Out Of Stock - Allow Customer To Buy Or Preorder?

General General Questions
1

I would like to set up so that if stock = 0 the customer can either pre-purchase or register for notification when in stock. From CS-Cart "explanation" box:

Note that the 'Buy in advance' option requires a positive product amount while the 'Sign up for notification' option requires a non-positive amount. Also note that the 'Sign up for notification' option is not applied to products tracked with options.

What does "product amount" refer to? Inventory quantity in CS-Cart? The amount the customer wants to buy?

Also, what actually happens with these product options? Does the buy in advance option allow the sale to complete and then flag it as bought in advance? Does "Sign up for notification" keep an internal database or and automate notification as soon as CS-Cart stock becomes positive?

2

Hope this article will help you:

http://kb.cs-cart.com/buy-in-advance

Does "Sign up for notification" keep an internal database or and automate notification as soon as CS-Cart stock becomes positive?

Yes, the notification will be sent automatically

3

This would be a good feature if CSCart put back the option to show or hide "out of stock" for the customer frontend.

My store has perhaps 20,000 items but only about 5,000 are in stock at anyone time. So I'm not going to enable "show out of stock" unless the visitors to the site can disable it for themselves.

4

Hope this article will help you:

http://kb.cs-cart.com/buy-in-advance

Yes, the notification will be sent automatically

Thanks for the link.

This would be a good feature if CSCart put back the option to show or hide "out of stock" for the customer frontend.

My store has perhaps 20,000 items but only about 5,000 are in stock at anyone time. So I'm not going to enable "show out of stock" unless the visitors to the site can disable it for themselves.

Agree that would be useful for any site with lots of products.