Documentation

A Shopping Cart For A Website Should Keep You From Running Out Of Stock...Period!

Think about all you do to capture a customer and make a sale, and then to have to send a back order notice when a customer buys an item that is out of stock! Well that's not a way to create a lot of repeat business. So, what's the best practice on how a shopping cart for a website prevents out of inventory situations? Many of them can take a lesson from UltraCart, which has detailed settings on ways to both predict and manage inventory, so you can balance carrying costs with keeping enough products on hand.

A shopping cart for a website should include robust inventory control including real-time out of stock alarms, inventory reporting and a host of configurable triggers (i.e. safety stock levels, stock level by distribution center), set at item, group or other category levels

In addition to managing inventory levels, pricing, item descriptions, and new or deleted items, UltraCart moves the whole inventory control process along with a host of tools that monitor and balance stock and profitability including:

• The basic tool for prevention of out of stock ordering is to manually change an item in your shopping cart for website to an inactive status - meaning it will not be visible in searches and customers cannot add it to their shopping cart; however, this is typically done for a temporary situation and UltraCart has many other means to control inventory on a more automated basis
• UltraCart is known for establising rock solid two way transmission of stock data between our shopping cart for your website and your fulfillment center, which keeps much tighter controls on inventory as the warehouse reports "real time" out of stock conditions to the website shopping cart
• The ability to allocate a certain level of inventory allowed for the distribution center's fullfillment needs and the shopping cart for the website (which allows you to "hold" a certain amount of inventory in case someone abandons the cart but later returns), and for time lags between order and fulfillment (UltraCart can even set a time interval for this allocation to prevent showing out of stock on items that are being held in in hopes of a customer returning to make a purchase.)
• Configurable safety stock levels by parameters such as per item, per distribution center, etc. - plus a variety of ways to report and notify you of reaching safety stock replenishment levels such as an email notice, automatic reports and filtered reports
• Allowing or disallowing the customer to initiate a backorder from the shopping cart with your website, which means you can assess the popularity of an item before committing to reorders
• A special tool that allows you control "shoppng cart for website" stocking factors at the item levels including tracking inventory, allow/disallowing back order, assigning the item to a particular distribution center and stock picking location, designating the desired quantity to maintain in stock, the quantity on hand at which to reorder, maximum backorder quantity and more...