Posts Tagged ‘inventory’
December 15, 2009 | 
Author Knowing the condition of a SKU is compulsory during checkout process. The sku condition can be “In stock”, “out of stock”, “Pre-ordered”, “Back Ordered”, etc. The status calculation is based on commerce server global settings as well as settings on sku. In this post, we will learn how commerce server calculates inventory.
Commerce server inventory behavior is driven by site resources. To see inventory site resources – follow below steps.
- Open commerce server manager.
- Expand commerce server manager –> commerce sites –> [Your site] –> Site resources –> click on Inventory.
Two site resources setting will play key role in determining the sku condition
- Ignore missing SKUs: This resource is used to specify whether a missing sku can be treated as in-stock or out-of-stock. If the value is set to –1(true) then the missing sku is treated as in-stock and if the value is set to 0 (false) then the missing sku is treated as “out-of-stock”.
- Stock Handling: This resource is used to specify whether pre-order and back-order can be associated to a sku. If the value is set to –1(true) then the stock handling exist for SKUs(i.e., a sku can be pre-ordered or back-ordered) and if the value is set to 0 (false) then stock handling doesn’t exist for SKUs.
The below flow chart shows how commerce server calculates the inventory.
In the first condition, we will check whether a product catalog is mapped to an inventory catalog. If it is not then we will determine inventory status on site resource –“Ignore missing Skus”. If the product catalog is associated then we will check the inventory condition based on sku status. If the status is set to disabled then the inventory condition is “out of stock” and if the status is ignored then the inventory condition is “In stock”. If the sku status is “enabled” then commerce server calculates inventory based on site resource “stock handling”.
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Handling inventory is a tricky stuff in retail industry. Business development team are very agile and comes up with innovative ideas of making sale of the goods from the store. Sometimes they give discounts to attract people and sometimes they sell goods in bundles. These bundles are either physically grouped or logically grouped. Physical grouping means packing couple of items in to one item and giving a SKU to it and logical grouping means the bundled product doesn’t exist physically but it is grouped with the individual items with their separate SKU. It would be good to provide both functionality to the customer.
How do we implement logical grouping?
Pretty simple – Let’s see it with an example. We would like to give a LCD monitor, wireless key board and wireless mouse with the purchase of desktop. I have created a product named “Desktop of the week” and add LCD monitor, wireless key board and wireless mouse as related items with the identify text “Product Group”. May be we can have a property for the product to distinguish whether it is regular product or packed product.
Excellent! The configuration is done in catalog manager. How do we capture the inventory of the grouped product as the inventory for LCD monitor, wireless key board and wireless mouse can be different. Now it’s time to implement our custom logic. We have to iterate each item to check whether the inventory is available for a particular item by calling commerce sever inventory pipeline component (other option is add the item to the dummy basket and run basket pipeline). If any of the item is out of stock then we will quality the bundled product as out of stock else we can accept to add that bundled product to the basket. Here is the flow chart which helps to get this logic.
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All products doesn’t require inventory. Some products like services or digital media (like songs, movies, games) products may or may not require to track inventory. Commerce server provides flexibility to use inventory or to switch it off. There are two days to disable inventory for a product.
- Add product to the catalog that doesn’t have any association with inventory catalog .
- If the product is the catalog that have an association with inventory catalog then we have to explicitly disable inventory status for that particular product as shown in the image.
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