proteanwoodworking

Thanks for the additional info, Moses!

-Jim

Thanks so much for the detailed information, Jonayed!

I did have the WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Inventory Enable stock management box checked and my Hold Stock (Minutes) was set to 5. Is my understanding correct, that this timer starts when the customer proceeds to checkout? Or does it start when the Pay/Submit button is pressed?

I haven’t checked the rate of traffic to the site during the drop to see if it was significantly higher than usual, but I do operate on a shared server which might be a source of throttling on CPU, network, or other parameters. They actually pulled the plug on me once because my site was using too many system resources and the other websites on the server were being affected. They thought I was under a denial-of-service attack. That turned out to be a few legit users who were using some sort of bot software to increase their chances of purchasing an item. Anyway, perhaps it’s time to graduate to a dedicated server.

-Jim

Very helpful, thank you!

I anticipate that people will occasionally click ‘Place Order’ and be told the item is no longer available, and I’m going to try to prepare them for that.

I appreciate all the Woocommerce support on this!

-Jim

Thanks for your comment.

I have to zoom in here to focus on something you said above that’s critical to my operation. You said “WooCommerce doesn’t reduce the stock until payment is complete.” Now I’m a little concerned. If WooCommerce doesn’t reduce stock until the payment is processed, then it seems like there’s ample oportunity for two people to put in for a CC charge and one not getting the (unique) item.

I had thought it went something like this.

• Customer clicks “Place Order”
• Stock is consulted
  • If stock is 0, inform customer, abandon CC transaction
  • If stock is 1, reduce it (this is critical)
• Process CC payment
• If CC is not successful, wait “Hold Stock” minutes before incrementing stock

Please let me know if I have this wrong.

-Jim

Thanks again for a rapid and thorough response. Great to hear that a single item can only be charged to a single person.

My main problem is that I’ve gotten to a point where I do product “drops” of all unique items. This entails many people hitting the site at the same time — thousands of hits in the first 10 minutes — and frequently led to situations in which the same item would be in multiple carts, thus disappointing people (though indeed there were no double charges).

I’ve been in search of a solution that involved temporarily removing an item from inventory when it was put in a cart. I came to learn that Woocommerce is not built for this situation. I tried the two plug-ins that purport to address this problem; the pay one didn’t work at all and the free one worked some of the time, but I still had cart clashes.

I do have the box you mention checked for all my stock; I also track inventory and start at 1, and don’t allow backorders. But none of this helps my cart over-loading.

So I’ve decided to go back to the “wild west” of the site behavior in which an item isn’t yours until you’ve paid for it. This will lead to much disappointment, but I’m getting that with the plug-in that “kind of works” anyway, and with other site-wide side-effects.

-Jim

Thanks for your prompt and detailed response!

Is it possible for there to be a “tie” in terms of two customers clicking on “Place Order”? Or is there always just one winner?

-Jim

One more bit of info: I’m hosted by siteground.com.

-Jim

I should add that I’m talking to the API via curl in a Terminal window on a MacBook. Something like:

curl -s https://proteanwoodworking.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media?search=B52.1219 -u ck_<etc>:cs_<etc>

This arrangement has worked flawlessly for ages, until today. No updates of any kind on the MacOS side.

-Jim