Product Minimum Order/inventory/quantity Conundrum

Hello,



I have searched the forums and the internet for available add-ons but have not been able to find an answer to my problem. Maybe someone here can help. I don't know if CS-Cart or any add-ons have the capability to do what I need the software to do.



The company I work for is a manufacturer of sewn goods. In our cs-cart store, we want to sell remnant fabric (yardage left from our jobs) and also rolls of fabric drop-shipped straight from the mills to the end users.



Here's the problem, with an example:



We have 10 yards of new grey silk in stock and available to sell. So we would normally set the maximum order quantity to 10 and be done with it.



However, we also need to be able to allow the customer to order 30 yards of the same gray silk because that equals a roll, and we can drop ship it straight to them from the mill. In that case, we would normally just set a minimum order quantity of 30 yards and be done with it.



The customer cannot order 20 yards, because we don't have 20 yards in stock (we only have 10) and ideally there would be a minimum order quantity of 30 yards in place for the drop-shipped roll.



We do not want to sell random yardages as a separate product listing (i.e. 10 yards of gray silk), because it is new fabric and not a “remnant” or second. We do not want to have duplicate product listings of the same exact fabric (random yardages and also rolls) all over the store, as that would be confusing for people.



Is there a solution here? Can we set minimum yardage requirements for color options of fabric we don't have in stock, and at the same time have available stock in smaller yardages for some color options? If we have 5 yards of white voile available to sell, nothing available between 5-30 yards, and 30 yard minimum for a roll, can this even work??? My employer seems to think this will all be easy and doesn't seem to understand that there are limitations as to what I can do here.



Thanks in advance for your help…

We also sell stocked goods with limited inventory + the option to buy in bulk as a dropship purchase. We treat these as separate products for many reasons (unique SKUs for clean bookkeeping, ability to employ the Suppliers addon and assign unique origination addresses, more control over item display). There doesn't seem to be much customer confusion as a result. The “Shipping Availability” addon can be helpful to clarify the differences between the stocked/dropship items.



-Glen

You could set up your products as usual, and add the product option for them all as 1 Roll (30 yds) as a standrad order .but when you have a remnant you want to shift the set that up as another poduct option on the said product with an option of 10 yds, with a price modifier.

You could set these up as option combinations to track inventory so that when the remnant is sold it no longer allows anyone to buy it.



Or why not look at it from a different angle and offer a whole remnants category or a remnants product



“dont need a full roll?, why not check out our remnants page?”



could be a mesage line or block on each product or a block on each product that leads to the remnants product/category.



Lets say you just set up 1 product called remnant, and that 1 product has the all the material codes in its product options for every item you have in stock for 10yds etc, they can purchase any of your codes from just 1 product, as you can upload a swatch image of each to be shown under the product option when chosen by the customer…again these can be inventory controlled if needs be



John