Stock Reservation System

[mattbrailsford]

Which component is this idea for?

Umbraco Commerce (Core)

Describe your idea

It might be useful with the inbuilt stock system to allow the use of a stock reservation system. With this, items could be marked out of stock if there are items in open carts already.

Context

Benefit:
This could prevent over selling of products for busy sites where low stock items could be in multiple carts at the same time. By updating stock levels based on carts it would prevent an item being added to a cart if it's already in somebody else's.

Considerations:
We'd need to take into account the fact that carts are long lived and so would need to define a sliding mechanism to automatically remove items from abandoned carts after a specific period. This would likely need to be based on the update date of the cart where we would state after X minutes the item is removed and restocked. This scale would need to be configurable.

We will also need to consider how this impacts load balanced environments ensuring stock added to a cart in one environment still prevent adding to a cart on the other.