Products now have an inventory feature! For any Product item (at Products > Modify) you can optionally enter an Inventory Quantity number, and the website will then keep track of the available inventory. Once the entire inventory of the item has been sold, the product can no longer be added to the cart. Here are a few notes:
- Inventory is infinite by default, therefore if you don't have an inventory quantity limit for a product, you don't have to do anything.
- If you added an inventory quantity to a print/product but later want to change the quantity back to infinite, enter a quantity of 99999.
- If a product is a sub-product of a parent product, the parent product's quantity (if defined) will always take precedence and will be used as the quantity. (For example, if you have a Workshop product with two payment option sub-products, you would enter the quantity number at the parent Workshop product level).
- A print/product's inventory quantity is automatically updated only when a customer has finished the checkout payment process. This means that technically it may still be possible to oversell a product in a rare situation when there's only one item left and two customers begin their checkout process for the item at the same time. In that case you would need to refund the second customer's payment and cancel their order. One possible strategy to avoid this if you foresee a rush of customers at the same time (like for example for a popular workshop that you've just announced) would be to set your inventory quantity to one less than it actually is; that way if two people end up buying the last available item at the same time then there's no problem.
Additional Inventory Settings
For each product that has an inventory quantity, there are also some additional inventory-related settings you can enter - you can find these by editing a product at Products > Modify, then scroll down until you see the "Inventory Settings" panel.
- You can choose whether you want to display the available quantity number on the product page. You also have the option of only showing the quantity when there are less then a certain number of items left.
- You can customize the message that shows the available quantity. By default it would simply say "# Available" but you could change that to something like "Only # Spots Left" or "# Widgets In Stock".
- You can also customize the "SOLD OUT" message that displays when an item is sold out.
In the same way that a parent product's inventory quantity takes precedence, so do these settings. So, if you customize these inventory settings on a parent product, all the child products will use the parent product's settings.