Can customers reserve their stock whilst ordering?

When a customer adds a product to their basket or is in the middle of placing an order, by default, the system will not automatically ‘reserve’ their stock until payment is complete. If you would like the system to reserve the stock for the customer while they are going through the order process or continuing to browse you can enable the ‘reserving stock’ feature. If a product’s stock levels are low or the stock is likely to quickly run out then you might want to enable the feature to temporarily reserve the stock for the customer.

When you enable the feature you can choose either for the stock to be reserved from the time the customer adds the product to their basket or from the time that the order has been submitted for payment.

Allowing the stock to be reserved means another customer on your website won’t be able to add that stock to their basket while the original customer is still trying to purchase it.

If, midway through placing an order, a customer stops and cancels the order, the stock will still be considered to be reserved for them for the full allotted amount of time, so they would be allowed to re-add the stock to their basket and complete their purchase.

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Activating the feature

To activate the feature select Settings > Products from the menu.

Find the “Would you like us to reserve the customer's stock during the order process?” setting.

Choose if you want the stock to be reserved when an order is submitted for payment or when the product is added to the basket, and change the setting to ‘Yes’ for that option:

When you choose either of the options a new box will appear asking you to enter the number of minutes you want the stock to be reserved for:

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