BigCommerce - Product Availability & Inventory Settings Function Gap to Allow Preorders?

@tusharpandita74 - Appreciate your response. 

Take a look at how BigCommerce behaves at the product level based on these settings, and I think what I’m getting at becomes clear. 

Let take this example product from my test store, the Gill Aero Side Zip Boot.

I am using a free theme with no customization in this example (with the exception of a ‘notify when in stock’ app that is installed for testing). 

In the screenshot above, this product has the following settings on the admin panel:

• Availability = This product can be purchased in my online store
• Inventory Tracking / Method = Track inventory for this product

Now, if this item was set to ‘When QTY Unavailable = Set as Pre-order’, Acumatica would update the Availability setting to ‘This product is coming soon but I want to take pre-orders’ the next time the Product Availability entity were to sync, as shown here: 

However, this action alone doesn’t allow any sort of front end preorder functionality. Note that while the native OUT OF STOCK notification has gone away, there still isn’t a Pre Order button. 

If I go back to the admin panel and adjust the Inventory tracking setting (from Track inventory for this product to Do not track inventory for this product):

And then revisit the front end, note the difference. There is a PRE-ORDER NOW button in place of the add to cart button, per the native BigCommerce pre order functionality. 

My point is that the current ‘Set as Pre-Order’ setting in Acumatica does not take the second and required step on BigCommerce to actually trigger the ability to pre order a product automatically.

My follow up question to that again is a) is this how the system was intended to work (which seems somewhat short sighted to me)? and b) if it was intended to actually allow the pre order functionality to work on the front end of the site, what am I missing in the configuration to allow that? 

Hi @tusharpandita74 - Thanks for your response. We already have a customized inventory script in place that does what ‘Ecom Lister (Customer)’ describes. What I’m really after is a solution that doesn’t require customization. Fundamentally without the inventory tracking setting update, nothing described here will just ‘work’ out of the box. Appreciate the effort to provide some guidance but this does not really address the actual business need so I’m going to continue to pursue customizations outside of Acumatica to solve for our needs.

@tusharpandita74 my understanding is that 2022 R2 has an improvement to Product Availability configuration for BigCommerce stores. 

Per this wiki article - https://help-2022r2.acumatica.com/Help?ScreenId=ShowWiki&pageid=e2af17d8-c0c6-4350-b9f3-bc37c10567b2

To make an exported stock item available for purchase via the storefront and enable quantity tracking for it, on the eCommerce tab of the Stock Items (IN202500) form, you select Set as Available (Track Qty.) in the Availability box.

When the item is synchronized, in BigCommerce, on the product management page for the item, the system applies the following settings:

Under the Track inventory check box, the On the product level option button is also selected because stock items do not have product variants and the available quantities of exported stock items are tracked for the entire product.

• In the Purchasability section, the This product can be purchased in my online store option button is selected.
• In the Inventory section, the Track inventory check box is selected.

Subsequently in the wii article, 

• To make the item unavailable for purchase via the storefront but available for pre-order, select Set as Pre-Order/Continue Selling in the When Qty. Unavailable box. In BigCommerce, the This product is coming soon but I want to take pre-orders option button becomes selected.

In the first action (configuration set to Availability = Set as Available (Track Qty.) in the ecommerce settings), Acumatica updates both the ‘Purchasability’ section AND the ‘Inventory’ section (on the BigCommerce product settings). In the second action, the documentation indicates that Acumatica updates the ‘Purchasability’ section, but does not specify any action for the ‘Inventory’ section. 

Is it an intentional design of the system NOT to update the ‘Inventory’ section? Does it update the ‘Inventory’ section but that fact isn’t documented here? Why would the system be able to update the ‘Inventory’ section for the first action but not the second? 

@josh.fischer or @KarthikGajendran any ideas here about design intention of these configuration settings? 

“The track Inventory checkbox would still be selected.”

If action 2 is updating the “purchasability” section to preorder, why would that action not update the “inventory tracking” section as well? The connector can clearly update that section (per action 1), but if it cannot do the same in action 2, updating the “purchasability” section alone is useless to a merchant attempting to actually oversell product. 

Is this intentional? Is it an oversight? 

Clarification of the documentation would be great, but more importantly, clarification about the intention beyond this design would be even more useful. This ‘gap’ in the functionality renders the “When Qty. Unavailable” configuration unusable in my use case, and I’m sure for other merchants who want to take advantage of the preorder function.

Hi @Phil, Thanks for your question. I am sorry I missed this post. Tushar just brought this to my attention. 

Let me answer you about Action 1, Action 2 and Why it is designed this way. 

Action 1: Here, the connector does not do anything with respect to Purchasability settings. For the first sync of an item it only takes care of the Inventory settings. The reason is for sure when the item is first synced connector does not know the qty because it does not update the availability with item sync. So we are letting BigCommerce pick the default which happens to be “This product can be purchased in my online store”. 

Action 2: Each setting in Acumatica update its own settings in BigCommerce. We were not required to update one setting based on the value of the other. Also, this might look inconsistent. Example: In Acumatica, you have track qty but in BigCommerce it is set as Do not track. 

Why it is designed this way: Initially, BigCommerce did not work this way. Meaning, whether the item is set as Track Inventory at Product level or Variant level, if you have set Purchasability as Pre Order and Qty is 0, then the item is always shown with the Pre Order button in the storefront. 

We missed this update and thanks for bringing this to our attention. We will improve it. 

Could you please let us know how important is this update for you? If you already have a solution for it, then we will do it in 24R1. If not, then we will do it based on your request. 

Workaround: [Without a customization]

I tried to update this setting with Entities mapping for Stock item like the below screenshot and it updated successfully. But it is only a half solution because the Product Availability entities will override it again. 

How and when you can use the below approach? 

1. If for sure you know an item is going to be Preorder for a while. Then you can either update the settings manually in BigCommerce to PreOrder or use the below mapping if you wanna do a mass update. 

   

   = IIf( NotAvailable='Set as Pre-Order/Continue Selling', 'none', NotAvailable)

2. After doing the Step 1, immediately do Step 2, which is to set the Availability to Do Not Update. 

   

    

3. Then when you know that you have the inventory for the items you can go back to the normal settings. 

I am giving you here an approach to do it without customizing either at BigCommerce or at Acumatica in the interim. 

Awaiting your response and based on that we will fix it in the required version. 

Saw this months ago and signed up to comment to see if there was ever a fix.

Suffering the same problem. Without Acumatica triggering ‘Track Inventory’ to be disabled, the Pre-Order won’t work.

8 months now of a wasted BigCommerce / Acumatica just sitting there waiting for this to work.

There’s over 5,000 SKU’s, so no I’m not going to adjust these manually several times a day.

@nathankeating I manually tried your ‘Avilability’ Set as Pre-Order, and yes that actually did disable ‘Track Inventory’ in BigCommerce - so why can’t they actually replicate that in the ‘When Qty unavailable’ to solve this problem (of course we’ll need it to enable once stock comes back in).

@KseniaBurtseva61, 

Thanks for confirming. We’ve completed our upgrade to 23R1, so I will figure out a work around for the next 10-12 months. @nathankeating I like your approach and will test that in a fresh test instance of our tenant. Thanks @KarthikGajendran as well for the suggestions.