I have to say I find it extremely irritating when web shops have items on their site, with no indication it is out of stock, when in fact they don't have any. There's really no excuse for this when a web store can be pretty much self-maintaining.
Here's an example. On Friday I had a PM from Amigakit letting me know they had ONE DCE ScanDoubler in stock. I immediately followed the link he provided and bought it quickly before someone else did :-) Minutes later I wanted to go back and check whether it comes with the loop-back cable for the CV64, and the product page was already gone from their site.
Why can't Softhut's web store work the same way? My guess is that the products are manually added and removed from their site rather than being inserted in to a database. It's really quite simple, if you have a proper PHP/MYSQL database, to check stock levels. For example:
$result=mysql_query("SELECT stock FROM products WHERE product_id='$product_id'");
$stock=mysql_result($result,0,"stock");
if ( $stock > 0 ){
//Code here to display the product page
} else {
//Code here to display an "out of stock" message
}
Just in case someone from Softhut is reading ;-)
--
moto
