[Products] Allow purchase when out of stock
At present when a product runs out of stock its stock level goes to stock level 0 which makes it unavailable to purchase. How about having the option for it to automatically go to stock level -1, thereby staying on sale even though it is out of stock?
-
Jeff Kane commented
Lee, that sounds like a good idea. When we run out of a product in a certain size and colour, we can usually still obtain it and many customers still expect to be able to buy and wait. We therefore have to leave them at -1, but then we get other customers saying that we didn't advise them it was out of stock so that they could decide what to do. The way we solve this in our back end system is to use negative numbers, so if someone orders 3 and we only have 1, the stock goes to -2. This works well because when we receive some more in, we can add the quantity received and get back to the true stock figure. However, this won't work in EWS because -1 already has a meaning (ie always in stock). Your Yes/No field would certainly help.
-
-1 is used to indicate that an item is "always in stock".
Would this be better done with a setting to determine whether nil-stock items should be allowed to be purchased?
i.e.
Allow items with zero stock to be checked out: Yes/No