable Inventory checkbox,
- When the box is ticked, you can ensure that your products do not immediately become unavailable for sale by adding some On Order stock,
- Add a number greater than zero to ensure that all products with no stock remain available for sale,
- You can then go through each product to set the correct stock levels individually.
Setting Stock Levels
To set stock, at present you can only do it through each individual product record (global editing coming soon).
- Go to the selected product record. Control Panel > Manage Products/Categories > View All Products (selected category) > Click on the selected product
- Insert the correct quantities for each of the 2 fields,
- In Stock - the number of product units you have on hand which have not been previously sold,
- On Order - The number of product units you expect to receive some time in the near future.
- The Pending Sales number is the number of products that have been sold (by direct or alternate payment), but have not yet been paid for,
- You cannot manually edit this number,
- It will be amended when either the item is marked as paid or the item is removed from the shopping trolley.
- When items are sold through online systems (e.g. PayPal or credit card) the In Stock field will automatically be reduced.
- When the total of In Stock and On Order is zero, the product will become read only - the public will not be able to purchase the item until restocked.
- You can set the Stock Email field to receive an email when the Stock total reaches this level,
- This field must have a value of 1 or more for inventory to function fully.
- You will also receive an email when the stock reaches zero.
Important Limitations
Because of the nature of online sales, it is possible (though unlikely), that a purchase of a product could be made which is out of stock and which cannot be restocked. This could happen when sales are made very close together in time.
- Inventory checks are made each time;
- A product is viewed,
- A product is added to a trolley,
- A trolley is viewed or updated.
- If another product is sold in between viewing the trolley and clicking the Buy Now or Checkout button it is possible the last product could be sold more than once.
- You should make provision for this in your sale terms and conditions and have a refund policy in place to cater for this instance.
