Not working with Bookings items

That’s difficult to do right now since there isn’t any hook that runs when expiring an item from the cart. Though it is something I have thought about adding in the future.

How are the “synced” items actually connected? I’ve never used the Bookings plugin or seen its code so I can’t be sure how it’s actually working.

So I have two addition plugins – Woocommerce Bookings and Woocommerce Force Sells. My brain is pretty well on holiday at the moment so I struggle to explain how bookings work other than basically being a heavily customised product. When a ‘product’ is booked, stock level is reduced for a certain time period. But stock control is something in between a physical product and a virtual one. (Not sure I’m making a heap of sense here lol).
Force sells is like other linked products only when one product is added to the cart, the force sell product is added too. A Synced Force Sell product means that the number of items in the cart are kept in sync.

For clarity, our organisation hires out birth pools. We have very limited number of these (3 of one kind and only 1 of another). When we book them out, people must pay a bond and pay for a liner. The bond is set as a virtual product and the liners are simple products with a stock level. The bond and liner are set as synced force sells so that when a pool (‘booking’) is added to the cart, only one bond and one liner is added and can’t be changed in quantity. If a customer removes the pool, the bond and liner are removed as well (as the pool product count becomes zero and the synced force sells are matched quantity).

The problem we have come across in testing is that if someone adds the pool to their cart and then abandons it, the pool sits ‘booked’ for the time period they entered which means someone else cannot book it. Obviously this problem is compounded when we only have a few pools, particularly with the single one.
I’ve improved things slightly by adding a cart icon so that people know they have stuff in their cart if they navigate elsewhere in the site, but we cannot get around the cart abandonment currently. There are a couple of paid plugins that allow you to reduce the cart session to whatever you want but as a non-profit, these plugins are beyond our means to afford.

I have set the stock hold setting to 15 minutes but I don’t know that it affects cart abondonment at all (for WC Bookings) or consistently anyway. The standard 48 hours expiry is way too long and tutorials I’ve looked at only reduce it to 12 hours.

The system we are wanting is the same as you get with booking movie theatre tickets online – you start your booking and have 15 minutes to complete it. If you don’t the tickets are released for others to purchase.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by Rose. Reason: Spelling mistake

Thanks, I understand your situation now and fortunately don’t have to google with safe image search enabled.

I think the ultimate solution is to for this plugin to be able to trigger an action so you can forcibly purge the cart but that’s not available now. If you send me a copy of those plugins <[email protected]> I can see if I can figure out an easy way to detect linked products.

For the short term what I think would work for you would be to only have your pools be managed inventory so those would expire from the cart and someone else can then buy them. The bond and liner could be unlimited products (even if the liners are a limited quantity I assume you must keep enough in stock to cover any rentals) and they wouldn’t expire from the cart.

The only downside to doing it this way is potentially if someone adds one to their cart (along with the forced items), lets them expire, then comes back to actually buy one the other plugin might add a 2nd liner + bond to their cart. There could be some workarounds for this, or maybe the other plugin won’t add if they are already in the cart.