Prevent Overbooking: Add Additional Checks for Registration During Checkout Process [#1938674]

Just wanted to say that this module works awesome. I just launched a registration site that took about a 100 orders in less than 10 minutes. All the registrations were booked cleanly. Unfortunately it ended up getting overbook. Let me describe how

Due to the speed of registrations on my site, it created a situation where there was time gap between availability at time of adding to cart (when registration limits are checked) and when orders went through. So essentially you had a time gap where technically all of the registration spaces and more so had been added to cart BUT had not checked out.

I'm not sure about a solution here. I'm thinking there are a couple ways to do this. Probably the easiest would be to check registration limits at multiple stages and remove a product from the cart and display a message.

Comments

Comment #1

hedley CreditAttribution: hedley commented 13 March 2013 at 06:50

I've also noticed an issue where a user can go to their cart and increase the quantity of items from within the commerce cart - bypassing the registration check.

Some popular ticket booking websites use a timer so the moment you add a registration product to your cart it is 'reserved' and you have x amount of minutes to purchase before it would be excluded.

Comment #2

markwk CreditAttribution: markwk commented 13 March 2013 at 16:12

@hedley: you can prevent this via rules. there are quite a few pages out there on how to do this. Just google it and you'll find...

Comment #3

markwk CreditAttribution: markwk commented 25 February 2014 at 03:57

Issue summary:

View changes

This happened again this year, as we expected it would. We overbooked. I unfortunately didn't have time to check or fix this issue. Rethinking about it, I think we need to add more checks during checkout process so limits are checked every step instead of just adding to cart. One place I should also check is with stock limits. Perhaps that module already has checks in place BEFORE cart is completed in order to avoid this issue.

Comment #4

blacklabel_tom CreditAttribution: blacklabel_tom commented 12 June 2014 at 09:28

Hi Markwk,

Could you limit the amount of places on offer by setting a stock level on the product rather than a limit on registrations?

Cheers

Tom

Comment #5

markwk CreditAttribution: markwk commented 12 June 2014 at 14:50

Yeah, stock limits makes sense as workable solution, though it would be good for this commerce registration to cover this situation too, since it can have unintended / embarrassing results if someone comes back to an old cart and checkouts when places are already full :)