Thread

Hello,

We are considering using SCM to add very simple commerce (10 items approx.) ontop of a forthcoming EE build. How easy would it be to include some kind of stock control with this?

We don’t want users buying more items than are available, as this would create problems with forfillment of the items.

If there was a field in the product called stock_control, could this be checked against the quantity required, or as this is all handled by Paypal, is this not really faesable?

Anyone have any different solutions?

Thanks,
Adrian

Define “some kind”. The SCM keeps tracks of the number of sales (because they are stored in the db) of registered & logged-in members, so if you provide a variable of the available stock somewhere you can use PHP to deduct from that; I’ve done it before. Making sense?

Just take note that you can sell to anonymous users as well, but EE will not keep track of such sales.

Some kind - all we want is to stop people being able to buy more than the client has in stock.

The website will not be forcing the users to log-in, so in this case, I guess there is no easy way to keep track of stock?

Not with the SCM, I am afraid. Not saying it can’t be done, but you’d have to keep track of the numbers yourself. If we are talking about physical goods, having people log in is generally not a problem, I find(they need to provide a shipping address at some point), but for non-tangible goods this might not be the case.

OK. Do we need to hold the shipping address through EE, or can this not just be done using the addres held for the user in Paypal?

You get a whole heap of variables back from PayPal - address being one.

As mentioned above you can do inventory management with the method above and if you don’t mind changing a few lines in the core you can get everything working without users having to log in / register.

That said Simple Commerce is what it says - simple. It is not a complex shopping cart solution and it basically allows you to buy one of every product at a time.

Thanks for your help. I’ll see what we can do.

Adrian, I’m in the online t-shirt biz, and what some sites do is display how many are left in stock of an item online. It’s a good way of prompting people to act to purchase, as well, in our line of work. It’s not an ideal system - we have to update the inventory figures ourselves, but I made a series of simple SAEF forms that let us decrement stock fairly easily.