Conditional Shipping and Payments

Restrict shipping methods based on product availability.

Real world example is some of our products are ones we dropship only. Obviously we could create a shipping class for ones that never change, but there are products that change with availability. So if product X has 3 variations A, B, and C, and we have stock on A and B, but ran out of stock on C and allow backorders with no notification (our way of managing a product’s inventory when we can fallback on the vendor to dropship if we run out of stock), then we’d want to exclude C automatically after it drops to 0 or less for inventory IF backorders = allow but do not notify. Yet we may still want to allow for the shipping method (eg. priority) when inventory is 0 or less IF backorders = allow and notify customer. That way we could also display conditional messaging to notify them that hey this is on backorder, but once it’s available, we’ll ship it via the priority method you chose that is otherwise not available when backorders = allow with no notification.

The basic concept is, we have a priority shipping method and want to exclude it when items run out of inventory and we’re relying on the vendor to dropship as our vendors ship very slowly and ONLY via ground. So priority simply isn’t an option for us in these dropship situations. However, when it’s a product we allow backorders on with notification, that generally means we’re going to bring it into OUR inventory, not drop-ship it, and as soon as we have it in stock again in our store/warehouse, we’ll ship it via priority if that’s what the customer wants.

It looks like today, the restriction options only allow for is there an item on backorder in the cart, okay, here’s some options, but not the distinction level between the differences in types of backorder statuses available that we utilize to try and keep things “In Stock” when we don’t have it but our vendor does and we’ll simply dropship from them.