[ic] Discontinued items woes

[Peter]

On 09/18/2008 11:27 AM, Stefan Hornburg (Racke) wrote:
> Hello, folks!
> 
> Products in an online store may change regularly, depending on the business. 
> Customers might now be aware of it, due to several possible reasons:
> 
> * "race" conditions, product just removed or deactivated
> * stale pages in search engines or price compare sites
> * pages on affilates's sites

How can we differentiate these from things that do indicate an 
improperly configured catalog or improperly populated database such as:

* Variants table not set in the ProductFiles directive
* Variants not populated for a p[articular item
* Variants generated with the wrong codes

?

Peter


> 
> Now the customers hit the fancy "Buy Now" button and all of the sudden
> an empty cart appears and the product is missing.
> 
> In this situation you want to let the customer know about what happened,
> like
> 
> "Sorry, this product sold off. Please click here for similar products."
> 
> Instead Interchange fills the log with:
> 
> Order.pm:2377:			logError( "Attempt to order missing product code: %s", $code);
> 
> Possible solutions (and/or):
> 
> * SpecialSub triggered
> * new action for CartTrigger
> * Error trigger
> 
> This is a substantial problem in a project with lots of affiliates, who
> tend to think that the shopping cart is broken instead of figuring they
> haven't updated the products.
> 
> Any opinions?
> 
> Regards
>            Racke
>