Out of Stock item in cart causes checkout button to disappear

Question

We are having an issue that is a big problem but I cannot find a mention of it anywhere else. If a customer puts an item in their cart that is purchased by someone else before they check out, the checkout button disappears. There is a small warning under the item on the checkout page that says:

This item is currently out of stock.

But it doesn't say you must remove it to checkout. If someone has a lot of stuff in their cart, they probably wouldn't even see that message.

I've never seen a shopping cart that wouldn't let you checkout due to a sold out item if you have other items in the cart. I don't know if this has always been an issue because it's something I never thought to test.

I would like it if there were a warning about the item being unavailable but with the ability to checkout. Or at the very least I would like it if sold items would automatically be removed from other carts.

We are on Magento Community 1.7. Running the Ultimento theme. We do not have backorders enabled. This happens on the native Magento cart page.

Has anyone else seen this? If you want to test it on your site, you can just disable an item after you put it in your cart and see what happens.

Thank you!

Answer 1

This is default behaviour, just tested it on a CE1.7 with sample data. I do get an error message on top of the page that says: Some of the products are currently out of stock. You could change the text to explain what the user should do (remove that item from the cart) to continue or you can set all your products invertory to allow Qty below 0 so that the item is ordered as a backorder.

Answer 2

The solution would be to have the Checkout button itself become a message block, rather than the message be on TOP OF THE SCREEN where the customer may not scroll up to see, if they have 30 items (wholesale cart instance). I am going to implement this solution.

Answer 3

Why it's doing this:

The link / button graphic on the cart is disabled by default if the value of the hasError methods in checkout/cart.phtml template returns false:

<?php if(!$this->hasError()): ?>
<ul class="checkout-types">

If this returns false all checkout methods are then suppressed from displaying on the cart page.

This error is triggered from the CatalogInventory module in the class Mage_CatalogInventory_Model_Stock_Item (~line 580) which explicitly sets the error if the item is not in stock.

Workaround:

So what's the workaround? You can set an observer to remove the item from the stock and place a message on the cart that some of the items were removed. To do so you will rewrite the method checkQuoteItemQty:

<?php

class MyCompany_MyModule_Model_Stock_Item extends Mage_CatalogInventory_Model_Stock_Item
{
    public function checkQuoteItemQty($qty, $summaryQty, $origQty = 0)
    {
        $helper = Mage::helper('cataloginventory');
        $result = parent::checkQuoteItemQty($qty, $summaryQty, $origQty);

        //check for error and specifically for the flag that the item went out of stock
        if($result->getHasError() && $result->getItemUseOldQty()){
            //remove the item from cart
            $this->subtractQty($qty);

            //set notification for the user
            Mage::getSingleton('checkout/session')->addError($helper->__('Some items have been removed from your cart as they were not available in the qty requested.'));
        }
    }

}

Disclaimer:

This suggested workaround is provided entirely top-of-mind and may have unforeseen consequences.

I suggest using this post as a guide of how the functionality flows so that you can make informed decisions about how to set up a proper workaround for your business and your set of rules that govern how you operate.