Realtime inventory managment

Question

Hello

I've tryied to set a realtime inventory system wuth CS2007. Let's explain :
My products only have 2 inventory states : They are in Stock or not. No backorderable stuff or anything else. As soon as a variant is added to the basket, the rule is that it is "reserved" for 15 minutes, and it can't be added to any other basket. After 15 minutes with no activity on the basket, the variant ihas to be removed from the basket, and the inventory quantity has to be corrected.

Here's what we've done, wich is probably not the best solution :

We've remove the pipeline Inventory steps, so the inventory quantity is never corrected by the pipelines
When a variant is added to the basket, we immediatly modify it's quantity.
If the variant is removed from the basket (by tje customer), we put it back to the inventory
Every 15 minutes, we check all baskets, and if a basket wasn't modified for more than 15 minutes (and if the user isn't currently checking-out), we empty it and replace its variants to the inventory.
Each night, we get an inventory file from the logistic team, containing the real quantities available. We import this file, with quantity correction if there are still baskets containing the concerned variant, which were not allready cleared.

It seams to work, but there's probably a better way of managing this rules

Any suggestions / recommandations ?

Thanks a lot

Olivier

Answer 1

Hi,

I don't have better idea, but decreasing/increasing the stock without running pipeline is quite dangerous since you can have cache/coherence problems (for example, a person adding a product and a timeout triggering at the same time.)
What is the finality of your idea ? I suppose you have 2 stocks to synchronize ?


Cyrebre
P.S : You work @ Itelios, no ? :)

Answer 2

Hi Olivier,

A new KB was release a couple a days ago: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975086 

I think it can help you

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Answer 3

Hi

Sure it's not the better idea, but I didn't find any better solution for modifying the inventory values when adding a product to the basket

and yes, I work for Itelios :)

Olivier

Answer 4

Hello

VERY usefull hotfix, of course, I'll use it for many projects...

Of course I need to analyse it, as it fixes the problem that obliged me to try this "custom" solution

Thank you

Olivier