Need to sell items with zero or negative stock values

Question

We're using Magento 1.7.0.2 for over the counter sales in a pharmacy, and because we update our Magento inventory once a week with new products & stock updates, many times we receive stock which is lying and ready for sale, but Magento has not yet been updated.

For this reason, I need to be able to sell out-of-stock goods from the Magento front-end.

I have tried enabling backorders (System >> Configuration >> Catalog >> Inventory >> Backorders >> Allow QTY below 0 But in spite of setting this, the front-end still shows (products with zero or negative as) out-of-stock and thus cannot be added to cart.

I have even flushed the cache and reindexed everything but no luck.

Answer 1

I think it should work if you set 'Backorders' to 'Allow qty below 0' in the System Configuration like you did and make sure on the individual products the 'Stock Availability' value is set to 'In Stock'.