Availability of physical products by day of the week

Site URL: https://www.lang-baeckerei.com

hi everyone ,

is it possible to control/ manage the availability of physical products based on days of the week?

unfortunately i haven't found anything on this topic yet.

we sell bread and other baked goods in our shop, but we do not offer all products every day.

in order to avoid customers ordering a product on the wrong day, i am looking for a function/ code that controls the availability by weekdays.

for example available on mondays - not available on tuesdays - available on wednesdays and so on.

so what I mean is when the customer puts its cursor on the item it shows a sign "not available or out of stock". or he can not select it.

is this function possible on squarespace?
 

thanks in advance

louis 

On 9/14/2022 at 4:30 PM, Louis-Matteo said:

is it possible to control/ manage the availability of physical products based on days of the week? for example available on mondays - not available on tuesdays - available on wednesdays and so on

Hi Louis

Unfortunately, it isn't practical to do this because products added to the cart will remain there until they checkout or remove them. This means that, even if you prevent someone adding a specific product on a Tuesday, there's nothing you can do to prevent them adding it on a Monday (when it is available) but then checking out on the Tuesday (when it isn't).

You can’t remove products from carts, but if you set the stock level of a product to zero, the shopper will have to remove it from the cart during checkout to complete the purchase. (At least that was the case a few years ago when I tested it.) Would that work for you? If so, you could use daily bulk updates of stock levels to do what you want.

We do that with our yearly fundraiser auction; we upload a CSV file every day that sets the prices for that day. The prices are computed by a spreadsheet on our end. (In your case, stock levels could be computed based on product category -- e.g., "tuesday" -- and the current day of the week.)

Not ideal, but it works. There are two problems with it. First, it’s a manual process; we upload the CSV file daily, using the Commerce>Inventory>Import tool. I don’t dare automate it because Squarespace is so unpredictable. In fact, just this morning I got “unknown error” flags during the import. (Luckily, rerunning the import worked fine. But my hands are still shaking!)

The second problem you’d have, for now, is that a Squarespace bug may prevent stock values from being set by CSV import. Other values seem to update just fine, but the ‘Stock’ value is ignored. SS Cust Svc acknowledged the bug on Sep 14, and I have no idea if it has been fixed since then.

I suspect one could automate the daily process completely using a Squarespace API, but I haven’t taken the time to look into it. My worry is that any time saved over manual imports would be lost to debugging “unknown error” conditions.