Using KK as a stock management system as well

[paulsschwarz]

The primary reason we are looking at KonaKart is for the online shopping capability (obviously), but the client was interested to know, to what extent does KonaKart double up as a stock management system?

In particular I guess the following questions need to be answered:

• We noticed that KonaKart will send an email when stock levels drop below say 5. Can this be set per product? For example 5 chainsaws left in stock is plenty, but 5 screws in stock is not enough!


• What if we make a sale over the counter? We would want to decrement the stock in KonaKart. Any ideas on this one? My guess is we would either have the KonaKart public interface running on the screen on the shop counter and we would somehow punch in that we sold goods over the counter, or we would write a completely independent application which connects to the KonaKart database and has the simple ability to decrement stock levels? But would this bypass KonaKarts mechanism which checks stock levels and fires off a low stock warning?

What do other people do when they have an online store but you can also make over the counter purchases?

Thanks,
Paul

[kate]

Yes KonaKart can easily operate as a stock management system.

We noticed that KonaKart will send an email when stock levels drop below say 5. Can this be set per product? For example 5 chainsaws left in stock is plenty, but 5 screws in stock is not enough!

To do this you would have to use custom fields to identify the reorder level for each product and create your own ReorderMgr to check what action should be taken.   Optionally, you could also stop low stock level orders being sent by blanking out STOCK_REORDER_EMAIL (which would send out the emails based on the global low stock level setting).   See the documentation on this: http://www.konakart.com/docs/ReorderActions.html

What if we make a sale over the counter? We would want to decrement the stock in KonaKart. Any ideas on this one? My guess is we would either have the KonaKart public interface running on the screen on the shop counter and we would somehow punch in that we sold goods over the counter, or we would write a completely independent application which connects to the KonaKart database and has the simple ability to decrement stock levels? But would this bypass KonaKarts mechanism which checks stock levels and fires off a low stock warning?

Either use the Admin App to do this or a very simple application that uses the Admin APIs to update the inventory.

-Kate