I need help with a tricky inventory question

Hi All, I have been approached to create an ecommerce site for a well established busy local shoe store. The problem being they have a HUGE amount of stock and they don't have any electronic inventory system. So my worry is that they could sell out of a particular shoe/size/colour and it would obviously not get updated on the webstore side of things and then a customer could purchase online and there is no longer stock to fulfil the order. Is there any way of tweaking a shopping cart to not accept payment until we can confirm stock or is there any other clever ways to mitigate this? I am planning on using GoDaddy to create the store, as I am in no way a developer. Thanks!

 

Use opencart. They have auto alerting for low stock which will email when it hits below a certain threshold.

 

I've been talking to a local music store that I used to work at about the same problem. My only suggestion was to have someone that watches over the inventory. But, if you go with Shopify (the best eCommerce platform in my opinion), they will most likely have an app for that, as it must be a common problem for local stores with an online presence.
Best of luck!

 

how about like imposing an auto "out of stock" when users buy enough of the item that there's only 10 left.

I'm sure the IRL inventory can alert you when there's only 10 left in stock, so you can stop orders then.

If not, then their inventory system is...

 

This brings another idea. You could just put the inventory online to 10 less than what is available. That way you will have a 10 item margin so you don't sell out in the store before online. Not the most efficient way, but it could get the job done.