Thread: Updating Inventory Via WSI and Shopping Cart Behavior

We hire a 3rd party to do product inventory updates every night using WSI.

This afternoon we received an order which contains items who's inventory number should have been updated overnight to show 0. Somehow they were still able to submit the order including items which were not in stock.

When doing inventory updates via WSI, are existing customer shopping carts updated, are out of stock items removed, or is this ignored?

Trying to figure out what is happening here.

Thanks!

You may have your AppConfig variables set to allow selling more than you have.

Inventory.LimitCartToQuantityOnHand is set to true. What other appconfigs should I look at?

That would be the correct one. That will prevent things from being added to the cart. However, another check is not done once things are in the cart. Otherwise you can set ClearOldCartOnSignin to true.

A check not being done after items have been added to the cart would explain the behavior we're seeing. Any idea how difficult it would be to setup a stored procedure to run overnight that goes through customer carts and updates quantities? If it's a simple project I may consider looking into it but the problem we're facing isn't severe enough to warrant eating a huge chunk of time to fix.

The problem you're likely to run into is from who's cart do the items get removed. It could very well be that multiple people have the same item in their cart and that item not longer has sufficient stock to satisfy all the orders in carts. So how do you decide who's cart should get modified? Do you partially modify a cart? If you find even one problem with a product do you empty the carts of everyone with that product in their cart? If you do that, then how to you explain the 'bug' of carts randomly emptying over night?

You might be better off checking quantities when someone checks out, but then you start getting into modifying the checkout code. The checkout code is some of the craziest I've seen and I try to stay away from it whenever possible.

You're right, I can see how this wouldn't be a simple task. Best just to work through the problem orders as we get them.

If you do that, then how to you explain the 'bug' of carts randomly emptying over night?

We already have to try to explain the bug of carts randomly emptying over night. Our explanation: "We don't know and we can't find anyone else who knows why your cart emptied since the last time you logged in. Sorry." It's really quite frustrating. But, that's a different thread in itself.

Thanks for your input!