It is nice that the site sends out an email letting me know that I may be low on stock but it would be nice if when I received the inventory into stock it would mark the order as ready to ship in the admin area. Right now if I have 5 of something in stock and a customer orders 6 of them I place an order with my supplier and a few days later I receive it into stock. I have to go fishing through all my open orders to figure out what the stock I received in goes to.
There is no standard order status related to shipping. Only for payment processing. Hence there's no logic in the cart to manage order statuses that don't exist.
You would need to create your own custom order status.
Then you'd need to hook into the product detail page with a pre controller. If the inventory amount has changed, then you would have to have logic to find the orders with those items that are on hold (still in Processed status) so you can move the order to the new custom status.
It gets very complicated if you've done partial shipments or you have orders with more than one item that is not yet available. Since (I'm not aware of) the number of items shipped is not tracked in the order itself, I don't know how you would go about that without extending the order processing to indicate that 3 of 7 quantity requested have shipped and that 2 of 3 of a different item in the order have shipped…
Have fun…
[quote]
Have Fun…
[/quote]
Is Right!
You are attempting to manage far too much with your shopping cart.
You should really rethink this and manage your inventory and order processing (including back-order processing) through an order management system designed to “properly” handle this, otherwise it will only get worse as your business grows.
It just amazes me (or makes me sad) when I read various posts of everything people want or think a shopping cart program should effectively handle. CS-Cart is a very good, very effective online shopping cart, it is not a full blown inventory /order management system, and thank goodness for that because it would then turn into “bloatware” that would end up doing absolutely nothing well! 
[quote name=‘Struck’ timestamp=‘1330049547’ post=‘131928’]
Is Right!
You are attempting to manage far too much with your shopping cart.
You should really rethink this and manage your inventory and order processing (including back-order processing) through an order management system designed to “properly” handle this, otherwise it will only get worse as your business grows.
It just amazes me (or makes me sad) when I read various posts of everything people want or think a shopping cart program should effectively handle. CS-Cart is a very good, very effective online shopping cart, it is not a full blown inventory /order management system, and thank goodness for that because it would then turn into “bloatware” that would end up doing absolutely nothing well!
[/quote]
Give a suggestion, I am willing to look at reasonably priced order management systems. My Cs Cart sites have only been open for around 6 months and Grossed 50k in sales, not enough to spend the money on mailware (9k for 2 sites), mail order manager (5k for 2 sites) or stone edge at 6k for 2 sites. Not to mention none of the real quality inventory/management systems are even compatible with Cs Cart.
Order systems don't come cheap. As for integration
None are integrated. I had to build my own integration
To our erp everest but it's almost done but took
Months to do.
Everest is not cheap either.
[quote name='solesurvivor' timestamp='1330055262' post='131930']
Order systems don't come cheap. As for integration
None are integrated. I had to build my own integration
To our erp everest but it's almost done but took
Months to do.
Everest is not cheap either.
[/quote]I will take a look at Everest, thank you for the suggestion. I have been using mail order manager for about 8 years on another site. I used to use it in conjunction with Sitelink which is the front end (both dydacomp products). They worked great together single entry fast, problem is they require they host the site. One month it would be 500 then next month it would be 1000. I went to globalwebcart (400 per month with hosting) for front end and Mom for backend, they integrate ok but every year or 2 mail order manager updates their product and gwc has to be integrated all over again. I want to go to mailware but I can't justify spending 9k after only 50K and 6 months experience with Cs Cart. Mailware will do the integration for around 500 for both sites.
@struck - Gee, we're in 100% agreement!
A cart should be considered a sales channel of a business.
Ahead of that is marketing and then behind that is operations (order/inventory/vendor/customer management).
Everybody wants the cart to do everything. In my opinion, it shouldn't even manage inventory. It should just look to see if there is inventory to satisfy an order and if not act on the sale based on the configuration. If the shopping cart were more focused, it would be faster and less bloated with management code for doing things it's not very good at.
All post order processing should be handled by back end systems that are designed to do so, whether that's dealing with different drop-ship providers automatied methods, to handling customer relationship followup or vendor management.
Each area is a specialty and trying to lump them all into one always seems to offer mediocre results. Even the big ERP systems do a half-assed job of many things because they are trying to find a common denominator that simply doesn't exist. That's why SAP consultants are never out of work and make pretty darn good $$.
If a company will integrate their back-end processing to cs-cart for 500 a site, you should jump all over that deal.
I've run a back-end order management system that I built when I looked at what an old girlfriend was using to manage operations for her online store back in 2005. She was using StoneEdge. What a piece of crap from a technical standpoint. Just a MS Access forms application. I told her I could do better than that (and I did). But alas, as time has gone by, I've lost interest in trying to make a living off a back-end system. I invested probably 6 months of full-time effort to get a cs-cart integration that works reliably for downloading orders, uploading status and tracking and uploading inventory information. A real pain overall and in the early days of 2.x it was a moving target. I expect V3 will be the same.
[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1330061741' post='131934']
@struck - Gee, we're in 100% agreement!
A cart should be considered a sales channel of a business.
Ahead of that is marketing and then behind that is operations (order/inventory/vendor/customer management).
Everybody wants the cart to do everything. In my opinion, it shouldn't even manage inventory. It should just look to see if there is inventory to satisfy an order and if not act on the sale based on the configuration. If the shopping cart were more focused, it would be faster and less bloated with management code for doing things it's not very good at.
All post order processing should be handled by back end systems that are designed to do so, whether that's dealing with different drop-ship providers automatied methods, to handling customer relationship followup or vendor management.
Each area is a specialty and trying to lump them all into one always seems to offer mediocre results. Even the big ERP systems do a half-assed job of many things because they are trying to find a common denominator that simply doesn't exist. That's why SAP consultants are never out of work and make pretty darn good $$.
If a company will integrate their back-end processing to cs-cart for 500 a site, you should jump all over that deal.
I've run a back-end order management system that I built when I looked at what an old girlfriend was using to manage operations for her online store back in 2005. She was using StoneEdge. What a piece of crap from a technical standpoint. Just a MS Access forms application. I told her I could do better than that (and I did). But alas, as time has gone by, I've lost interest in trying to make a living off a back-end system. I invested probably 6 months of full-time effort to get a cs-cart integration that works reliably for downloading orders, uploading status and tracking and uploading inventory information. A real pain overall and in the early days of 2.x it was a moving target. I expect V3 will be the same.
[/quote]Dydacom offers front end and back end, Mailware offers front end and back end. Both are top notch systems for businesses with sales up to 8 figures. I have no first hand experience with Stoneedge so I cannot comment on them. I doubt if anybody here used SAP for their business systems they would be using Cs Cart.
Mailware is 500 for integration (supposedly did their first Cs Cart with the last 6 months0
Mail Order Manager told me 300 for both sites.
I have no problem with spending the money on integration (I have spent 3500 on developing the site over the past 6 months) but I would be foolish to spend 9k on the system if I don't even know if Cs Cart is the solution for me. Don't get me wrong I love Cs Cart it is basically the same as Globalwebcart but GWC does not allow any customization at all, but its user managed where with gwc you only manage your store.