Hello everyone, Lowis here.
We are in the process of building our site on Open Source 2.2.
We offer a combination of in-stock items as well as out-of-stock items (which are produced on order). Items being in or out of stock changes on an ongoing basis as orders are placed and stock is moved around.
Being a jewellery business, our rings are configurable products where the variations are simple products (various sizes). When one of the variations (a simple product) is out of stock, we still need these to display as available on the website, however with a different message regarding delivery:
In-stock items show "In stock. Order now for delivery in 3-5 days."
Out-of-stock items show "Order now for delivery in 18-20 days."
Our stock management is handled by external software. This software syncs stock levels to Magento on an ongoing basis. This means that we will not use Magento's backorder functionality, as this is handled by our stock management software.
Our challenge is in switching between unmanaged and managed stock on Magento based on whether an item is in stock or not. In principle if an item is out of stock, it should switch to unmanaged for it to still be available to buy. If it is in stock it switches to managed, however customers are limited to only buy the qauntities that are in stock, which is not ideal.
Does anyone have any solution to could keep us from going to an unnecessary level of custom programming?
Thanks!
