Controlling Inventory

Jeepsta

Hello All,

I will be beginning a project in the near future that will include a shopping cart of sorts for ordering (homegrown I hope). I've been toying with the idea of somehow controlling inventory with the server/cart.

Basically the site allows for ordering homemade breads and such off the website. The inventory problem comes up b/c we can only bake so much in a given week (ie. 50 loaves per week).

I guess what I am looking for is how to keep the inventory current. So we dont go over the 50 loaves in a week. Whether it be using PHP sessions, cookies, temp tables, cron jobs, etc. 😕

Any Ideas would be great. I'll keep searching google in the mean time.

BTW, The site runs Apache, PHP, & MySQL on Debian Linux if that helps at all.

Thanks,

Zach

mikeatrpi

Why don't you have some sort of administrative interface to the web site for your bakers?

Edit- do you mean that 50 loaves is always your limit? Well, on whatever day you replenish your supply (or every night) why not have a cron job call a PHP script to update your mySQL inventory tables? You can execute PHP from the command line if the first line is #!/path/to/php, and then call it as "php -q myscript.php." I think that syntax is correct...

Jeepsta

Maybe I wasnt very clear with my first post. I will be having the administrative interface to manually update inventory as well as what you suggested. I was more looking for the interaction of the shopping cart and the inventory.

Basically I would like the inventory depleted when someone adds some bread to the cart (so we dont over sell). The problem comes in when you have someone who does not complete the order process.

Example: Joe user comes to the site and adds 10 loaves to his cart. Joe user then leaves the site having not placed the order. The 10 loaves that Joe user had in his cart are (in theory) already depleted from the inventory. When the session is destroyed (user closes the browser or it times out) the amount placed in the cart should be added back to the current inventory.

I was thinking along the lines of a temporary MySQL table to handle orders that were in progress and have some script run a query to add the inventory back on ones that had expired (given some length of time).

Maybe I am thinking too much on this.

Zach

Jeepsta

bump

Anyone have any ideas??

mikeatrpi

Most people don't consider something removed from inventory until it is actually sold.

I assume you will be managing your carts with a database table... so then do what you said- just query that a few times. Maintain a table of real inventory and then just make sure a user doesn't try to put too many into their cart.

Every time a page is loaded, why don't you have a function run that strips out carts which have, say, a day of inactivity? I think you're thinking along the right lines.

Jeepsta

Thanks.....that sounds like a good enough plan for me. I guess I was just wondering if there was some easier way to maintain inventory. We'll just have to see what I can come up with.

Thanks,

Zach