Magento – Out of Stock item in cart causes checkout button to disappear

checkoutinventory

We are having an issue that is a big problem but I cannot find a mention of it anywhere else. If a customer puts an item in their cart that is purchased by someone else before they check out, the checkout button disappears. There is a small warning under the item on the checkout page that says:

This item is currently out of stock.

But it doesn't say you must remove it to checkout. If someone has a lot of stuff in their cart, they probably wouldn't even see that message.

I've never seen a shopping cart that wouldn't let you checkout due to a sold out item if you have other items in the cart. I don't know if this has always been an issue because it's something I never thought to test.

I would like it if there were a warning about the item being unavailable but with the ability to checkout. Or at the very least I would like it if sold items would automatically be removed from other carts.

We are on Magento Community 1.7. Running the Ultimento theme. We do not have backorders enabled. This happens on the native Magento cart page.

Has anyone else seen this? If you want to test it on your site, you can just disable an item after you put it in your cart and see what happens.

Thank you!

Best Answer

This is default behaviour, just tested it on a CE1.7 with sample data. I do get an error message on top of the page that says: Some of the products are currently out of stock. You could change the text to explain what the user should do (remove that item from the cart) to continue or you can set all your products invertory to allow Qty below 0 so that the item is ordered as a backorder.

Related Solutions

Magento – Stock control race condition between checkout and payment completion

In the various bits of contracting and consulting I've done, the solution is not to solve this problem. The general thinking is

It happens less often than you'd think
When it does happen, it's easier to take both orders and fix things on a business level

Fixing this on a business level means waiting to fulfill the second order until more stock comes in, or if more stock isn't coming you cancel the customer's order and send an apologetic email with an optional coupon or some other low cost fringe benefit so they don't feel bad.

Retrieve Quote Item ID After Added to Cart – Magento 1.9

So based on what you said I have now got a solution that I belive works 100% of the time and matched the items nicely.

When merging there are 3 things that can happen.

When the item is in both quotes it's qty is merged into the logged in customers item.
When the item is in the guest quote but not the logged in customer quote a new item is cloned into the logged in customer quote, and the item_id is added at some later time (that I couldn't pin point)
The item is in just the logged in customer quote nothing changes.

Because the for the first two possibilitys the item is in both the quotes I used the compare function to find when the items matched and populated the newIds and OriginalIds at that point.

We can then say if there was no match this item was not in the guest quote so just use the newId as there was no originalId.

protected $_source;

/**
 * @param Varien_Event_Observer $observer
 * @return Training_Merge_Model_Observer
 */
public function salesQuoteMergeAfter(Varien_Event_Observer $observer)
{
    $this->_source = $observer->getEvent()->getSource();
}

public function controllerFrontSendResponseAfter(Varien_Event_Observer $observer){
    if($this->_source) {
        $newOldArray = array();

        //Quote = Customer Quote
        //Source = Guest Quote
        $quote = Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->getQuote();
        $source = $this->_source;

        foreach ($source->getAllVisibleItems() as $item) {
            foreach ($quote->getAllItems() as $quoteItem) {
                if ($quoteItem->compare($item)) {

                    $newId = $quoteItem->getData('item_id');
                    $originalId = $item->getData('item_id');

                    $newOldArray[] = array(
                        "newId" => $newId,
                        "originalId" => $originalId
                    );

                    $quoteItem->setIsMatch(1);

                }
            }
        }

        //If there was no match so far then it's a new item and there was
        //no similar item in the old quote, we can therefore just take the
        //newId and set the original to null
        foreach ($quote->getAllItems() as $quoteItem) {
            if (!$quoteItem->getIsMatch()) {
                $newId = $quoteItem->getData('item_id');

                $newOldArray[] = array(
                    "newId" => $newId,
                    "originalId" => null
                );

            }
        }
    }


    return $this;
}

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