Hi Yotam,

As explained just above in the same thread to João, you can control if a product can be ordered or not if the stock quantity is negative.I agree than I could add a message if a customer try to buy more products than the available quantity.
On the other hand, I can't really avoid two or more customers to buy the same product at the same time! Imagine two people (John and Mary) visiting your website and both of them add the same product to their cart at the same time. You could tell me than I just need to substract the quantity ordered in real time, but this is NOT possible and it's no obvious to understand. First, the Internet DO NOT maintain the connection between each action. Second, if I substract the quantity in real time and one of your customers change his mind and leave the website WITHOUT clearing is cart. The stock will be never updated, because the server DO NOT receive a signal when someone close is browser or leave the website!
Currently, the stock is updated when the customer validate his order at checkout. Because if the customer want to paid, then it's time to decrease the stock! :-) If an order is canceled then the stock is reversed with the quantity ordered for each product in the order.

If you have a better suggestion, I'm open minded! :-)

Gilles

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We (team members) are Humans offering their knowledge, their work and their spare time FOR FREE to benefit the community. It would be so particularly appreciated that your messages begin with "Hello" and end with "Thank you" or any other form of politeness. Ask yourself what your reaction would be, if you were approached by me (a total stranger) on the street to ask you something without saying "Hello" nor "Thank you"? After several years of services dedicated to the community, I begin to be tired to read requests without any form of politeness.

Hi Gilles,

I've been following this thread as I very much appreciate the efforts being put into the module.
I think the agreement that you indicate above meets the need here:

"I agree than I could add a message if a customer try to buy more products than the available quantity."

If there are 10 units in stock and John tries to buy 9 and Mary tries to buy 3, one of them will click "Order" first. When that happens, the available quantity will be decremented in the store, although it will not be updated to the other user. However, when the other user attempts to complete their order, they should receive a message indicating that there are no longer that many units available and they need to change their quantity. At this point, the current quantity could be presented to the user.

It might also be possible for the cart to place a temporary hold on the qty that a user has selected. This would mirror the functionaly that we see with online ticket sales where actual seats are reserved during the session for the user. If the transaction is not completed within a defined period, then the items are released back to inventory again.

Thanks for the efforts...

Kevin

Hi Kevin,

This is exactly what I try to explain when I said "this is the nature of the Internet", please read my response to Yotam for details! ;-)

I don't want to use the Session objet nor the ViewState object and every developer should do the same. When you use the Session object in a webfarm, most of time the state of the object is maintened by SQL Server and this is realy slow compares to the Session object used "InProc" with a single server. This is especialy true whith an e-commerce module because now you can rent a small webfarm for a good price and I try to think about all use cases. In France we said: "You can't have the butter AND the money of the butter"! :-) The problem with the ViewState is different but similar, the more you use the ViewState, the more the size of the page increase! Again, this is not a good idea with such kind of module.

Gilles

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We (team members) are Humans offering their knowledge, their work and their spare time FOR FREE to benefit the community. It would be so particularly appreciated that your messages begin with "Hello" and end with "Thank you" or any other form of politeness. Ask yourself what your reaction would be, if you were approached by me (a total stranger) on the street to ask you something without saying "Hello" nor "Thank you"? After several years of services dedicated to the community, I begin to be tired to read requests without any form of politeness.