Backorder suggestions for the next Patch!

Here is our ideal vision of how product cart would handle backorders:
  a. Mark backorderable out-of-stock items as "out of stock" in the customer's view cart page
      (so they have a heads-up that although they can order it, it's going to go on backorder rather than get shipped immediately.)
  b. Subtract the out-of-stock $$ from the total that gets sent for BC auth/charge processing
      (because we don't charge customers for items that we aren't yet shipping yet)
  c. when processing the order, and sending confirmation, mark them as "backordered" rather than "shipped".  OR let the admin processing the order, change the ordered/shipped to 0 so it would show that we shipped them 0, but would still show what they ordered.  (Currently we have to delete the item from their order, to get the charges and quantity to show up right.)

"c." would save us a lot of time at order processing.

njessen42 wrote: "c." would save us a lot of time at order processing.

This is already how ProductCart works. Leave back-ordered items unchecked in the shipping wizard, and the order will be flagged as partially shipped. The e-mail that the customer receives points out the fact that the order has not been fully shipped. Only once all products have been shipped the customer is sent a message that indicates that the order has been fully shipped.

As for order processing, make sure that you setup your payment gateway in ProductCart to "authorize only" so that you can edit the order, if needed.

However, please note that in most cases credit card information is not saved to the database and therefore ProductCart cannot carry out two transactions (partial order, then the balance). ProductCart can only capture the previously authorized transaction.

See this page for more information on advanced order processing in ProductCart (including the ability to edit the order amount and batch-process using the edited amount, with select payment gateways).