stock control program `help` Options

[lotus man]

Hi,

i have my website from which i sell products, my shopping cart is done via paypal. What i would like to do is put something in that will allow me to keep a stock of products and once sold out will update the site. I have looked at the many shopping carts that are out there but i would like to do this in a way that allows me to continue with my site the way it is without using their skins. Is there anything out there that will allow me to do this?

site is www.toyz-in-the-hood.co.uk

many thanks

Paul

[Brian Chandler]

This should be in "Server-side scripting", by the way. (Or perhaps that's sort of The Answer)

How is your website generated at present - is it simply handwritten html? If so, you can't hope that it will become a "live" representation of the inventory state without rewriting. But in principle it's not an enormous job to replace the bit for each product that says <...link to PayPal code=X1234...> by a call to a php function that looks something like:

get database entry for *code*
if (inventory > 0) echo "<link to PayPal code=>"
else echo "Sorry, out of stock"

Then you need to be able to update the inventory each time someone buys one, and each time you get new stock in. The degree to which it is worth automating this depends on your sales volume, product range etc. If it's fairly low, you may simply update the stock level manually, if you just handle the PayPal notifications by hand (FWIW, that's what I do at http://imaginatorium.org/shop ). I wrote my own, which is best in the long term; you may find a sample php script that just uses a simple database table, which you administer using Mysqladmin (or whatever).

Hope this helps - it all depends on the scale of the operation, and quite possibly you are better off sticking to manual updates.




This post has been edited by Brian Chandler: Feb 28 2007, 10:47 PM

[lotus man]

Hi,

yes i am writing the html (a good way to learn). The reason i would like to put somekind of stock control on is because although i don`t yet sell a high volume there is the odd time when two people will hit the button and purchase a product of which i may only have one and not be able to get another, so inverably i have to let a customer down, which as we all know isn`t good for business. To honest paypal being what it is, i would have thought they would have put some kind of stock control within their cart that would be based within our servers (but i`m no wizz and this is all new to me, so don`t know how easy it would be for them). The Mysql side of things i have not really been into as this looks a bit scarey for me at the moment and i don`t really know what to do in there. Could there be a way of still writing the html myself but having something written and installed that would be a live stock control? If so would one of you guys be able to do this for me, i would be happy to agree a price with you for this if it is possible.

thanks for the comments

Paul

[Brian Chandler]

No simple answer, I'm afraid. In practice, I would not worry about two people buying the same thing while you're asleep. (It's never happened to us yet, but because we use two different payment agencies, and I haven't implemented the direct order notification thing yet, the stock only gets updated as we process the order. But there is always going to be a chance of double purchases, unless you reduce inventory every time someone puts something in the shopping cart, because the finalising of an order doesn't always happen at the same point.)

Two other ideas:

If you use oscommerce (or similar), you can learn how to customise the functions so as not to change your design at all (I guess; you could probably get help on an oscommerce forum - you might well find someone prepared to help with the customisation for a reasonable fee)

You could patiently work your way through a book on php/mysql, which will have a shopping cart system as the worked example through the book. This will take a long time, but you will learn a lot of useful stuff.

A third idea which is probably not so good is to look for a commercial product: I found something called X-cart, but more importantly I found this page of user reviews:
http://www.filetransit.com/view.php?id=5862
... confirming my thinking that the first two ideas were better.

HTH