Recommended extension for product notes

[KS_Joakim]

Ello!

Like most retailers with a limited amount of capital, there is a limit as to how many units of goods my business can order at one single time. Thus we often run out of some of our best selling products. Now, even if these products are readily accessible from the distributor with only 1-2 days notice, every time we run out we are left with a stock "vacuum" in which many customers are reluctant to order. 

Does anyone know of an extension that makes it possible to create and show notes with relevant info for specific products - which at the same time allows for an "expiration date" to be set for these notes? The ideal extension would be one that let us create a note saying something like "This product has been ordered from the distributor, and will be available again in 2 days", and having the note remove itself when two days has passed.

I'm aware that this might sound like a rather weird extension request, but I figured I had to try =)

Thanks in advance!

- Joakim at KikkertSpesialisten AS - norwegian sport optics retailer 

[Tom Robertshaw]

Nice idea. I haven't come across an extension that does that. It's a pretty small sized development project in my opinion that could be achieved through a few new attributes. 

You could go down the route of a timed message with a from and to date. This would need three new product attributes "Product Message/Note", "Product Message From Date", "Product Message To Date". A small extension as part of your site can then just check those dates and show the message if between those dates, similar to how the special price functionality works. Note that if you have a full page cache mechanism, you will probably need to make sure that this gets flushed at the start of each day so that the message is added/removed if need be.

Alternatively, you can have a custom out of stock message without a date.  This is a message, again, through a new product attribute which is shown when the product is out of stock. Instead of relying on the additional date logic, you could simply make sure that this is only shown when out of stock. It would then automatically be hidden once you update the product stock levels.