[ic] Discontinued items woes

Peter peter at pajamian.dhs.org
Fri Sep 19 08:25:34 UTC 2008


On 09/19/2008 01:08 AM, Stefan Hornburg wrote:
> Peter wrote:
>> On 09/18/2008 03:07 PM, Stefan Hornburg (Racke) wrote:
>>> Peter wrote:
>>>> 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
>>>>
>>> Do we really need to differentiate that? You are responsible for correct
>>> configuration and database population. Also, it wouldn't hurt to
>>> show a boilerplate message in these cases.
>> Your proposal indicates that we should say what caused the problem:
>>
>>> 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."
>> I'm not sure how we can do that without differentiating and telling the 
>> customer that a product has been discontinued when in fact the error is 
>> due to a mis-configuration of the catalog can be detrimental.
> 
> OK, that was meant as example. I would be satisfied for now with having
> a hook which enables me to put such message through to an user.
> For existing catalogs nothing would be changed.

Ahhh, ok.  I have no problem with the hook.  My only concern is if it's 
used in the standard demo (by default) in a way that might be 
detrimental over the current behavior.

Peter



More information about the interchange-users mailing list