AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

We've found what appears to be a hole in the checkout process. When an item is set to not allow backorders and has only 1 in inventory, the system allows the customer to order that one last item. However, if the customer tries to add 5 of the item, it shows an error message stating that the quantity was changed because not enough of the item is in stock. That all works as expected. However, when you're looking at the mini cart or the basket itself and modify the quantity of the item and then bypass the recalculate button and just immediately hit checkout, the system puts all 5 of the item onto the order, rather than checking against the available inventory. This also occurs on the back end in the customer service section. This is extremely bad for us because we rely heavily on selling backordered/retired merchandise and need these verifications to be accurate.

Has anyone run into this issue in the past and is there a simple fix for it? I'm using 7.0.2 and cannot upgrade to 7.0.3 yet. Any feedback and/or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Wil

Hello Wil,

On my 7.0.3 build the full page basket doesn't do this and catches it when the checkout button is hit. When you do this with the mini-basket, it's caught when the payment is attempted as all values are re-checked and the resulting error message was displayed.

The quantity of item test exceeds the available stock 3. The quantity has been reduced to quantity available.

Unfortunately we are mid-Holiday season and cannot upgrade to 7.0.3 right now because I am the only person who has any technical capabilities in our company and am slammed with other things right now. I'm just patching things here and there as I find them. I'm definitely going to upgrade to 7.0.3 next year, once we slow down and there's time to integrate all of our changes into the new version. We've customized a lot of pieces for our specific needs, so that will all need to be implemented.

I'll have to test what you mentioned on my 7.0.2 version and see if it does a final check during the payment process. I had not taken the orders that far. I stopped at the step right before that. At least if it does it in the final payment stage, I would be able to leave it as is for now...since those excessive quantities wouldn't actually be submitted into the system. If that does not happen, I think I may have found the 3 sections of code (cart, minicart, backend) where I would need to add a verification. I'll probably try that out tonight on the backend to see if it works in the CSR section while everyone is gone and if so, apply it to the front end as well.

By the way, are you actually the CEO of AbleCommerce? If so, I must say that you've got a great product. We're definitely pleased. I had only about 3 weeks to get the site live. I know classic ASP/VBscript but had never worked with .NET/C#. I was able to setup our workflow using the base set of tools that come standard in AbleCommerce and then where I did need to customize, I was able to do so in the code behind files...didn't need to purchase the full Able Commerce source code as I thought we would need to. We may have to in the future if we go into some deep, deep customization but maybe not. I'm really glad I picked your solution (since the company ultimately left it up to me) because I doubt we would have been live in time for the Holidays with anyone else's solution. I tested some others and although they said they had the features we needed, I found them to be incomplete. AbleCommerce was right on point with so many things like Affiliate IDs, Shipping/Status Workflow Management, Product Management, Themes and lots more. Our workflow is very custom to the way we do business and I was happy to see that much of what we needed was already available, right out of the box so to speak. It does have some room for improvement after using it for a few months now, as any solution does I'm sure. I could see a big need for better gift wrap management in the orders on the back end, maybe some additional coupon options, and more flexibility with inventory/backorder management. But all-in-all I think this has to be one of the most complete solutions out there. I wish I had more time to work with the new version, but I'll just have to wait until the Holidays are over and then can move forward with our next version of the store.

Thanks,
Wil

Hello Wil,

Hopefully you'll find it to be working as described.

We all appreciate your kind comments about AbleCommerce 7. Rarely is it required to purchase the source, we've worked to make it extend-able without the need to jump into hundreds of thousands of lines of code contained in the Commercebuilder core.

Rather than test to see if it did a final check during the payment process, I just added a couple of lines of code to the checkout button trigger which seem to have resolved the issue and it occurs as the items go into the cart, so the customer sees the message immediately. Wasn't too difficult. Probably not the greatest fix, but I just need it to work for the next few weeks until our Christmas rush is over and then I can start installing the new 7.0.3

Wil