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New Feature: Inventory Reserve

by Matt on July 23rd, 2008

In the past, a few stores have run into the issue of overselling a product. This could happen when the product had only one left in stock and two people went to buy it at the same time. That’s a pretty frustrating experience since it usually means emailing one of the customers explaining that they don’t actually get the item they thought they were getting. Well we weren’t very happy with that so we did something about it.

The source of the problem is a delay between the sale being made at PayPal and us being notified so we can update the inventory. To get around that, we’re trying a new feature we call inventory reserve. Now when your customer adds an item to their cart, it’s removed from your inventory for 10 minutes. This gives them time to checkout while preventing someone else from buying the same item. If they don’t end up buying the item, it gets added back to your inventory and becomes available for purchase again.

If you run a store that receives a rush of orders on limited products, please let us know how this new feature works for you.

  1. Starr Horne said on July 24th, 2008 at 4:01 am...

    That’s a pretty neat solution to this problem. It’s funny that so often software winds up mirroring real life. Because what happens when a customer grabs that tickle-me-elmo doll at WalMart? It gets removed from the store’s inventory

  2. monica said on July 24th, 2008 at 6:41 pm...

    Awesome! This happend to me once and I was freaking out but got it settled. Thanks for this bigcartel!

  3. jen said on July 27th, 2008 at 10:50 am...

    great idea!

  4. Danni said on July 29th, 2008 at 4:21 am...

    Definitely a perfect solution and saves hassle and unwanted poor customer service! so thumbs up!

  5. lve said on August 5th, 2008 at 4:26 am...

    How do you turn this option on!?

  6. Matt said on August 5th, 2008 at 7:22 am...

    This is just part of the inventory tracking. So if you have inventory tracking on, and overselling off, then this is turned on automatically.

  7. Benjamin said on August 20th, 2008 at 3:41 pm...

    You guys are so smart :)

  8. Mark Forsman said on September 16th, 2008 at 12:18 pm...

    THANK YOU SO MUCH. This is the ONE thing that i needed!

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