Customer sells products (cars) from eCommerce and they have a special tracking dimension on the product, i.e. Device Number, which is similar to serial number. Device number is not required during place order phase but it’s required in the HQ inventory. So they would like the system to allow selling products even when the available quantity in HQ is 0 or negative.

At first they tried to use negative inventory buffers, however, that is not supported in current versions of AX.
And we don’t have the plan to support it in the future due to feature limitations.

We suggest customer to redefine inventory level of “Out of stock”, such as -1000, so even available quantity is negative it would still be considered as “Available”. The GetEstimatedAvailabilties API could calculate the quantity and inventory level correctly – the issue is that the add-to-cart button on PDP page requires available quantity to be bigger than 1.

After discussion we propose to take 2 steps to fix this issue:

1.A short term mitigation: eCommerce team to provide an extension / a fix to the add-to-cart button behavior, when GetEstimatedAvailabilties API returns “Available”, we should enable the add-to-cart button. This should allow customer to sell negative inventory products. The only issue is that the quantity input might not be adjusted, it’s likely to be always 1.

2.A long term fix: GetEstimatedAvailabilties API returns an additional field to indicate boundary of “Out of stock”, eCommerce team should respect this value for quantity input range and add-to-cart button.

3.A Customization:
There is the option of overriding the GetEstimatedAvailability API. In the UX there are many modules that does inventory validation (not only the add to cart button) so it would imply a very large customization.

4. Suggestion to MS Development team:
Maybe we can provide a more flexible solution out-of-box.

For example, assume we define inventory levels as:
• Out of stock: -infinity ~ -10
• Available: -10 ~ infinity

Assume we have Total Available as -8 and SiteBuilder uses Total Available. GetEstimatedAvailabilties API will return data like:
TotalAvailable: -8
TotalAvailableInventoryLevelLabel: “Available”
OutOfStockUpperBoundInclusive: -10 (new field to add)

Then on eCommerce site we should display the product as “Available”, and buyable quantity range is from 1 to 2 (calculated by -8 – (-10) = 2), and the add-to-cart button is enabled. This should also apply to other components which has inventory validation.

This solution will provide much more flexibility for customer to use inventory levels. Does the solution work? The change on the API would be small, but I am not sure how much it would be on eCommerce.