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Posted by: bigmowebsites Aug 7 2020, 10:52 AM

Hello WDG Community-

I am in the process of creating an HTML 5 website for a friend - the site is coming along nicely, however I am struggling with one specific thing; my friend wants a feature implemented where the system will count how many items are sold, and then once the item is sold, it will no longer let the item be purchased. For example -
My friend has 10 shirts he wants to sell. Once 10 of them have been sold, is there a way to make the button non clickable until the item is back in stock? I think this requires a server to be implemented - if so I can try to download a virtual server on my PC.

Thanks in advance, any help is greatly appreciated

Posted by: Christian J Aug 7 2020, 01:28 PM

Usually this is done with a database (MySQL is free and popular) where you can list every product in a database table by e.g. product number, price, inventory etc.

If the site is extremely simple (like just those ten t-shirts) you might read and write to a textfile instead (a so called flat-file database) using e.g. PHP.

Posted by: Darin McGrew Aug 8 2020, 10:58 AM

This isn't about markup, so I'm moving it to the server-side programming forum.

Posted by: bigmowebsites Aug 10 2020, 09:27 AM

Thanks for your response! Yes the site will be pretty simple - is there anyway you could direct me to a tutorial on how to implement this?

Thanks again!

Posted by: Christian J Aug 10 2020, 01:22 PM

Details would depend on how the sales are done. Are you using some kind of order form and associated server-side script?

Posted by: bigmowebsites Aug 10 2020, 01:31 PM

We were planning on just using Paypal's easy buttons to handle the transactions. I implemented a "add to cart" button for each item. https://www.paypal.com/buttons/

Posted by: Christian J Aug 11 2020, 05:14 AM

I didn't try to create a button code, but I suppose it creates a link to Paypal? In that case it might be tricky to also run a counter script on your own server in a reliable way --in particular, if the user cancels the Paypal payment your counter has still registered it as a purchase.

It's better if the counter only runs after the payment has been made. For example, if Paypal also creates a redirect back to a Thank You page on your own site (does it?) maybe you could let a PHP script on that Thank You-page update the counter file.

Posted by: pandy Aug 11 2020, 05:37 AM

Agreed.

Christian, can you take a look at this? It's driving me nuts. I must miss something.
https://forums.htmlhelp.com/index.php?showtopic=60372

Posted by: bigmowebsites Aug 11 2020, 11:43 AM

This is a very good point. I am going to run this past my friend and see if he wants to change the setup. Thank you for your help!