Hi,

I have an installation where customers are regularly purchasing products with no stock available. 

Example: We have a product say an apple with 2 left in stock.  A customer called John places both apples in his basket and at the same time another customer called Jane also place an apple in her basket.  John now completes the purchase of his 2 apples leaving the inventory with zero stock thus preventing any further purchases (so far so good).  However, Jane still has an apple in her basket and now she proceeds to checkout and completes the purchase leaving -1 apples in the inventory.

Is there a way of preventing items already in customers baskets from being purchased when the stock level becomes zero?

If this is configured correctly, technically this is a major bug in the system. It should not allow you to complete the order if the cart contains more items than you have in stock.

On a high traffic site, you could get some people buying 10 or more of items and have 10 other people doing the same. Or even worse - adding 100 items at once and coming back two days later to place the order. This just seems bad. I am glad someone found this out before my clients did!

It should simply check stock levels on submission of the cart-to-order and ignore any excess at that moment in time. This has actually happened to me before on other eCommerce systems. If they are out of stock, my order comes up short or without those items from my cart. It is annoying but, I imagine is realistically the proper way to handle it unless you tell your client to stop holding so little inventory!

I experienced this back in January as well.  Check my post on dnnsoft and see how your settings are set.

http://www.dnnsoft.com/Supportbrnbs...fault.aspx

Nathan