backorder???

I would also like to see something like this maybe another order status or a custom order status field, as a  subset of processed or of shipped.  It is not  uncommon to have one order with  standard items we ship on reciept and dropship or special orders that ship seperately and generally later.

This will be part of ProductCart v3. We encourage you to provide more details on what features you would like to see as part of this new component of ProductCart.

Specifically, one of the big questions is the following:

• Assume there are 3 inventory statuses: in stock, back-ordered, out of stock
• Assume your store allows customers to place an order for back-ordered products.
• Assume an order is placed for 3 items: 2 are in stock and can ship immediately and 1 is in back-order.
• Will you ship 1 order or 2 separate orders?
• If the latter is true, do you agree that the store will bear the full cost of the second shipment and therefore the customer will only be shown shipping charges during checkout based on the total cost of shipping the 3 items in one shipment?

We are interested in hearing your thoughts on this question. And feel free to provide additional feedback on this feature.

FTHOBBIES,

Thank you very much for your feedback. We strongly believe in considering our customers an integral part of the "product management" team. ProductCart is the result of many years of customer feedback turned into new features.

In reply to your posting: I believe that you are treating "out of stock" and "back-ordered" as the same "inventory status". However, we foresee store managers wishing to treat the three inventory statuses differently. Specifically, this is what we have in mind:

• Out of stock: the product is not available and cannot be purchased. This is the case when the inventory is 0, you have not re-ordered the product via the Supplier Management System (see below), and you have not set up the product to be automatically considered "back-ordered" when out of stock.
• Back-ordered: the product has been re-ordered and should arrive in N days (this is shown to the customer as "This product typically ships in N days"). ProductCart v3 will include an extensive Supplier Management system that will allow you to create Purchase Orders to be sent to suppliers right from ProductCart. A product would automatically be considered "back-ordered" by the system if it's out of stock, but it has been re-ordered (a purchase order has been created that includes the product). In addition, you could individually set a product to always be treated as "back-ordered" when it goes out of stock.
• In-stock: the product is available. If a customer tries to order a quantity that is higher than the quantity in stock, currently ProductCart shows a message indicating that the amount exceeds the current inventory level. We will change that message based on how the product is setup: if it's out of stock, the customer will only be able to order the units in stock; if it's back-ordered, the customer will be notified of how many units are in back-order.

Does this sound OK?
Any additional thoughts?

Edited by earlyimp - 12-January-2006 at 1:48am

I like the approach in general but one suggestion

Out of stock: the product is not available and cannot be purchased. This is the case when the inventory is 0, you have not re-ordered the product via the Supplier Management System (see below), and you have not set up the product to be automatically considered "back-ordered" when out of stock.

Using Out of stock in this manner, may be misleading/confusing. Out of stock is generally considered a temporary status. Discontinued or Not Available - with a check box for nofity if it becomes available, might be better.

You might want to look thru the 'code snippets' available on our Developer's Corner, one of which can be used to show content only to customers that are logged in:

http://www.earlyimpact.com/productcart/support/developers.as p#snippets

Please keep in mind that we cannot offer assistance with the implementation of code snippets from this site.