SC3 - inventory gradually lost

[ScottW]

I turned on inventory control with 3.0 and gave everything appropriate counts, over time though, I'm seeing stock counts on everything deplete and eventually go negative, even though orders are not being generated for the items in question.

I am not sure what's causing this though - I can see inventory reduced when an item is placed in the shopping cart, which is expected, but if I empty the cart, then the inventory is returned. I'm suspecting some sort of time-out type issue, but I've not tested this yet.

Anyone else seen anything like this?

--Scott

[ScottW]

I just reset stock counts on a number of items to 1000, and as I'm sitting here watching the 'products with stock total' via the control panel, the stock counts on a couple of items are decrementing about 1 every 5 minutes or so.

I've got Crafty Syntax Live Help embedded on the storefront, and it's not indicating any visitors on the site when the stock counts decremented.

Now it's 3 items that have dropped by one.

3 minutes later, 5 items have been hit, 2 items have been decremented by 3 and no current visitors to the site (other than me looking via the CP).

This is really weird.

[ScottW]

It looks like someone, or something is yanking my chain. Checking the temp_sessions table, I found 2 carts that have accumulated some 3,500 items between them.

My guess is that whatever it is accumulating the items has javascript turned off, which would disable Crafty Syntax Live Help from seeing them as visitors.

What a PITA.

[ScottW]

Just to bring this to closure - 3 bugs have been identified in inventory control related to this - they have been reported in the bug forum. It turns out it was googlebot that was inserting things in 2 different carts, and as far as I can tell, it's still trying to add items to the carts, but no longer can since the inventory bugs have been fixed. Why google is trying to do this, is unknown.

[pdunton]

Hi Scott, thanks for the info.

Which bugs are you referring to?
Just to make sure I've got them covered.

[ScottW]

There's the one you encountered where inventory from abandoned carts was not being restocked.

There was one where the Store Max Quantity setting was not being honored, and the one where the quantity check was happening too late (it was happening after the inventory was being debited).

Keep in mind that none of these have formal fixes from SC as of yet.

[mendocinomaples]

I am experiencing a very strange phenomena. My inventory goes to SOLD OUT after a few weeks without any sales. To test this, On Nov. 2 I entered stock into several items

Today many of those items are showing as SOLD OUT without any sales!

This has been going on for some months but I did not catch it until I did this specific test.

[designwerks]

Is that why my inventory every once in a while is Sold Out...

Help!!!

What files do I need to update?

Jamie, any ideas on this?

[Jamie]

Upgrade to the latest version, and you'll get all the inventory control fixes to date. Or, search the "Bug Reports : Confirmed" section of these forums for "inventory control" and apply the bug fixes for your version.

[pdunton]

Found the following in my morning access log check.
Sure enough, Product 812 had a level of "0". Was "1" last night.
This is a fully updated version 3.1 store.

Host: 66.249.71.22
/robots.txt
Http Code: 200 Date: Dec 04 04:13:52 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 179
Referer: -
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

/store.php?add_to_cart=1&discount_price=&discounted _qty=&discounted_qty_in_cart=&prod_rn=812&a (line truncated.)
Http Code: 200 Date: Dec 04 04:13:52 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 5282
Referer: -
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

/store.php?acct=1
Http Code: 200 Date: Dec 04 06:54:00 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 7210
Referer: -
Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

[Jamie]

Not quite Jamie

This is not a bug. Google is submitting the add to cart form, and the inventory is being reduced as it is designed to do. When that session times out, the items will be restocked. I'm looking for a solution now, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

[pdunton]

Jamie:
As soon as I saw the access log entries for Google described above, I went to the Temp_Sessions table. There were NO entries in the table.
If there was a Google session, it had evidently already timed out.
The inventory was, however, not restocked if that is true.

[Jamie]

Jamie:
As soon as I saw the access log entries for Google described above, I went to the Temp_Sessions table. There were NO entries in the table.
If there was a Google session, it had evidently already timed out.
The inventory was, however, not restocked if that is true.

The only way I'd be able to test restocking is with access to your site via a helpdesk ticket. Based on the response you provided in your last ticket, I'm guessing you aren't going to want to open one.

[Jamie]

Uploading these files to v3.1.0 should prevent bots from adding items to the cart.

[pdunton]

Working the "disappearing inventory" problem.

Just realized that the problem may be session based.

I put an item in the shopping basket, pressed "continue shopping" and then closed the browser.

Logging into phpMyadmin shows there is NO ENTRY in the "Temp_sessions" table.

I have been working on the assumption that there is where the temporary cart data would be stored. Just never thought to look there.

Jamie: If that is correct, I'll open a help ticket to give you a look.