eCommerce integration pushes expected in-stock date and pre-order quantity available to the shopping cart

The CartSpan eCommerce integration for QuickBooks now pushes expected ‘expected in-stock’ date and quantity coming available to the product masters in the Magento 2.x and legacy Magento 1.x platforms. This exciting functionality is presently only available between the QuickBooks and Magento platforms. Other eCommerce platforms will be considered on an as-requested basis.

Displaying when your product is expected back in stock gives your visitors a measure of certainty around availability and offers you, the merchant, an improved chance of converting the sale. In fact, this feature is so important, it is listed in the #1 recommendation by SEO Expert Trond Lyngbo in his blog post 17 SEO Best Practices That Could Double Your E-Commerce Sales.

The Magento eCommerce platform has a convenient feature called ‘attributes’ for associating additional information with items in the cart. When stock availability is zero in the accounting system, CartSpan will auto-detect an attribute of a given name and automatically push the next expected delivery date and quantity available for presales (based upon open Purchase Orders) to this field. You then have the flexibility as to how you want to present this information on the item page.

The screenshot below illustrates how this information will appear in your product catalog in Magento. Notice the specific quantity coming available in the right-most column of the catalog master:

expected in-stock date

Allow customers to pre-order from expected deliveries.

To our knowledge, no other commercial accounting/ecommerce integration offers this power feature. While there are shopping cart platforms on the market, other than Magento, that offer a free-form text entry field for a product delivery date, none delve deep into the QuickBooks system to evaluate the exact quantity of free-stock from the next available purchase order.  This is a sophisticated ‘hands-free’ feature that will allow you to capitalize on a consumers willingness to wait for a known acceptable amount of time for delivery of product.

eCommerce Inventory Management for Assembled Product Types

Inventory management for manufacturers in the eCommerce environment is uniquely challenging due to the product-type(s) they sell; namely ‘assembled’ products. To maintain flexibility in order fulfillment, a manufacturer will often ‘assemble-to-order’ using the required child components. With demand for related products with common components constantly changing, it becomes near-impossible for the business to indicate how many of each assembled item are actually available for sale.

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