Ask if in stock instead of checkout

Question

Well I guess here's a rare situation, because I can't find any writings about it. I'm building an e-commerce store (Magento) for my client, who doesn't want to sell his products directly. The main reason for that is that he's never certain of the stock. There's, at this time, no possibility of linking the online shop to a POS and we wouldn't want to spend our time refunding people's money all the time, nor would that be ethic.

So actually, this should be the timeline:

1. Client chooses product and orders
2. Client fills in name & e-mail
3. Thanks for your order, we will now check if it's available
4. Admin receives mail, checks if in stock and confirms
5. Client receives mail: article(s) in stock! You can now finalize your order
6. Checkout process with payment
7. Shipment

I've considered:

• Building a e-commerce platform myself: time consuming
• Magento Pre-Orders: payment has to be done immediately
• Wishlist and get notified when back in stock: not really commercial

So, basically, my question is: what would be a proper solution for this scenario? Any thoughts are much appreciated. Thank you very much.

Answer 1

What you can do is instead of using the out of the box checkout flow on Magento, create ur own using a custom module.

This way you can use alot of the functionality magento already has where you need it.

Example Flow:

1. Customer clicks "Check Availability"
2. Save their desired product in DB and unique access code if it is in stock in db
3. If available send link with unique access code to shopping cart in email
4. Load their desired product from DB put into shopping cart
5. Continue with regular magento checkout flow.

Its going to be alot of work but i think its worth it.