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As we are caching the stock value it is important we do not make an online sale based on an out of date stock position. Shopfront’s full integration with your accounting software means that as the user reaches their final checkout step, the Sage stock database is queried one final time to get the exact stock position. If there is insufficient stock to fulfil the order, either:
If we had to get 40 or 50 stock positions from your office every time we rendered a single page the website would run very slowly. So our ecommerce software uses a cascade of memory and database caches to keep the stock position. By default the cache value expires every 4 hours and the value is also updated when a sale is made through the website.
You may have items that you can quickly obtain for your customer when you are out of stock or they may be items that you never stock. In this case you can mark the item as ‘Back Order’. This will cause the site to show that product as ‘In Stock’ or show a more accurate message such as ‘Back Order’ or ‘Order for delivery in 3 days’ depending on your requirements.
Shopfront supports the Sage system Bill of Materials (BOM). When a stock query is made for a BOM item the stock of the made up item is checked first and then the BOM is...
The way you display stock on the web site is an important factor in your relationship with your customers. You may want to show ‘out of stock’ messages to prevent disappointment when orders cannot be fulfilled in a timely manner. Likewise you may wish to show ‘low stock’ messages to encourage purchasing of attractive items. You will know how accurate your stock position is in your warehouse so the threshold that ‘out of stock’ and ‘low stock’ can be configured for the site. The default values are 0 for ‘out of stock’ and ‘low stock’ is not used.
If you run an accurate purchase order system and you keep expected delivery dates up to date then when an item is out of stock a due in date can be displayed. This date can by ‘slugged’ by a fixed number of days to allow for late delivery, unpacking and other factors which make the shipping date different from the delivery date.