I have been working on setting up my eCommerce store in CS-Cart, I had a question regarding inventory management.
Suppose I am selling a laptop hard drive that fits into 100 different laptops and I have 10 of those hard drives in stock, but since it fits in 100 products and I have all 100 listed on my site, how do I control inventory? Can I create something like a product group and control inventory at the group level? Basically I want a group of products to share a common inventory. Is that possible?
Thank you.
I'm pretty sure you cannot do group inventory. It is specific to each product listing.
[quote name='racingsolution' timestamp='1319902543' post='124836']
I'm pretty sure you cannot do group inventory. It is specific to each product listing.
[/quote]
Do you know of any third party plugin that could do this? I can't be the only one looking for something like this.
I don't… and it would be a significant addon to achieve what you are looking to do.
I would look at how you have your products 'structured'. I.e. your disk drives should be their own part and should have the laptops they support (or the disk drives supported by the laptop) as product features. Then you'd have cross referencing and inventory would work as it should. When you're out of drives, you're out of drives.
Well I have supported laptops as individual products, for example: Acer Aspire 3250 Hard Drive, Acer Aspire 7000 Hard Drive etc. are separate products on the website. But all are compatible with say a Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA. So I only need to track inventory for the Seagate HDD since that is the product I will ship out, but since it is compatible with all those different laptops (which are listed as individual products), I need the inventory to work on a group level.
I don't want to put compatibility information as product features, I would rather have them as separate products for better conversion.
How long will it take you to order more hard drives if you run out? If it's not long, I would just track inventory yourself and not rely on the shopping cart to track it.
How long will it take you to order more hard drives if you run out? If it's not long, I would just track inventory yourself and not rely on the shopping cart to track it.
Well, in that case you would need what's commonly known as “product aliases”. This is not a feature of cs-cart.
I'd guess that you want to alias a lot of product info like product_code, descriptions, etc. so they can all be different between the same aliased product.
Unfortunately, this would be a change to a lot of base functionality in different places in the cart.
Another option you might want to consider since you are worried about SEO, etc. is to extend SEO to allow for more than one name per product. I.e. Acer-200gb-disk-drive.html, sony-200gb-disk-drive.html, dell-200gb-disk-drive.html would all point to the same compatible product of western-digital-200gb-disk-drive.html
This would be a lot easier to implement, though it would require extending the SEO addon to handle the setup and to avoid its checks for multiple names that point to the same object.