[ic] Discontinued items woes

[Stefan Hornburg (Racke)]

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

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

-- 
LinuXia Systems => http://www.linuxia.de/
Expert Interchange Consulting and System Administration
ICDEVGROUP => http://www.icdevgroup.org/
Interchange Development Team