Magento

Can magento handle this?

I need the inventory to change when a customer adds the item to their cart instead of after they checkout. We sell exotic fish/corals that are one-of-a-kind so most of them will have only 1 in stock and I do not want two customers adding the same item to their cart. I need the product to be “out of stock” when it is in anyone’s cart and also I need their shopping carts to expire after 10 minutes of inactivity so that the product goes back “in-stock”.

This feature is standard in some other shopping carts, but I do not see this feature available in Magento. I only see the option for reducing inventory on successful checkout. Am I missing something?

I see your point, but we have been doing this for a while already and it is pretty standard in the industry. My main question is if magento can handle this, or how hard it would be to modify magento to handle this… Do you have experience with this?

In your example, if customer A and customer B add the same product to their carts and customer A checks out first making the product out of stock, customer B would then only find out that the product has already been sold when they go to checkout, correct? If I were customer B I would be pissed and abandon my entire cart including whatever else I had been shopping for.

I would rather that customer B never get the chance to be disappointed, because he never could add the product to his cart. He would then be more inclined to at least buy something else OR jump on a new product quickly next time.

Thanks for your input fifthave, do you have any more insight on this?