Stock Availability Status for 4.0

[Pooch]

Is there a way to include a generic stock availability status, without tracking inventory? For instance, on Amazon it normally reads:

Availability:In-Stock

...and sometimes it may read:

Availability:Usually ships in 48-72 hours

This would be a great feature to include, if it isn't already possible with 4.0. If it is possible, what's the most efficient way to do it. Thanks in advance for responses.

[SunShopper]

I totally agree! I believe this is a MUST HAVE feature. Some of us mentioned it as a suggested new feature for 4.0 but it doesn’t seem to have made the cut as of yet.

I think many people totally underestimate the need to NOT show your inventory totals. This is incredibly valuable information to your competitors. If your competition can see your inventory quantities, then they will be able to accurately determine how much of each product you are selling and that’s information you don’t want your competition to know! I’d pay big money to know the sales history of my competition. I could simply find out which items they sell the most of then emulate (rip off) what they are doing.

That said we still need a way to communicate to our customers what the stock status is. Ideally, I would like there to be a Stock Status field for each product where we can state what we want SunShop to say when an item is in stock or when an item is out of stock. For example if an item is in stock we could simply say “In Stock”. When an item is out of stock, we could make it say “Usually ships in 7 to 10 days” or “Out of Stock” or “On Backorder”…you get the idea.

I did notice that when sun shop lists the items while you’re browsing categories, it lists the availability as either “In Stock” or “Out of Stock”. We could probably modify the template of the product page to do this instead of listing the quantities but I would still prefer custom responses for each product.

[Brave New World]

I like the custom response idea! Sometimes I am out of stock on a given item but I am expecting the product to arrive within a few days. If I list the product as “Out of Stock” then my customers will simply go elsewhere but if they know the product will arrive very soon, then they’ll usually place their order anyway. That’s why I like to list my out of stock items as “Usually ships in 7 to 10 days”. Listing them as “Out of Stock” is the equivalent of saying, “Take a hike”.

I say SunShop should offer a custom availability field on each product for both “In Stock” and “Out of Stock” responses. Make them default to “In Stock” and “Out of Stock” respectively but allow us to change them as needed.

For those of us who don’t want to take orders for products that are out of stock, you could simply list the items as out of stock and use the Enforce Stock feature.

The main thing is to get the quantities out of there.

[Killer Commerce]

I don’t like the idea of showing quantities either but what happens when a customer wants to buy a quantity of 10 when there are only 5 in stock?

Well I think I may have the solution! Do it like Overstock.com does it!

They list the item as “In Stock”. But if a customer buys more than is available, they are told that there are only 5 available. Using the Enforce Stock feature, SunShop simply says “Too Many”. I think they should say something like “There are only 5 in stock – Please reduce your quantity and continue with your purchase” (or something like that).

This should be an easy template modification and will allow us to hide our inventory levels but show them when absolutely necessary.

[Fingerstyle]

I think all of these solutions are great and very much needed. I too was hoping they’d make it to 4.0 as I do not want to show my inventory levels either but I still would like to communicate the availability to the customer.

If you want to take orders for products you don’t have, and you don’t mind shipping partials, then SunShopper and Brave New World have come up with a great solution…Give us the option to enter a custom availability message for each product.

If you want to hide your inventory levels while using the Enforce Stock Feature, then Killer Commerce came up with a great solution as well…List the availability as In-Stock but when a customer buys too many, don’t just say “Too Many”, alert the customer to how many are available and ask the customer to adjust their order. Brilliant!!!

I personally like the SunShopper and Brave New World solutions, as I would still like my customer to be able to order from me even if I don’t have the products in stock at that time. As long as my customer knows it will take a few days before it will ship then I think that’s ideal. But I’d like to go one further and put the availability information in the shopping cart and on the receipt. That way we can avoid the phone calls from angry customers when they call a week after placing their order wondering where it is, as they will have the availability right there on their receipt.

Otherwise, use the Killer Commerce solution and only take orders for stuff you have on the shelf.

Now, all we need is the functionality….hint hint to TWT!

[Pooch]

Listing them as “Out of Stock” is the equivalent of saying, “Take a hike”.

EXACTLY! I've never thought that listing your inventory counts is a good idea, simply because it isn't. If you decide to enforce inventory, fine...but your inventory should still be hidden behind text messages such as "In-Stock" or "Usually ships in X amount of days", etc. I really hope TWT is listening to this and will respond as to whether this is included (and I just can't find the function) or whether they have last minute plans to add it to 4.0.

[johndelk]

Just an idea here but you could just turn off the "enforce in stock" setting and then add a product attribute that would say something like "usually ships in 3 to 5 days". This would show up and if it is in your local stock and ships right out then great. If it's not in your local stock then maybe that will buy some time.

[SunShopper]

Not a bad idea Johndelk. This actually works rather well. I put the word “Availability” under the attribute name and “Usually ships in 7 to 10 days” under the value. I then turned off the “Show Stock” and “Enforce Stock” features and it worked like a charm. Although it appears that the “Enforce Stock” feature isn’t working correctly in the 4.0 demo. Even when it is turned off, I am still unable to add more than is available. TWT will need to fix this.

Another good thing about this is it will show up on the HTML pages, which is good because the “Show Stock” feature doesn’t work on the HTML pages, as it needs to be dynamically generated.

The only problem is that you will have to do this for every single product and be sure to update the attribute the second you run out of stock. You’ll also have to generate your HTML pages (if your are using HTML pages) each time you make a change. It also won’t work for those who want it to automatically change.

However, for me personally, this is a great solution but we still need to come up with a solution for those who want it to automatically change. There’s probably a simple line of PHP code we could stick in the template that says…use one response when inventory is greater than 0 and use another response when inventory is less than 1.

Until then…GREAT IDEA JOHNDELK!

[marlo74]

I think that showing the "In stock" is much better than showing the quantity. And that message "Too many" must be changed. Some lazy coder put that there instead of taking care of relying a better message to the customer. :)