[RESOLVED] eShop stock implementation problem

[maurelius]

Hi guys,

I'm having a bit of a problem here, while coding a php eShop from scratch. Everything went fine so far, but now I have the following situation with stock implementation:

Stock system works OK - when a user ads a product, the amount of items on stock decreases, when a user updates his cart, the amount of items on stock changes appropriately.

When a user has some items in his cart, the amount of those items is already subtracted from the total stock of that product so that two persons can't buy the same ticket. If the user logges off without buying those products, those products are "returned" to stock - in other words, the amount of items on stock increases again.

BUT if a user closes his browser, while having items in his cart, those products remain "used" and the stock stays decreased by those items eventhough the user went away.

HOW can I make sure that the amount of tickets on stock gets back up if the user goes away without buying the "reserved" products and without his input???

Please give me some ideas as this is urgent..

Many thanks in advance!

[NogDog]

I don't think I would actually decrement the stock until the order is submitted and approved. What I might do is have a separate table for pending orders where you have something like the product ID, quantity, customer ID, and a timestamp. Then when checking availability you would subtract the total quantities for that item from the stock quantity, but only use totals from the pending table that are not older than some arbitrary amount of time. If a user logs out you would delete any of his entries from that pending table, and you might want a cron job that periodically deletes pending entries older than some amount of time.

[maurelius]

Thank you very much for the idea and explanation. You've got a very good point there and now things are clearly going to work🙂

You're the best!