Relationship between Track Inventory by Product Attribute & Stock Quantity

I just switched from Magento CE to NopCommerce 3.8 for my boutique and so far I am glad I made the move.  Most of my items have a Size attribute and many also have a Color attribute so I track inventory by product attribute.  (It is MUCH easier to set these configurations up in Nop, by the way!)  I have found that if the default attribute option is out of stock, then "Out of Stock" is the availability status that is first seen by my customers on the product page. I am concerned they will not realize the status is just for the selected option and other sizes/colors are available.  It would be nice to be able to link the availability to the overall product quantity and then show "out of stock" in the attribute selection area for the appropriate items (dropdown for Size in my case).

For example:

Availability:  In Stock

* Small (out of stock)
   Medium
   Large

I also use a plugin for Product Ribbons. I tried to use this to show "Out of Stock" on the category list page, but it uses the stock quantity of the main product and ignores the variant quantities. So it only works for products that do not track by attribute.

I was thinking that if the stock quantity of the main product could be kept in sync with the attribute inventory counts when tracking inventory by attribute, then the availability on both the category and product pages could be related to the overall stock quantity.  Has this been considered?  I have seen several people asking about showing the stock status in the attribute dropdown. Is there a plugin for this for 3.8?  Thank you!

JacquieK wrote:


Did you set "Inventory method"  : "Track inventory by product attributes"?

You will find it from Admin>Catalog>Products> Edit

Yes.  The items that I have set to "Track inventory by product attributes" are the ones I am having issues with.  If the default selection is out of stock, the customer may see that and not realize other sizes are available.  They also do not have the "notify when back in stock option" if they select a combination that is currently out of stock - that only shows when "Track inventory" is selected.  And with product ribbons (plugin), if all options are out of stock, the ribbon still will not show because it is based on the "Product Quantity" (when "Track Inventory" is selected).

I am also in the same boat with this issue.

Just to explain in different words
If we have productx with size S / M / L / XL
If S is out of stock, when customer opens the page, the availability shows out of stock, though other sizes are available.

I would suggest to have an option where the default selected value for product attributes can be either blank or a predefined value which shows it needs to be changed.

So in short, there should be a default value selection from the list of product attributes.

I know it doesn't really solve the problem, but maybe, for now, you could at least "hide" the text on the page that indicates when the product is out of stock?

\Views\Product\_SKU_Man_Stock.cshtml

Just comment it out like this:

@*Stock availability
@if (!String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(Model.StockAvailability))
{
    <div class="stock">
        <span class="label">@T("Products.Availability"): </span><span class="value">@Model.StockAvailability</span>
    </div>
}
*@

Or, if you will always have at least one size/color/option you could even just comment out the current code and hard-code it to say "In Stock", like:

@*Stock availability
@if (!String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(Model.StockAvailability))
{
    <div class="stock">
        <span class="label">@T("Products.Availability"): </span><span class="value">@Model.StockAvailability</span>
    </div>
}
*@

    <div class="stock">
        <span class="label">Availability: </span><span class="value">In Stock</span>
    </div>