[ic] Discontinued items woes

Stefan Hornburg racke at linuxia.de
Fri Sep 19 08:08:14 UTC 2008


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.

Regards
        Racke


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