eCart Inventory Control - Solution Recipe Tutorial

Please add a solution recipe or tutorial explaining how to accomplish inventory control when using eCart 5.

Many people have expressed confusion how to set this up in the forums, and there does not appear to be a clear solution how to easily set this up.

As a key part to a shopping cart application, there should be a step-by-step guide to integrating inventory control into a shopping cart built with eÇart 5 (not power store).

Thanks for listening.

D

Inventory control can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make, with many different examples to be written based on the different payment providers available through eCart.

Basic inventory control could be a simple Quantity field in the database - easy enough - but then how you go about updating stock once purchased is a little trickier.

For example, if you use PayPal then you would create an IPN script (see their web site) and introduce WebAssist behaviors to the IPN page to update the stock records as the script parses the content of the cart.

Different payment providers would provide examples of their own scripts if they support this kind of thing.

You could also manage the update of the stock on a thankyou / confirm page of your site, but this isn't necessarily reliable and I prefer to use the back end processing provided by the payment provider.

Cheers
Ian

Hi, Ian.

I was just reading this post because I am using the Ecart 4.x with ASP.

I have an IPN page that works great with single items.

However, when I use the Ecart for multiple items, the "item_number" is returning as blank from PayPal.

I noticed in the Ecart Checkout form that the "item_number" actually has an underscore after it, followed by the Ecart increment.
(<input type="hidden" name="item_number_<%=eCart1_Index+1%>" id="item_number_<%=eCart1_Index+1%>" value="<%=WA_eCart_DisplayInfo(eCart1, "ID")%>" />)

It posts to PayPal just fine. All the multiple items are displayed perfectly.

However, after payment, the IPN page gets nothing.
I have it returning to a "thank you" page, and the querystring shows "item_number" as equal to nothing. (i.e. &item_number= )

To what are you referring when you say that WebAssist behaviors could be added to an IPN page?

I assume that is true, somehow, but not sure how to do it.
Also... not sure how PayPal is returning the "item_number_ecart1_index+1" value/string.


Thank you!
Shane

¿how I can fix the stock of control when I have several fields a single record?

This code works fine with a field
<?php
$eCart1->MoveFirst();
while (!$eCart1->EOF()) {
$FinalStack = $eCart1->DisplayInfo("Subtractions");
$idProduct = $eCart1->DisplayInfo("ID");

mysql_select_db($database_sis, $sis);
$subtractions = mysql_query("UPDATE articulo SET can1 = '$FinalStack', WHERE Id = '$idProduct'") or die(mysql_error());
$eCart1->MoveNext();
}
$eCart1->MoveFirst();
?>