AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Hi,
our business has 3 different cenarials for products' availability:

1. in stock and ready to ship

2."usually ships in ..X. days"
(allow placing and order)
(customer should see this message both on products page and on order confirmation e mail)

3. out of stock (do not alow placing an order)

we do not want to use any products quantity in stock updating, (meaning in numbers- 3 units available etc. 10 received, 8 orderes 2 left etc.)

we only want to be able to show the above messages for each item individually, depending on it's status, with these comments appearing also on confirmation e mail ( hopfully also on cart page and checkout page)

what would be the best way to do that?

You might be able to do it with product templates and I think those fields show up during checkout.

This module could be easily adapted to accomplish what you need:

http://www.solunar.com/Out-of-Stock-ETA ... 37145.aspx