Out of Stock.

[mytheory.]

Hello,

We are planning on taking our shop live in 2 weeks and to ensure everything goes smoothly or at least so we are prepared I have a couple of questions regarding how PS handles out of stock items.

Although we try to keep our PS database up-to-date, we also have a physical store that uses the same product inventory. So the product quantity in PS might not always be 100% accurate.

Here's the scenario...
1) A customer orders a product from our webstore, but earlier that day we sold the last item in the store. So technically we are out of stock and cannot fulfill the other of our PS customer. My question is how does PS handles this issue and what is the best way to deal with this?

2) I don't have a problem sending the customer an email informing them the product is out of stock, and giving them the option to wait longer or cancel the order. IF they decide to wait then we won't change the status (under Orders) and everything's fine... but what if they want to cancel the order or the product is discontinued and we have to force a cancel on one product of an order?

3) Most importantly, how will the payments be handled? If they customer paid for the order but we need to cancel one product from that order will he/she be refunded a portion of that order automatically? I can't imagine PS being linked to our payment gateway so will we have to call our merchant company to change the charged amount?

If this has happened to anybody could you give some insight on how you handled it?

Greatly Appreciated.

[rocky]

1. PrestaShop does not have a good solution for this scenario, but I don't see how it possibly could. How could PrestaShop know that a product was bought from another system without having some kind of connection to the other system?

2. You can cancel a whole order by changing the status on the order page to "Canceled". You can cancel individual products in an order by entering how many of each product to cancel in the X column and then click the "Cancel products" button.

3. Unfortunately, you must manually refund money. PrestaShop doesn't do it automatically.

[mytheory.]

rocky as always thanks for your reply!

So I guess to recap, if the product ends up being out-of-stock after an order has been placed I need to cancel the product or order as you mentioned in #2. And then I would have to contact my merchant company or bank to "manually" refund the order amount or a portion of it. Sounds like that's manageable to do.

So my next question is:

So to my understanding once the customer submits a payment through a gateway module (the last step of a order process) the payment is instantly and directly sent to the processing/merchant company, right? If so, is there anyway to "pause" the payment from going to the merchant company until a status is changed for that order in the BO? So, basically, the customer submits the payment but until we process the order the payment lingers, that way once the order is modified and finalized we can change the status, in which case that "paused" payment reflects the new total and is sent to the merchant company for processing.

I imagine this would be difficult to do without holding the credit card information locally (which may not be possible in the US due to security and/or law issues), but I thought I might ask just in case there's another way to handle something like this...

Thanks!

[rocky]

It may be possible, but I think it would be very difficult to pause a payment in PayPal until you've confirmed the product is in stock. Perhaps an easier way would be to use the Offline Credit Card module, which lets you encrypt credit card information in your database for manual processing. I'm not sure whether you can then send those details to your merchant company and make the payment without the customer clicking a button. If you can't, you may need to use the "Cheque" or "Bankwire" module and change the name to "PayPal" and the message to "We will send a request for payment after we have confirmed the product is in stock.", then send a PayPal payment request to the customer for them to approve.