Thread: Backorder Question

I have a question regarding backordering. I know aspdotnetstorefront does not support this out of the box but I am wondering if the idea I have would take too much work. I do not currently have access to the source code (will once purchased) but it's just an idea right now.

What I am thinking is that an item that is out of stock (inventory of 0) can still be added to the cart. When that item is added to the cart, a trigger in sql server will add that item to a "backorder" table. This would remove the dollar amount from the order but still list it in a receipt (therefore not charge the customer until the backordered item is in stock). Then when the inventory is updated, it will automatically pull from the backorder table to populate a new order.

Is this idea making sense?

You could probably do it that way but it would take a lot of little updates all over the place. We do checks on pretty much every page during checkout to make sure that nothing 'funky' has happened to the order (quantities are right, total makes sense, shipping hasn't changed, etc) so you'd have to make sure your mods were working throughout. We already support 'child' orders for recurring and ad-hoc transactions, so tracking orders that come from backorders shouldn't be too hard.

The trickiest part of backorder handling is actually the payment, not really how you handle the inventory/order. If you take the order as a standard order (with normal costs), the user can enter payment info right then. If you do AUTH only, you can just wait to capture the payment until the order ships. The problem with this is that each gateway will only hold the auth for a certain amount of time, and then you can't do a capture anymore. If you don't collect any payment info at all during checkout (like you're looking at doing), you then have to contact the customer somehow afterwards to get that, and customers are often uncomfortable giving that information out over the phone.