I just wanted to rave a little about the mod that instinctual describes above. It needs to be made widely available somehow, preferable in a way where you can recover some or all of your apparently substantial investment. It would be great if you could sell your code to X-Cart who could re-package it as an add-on (or as a distant second, you might work through one of the after-market companies selling X-Cart add-ons and mods). This would likely create the kind of economies of scale that would allow this mod to be priced within reach (that is, hopefully less than X-Cart itself).
For my stores, this feature would fall squarely in the category of "Oh my God - how did I get along before this?". Under X-Cart's current inventory tracking system, the dilemma of whether to track or not to track is major for my business. Easily the leading source of time-consuming manual changes are orders with, say, 10 items and one $2.45 item missing. We don't back-order something like that, so we need to go in and modify the order to drop the item. We also don't capture CC transactions automatically when orders are placed (just authorize) because of orders like that. We'd always be issuing tiny credits. But this then creates a whole second manual step of charging each order, so we can get the right totals in for orders that are short. X-Cart's poor (essentially non-existent) integration with payment gateways greatly compounds this problem. That is, changing the order in X-Cart does not change the information with payment gateway, so there's another manual step there in changing the number. And X-Cart does not offer a direct interface with the gateway, meaning you're on two websites to do all this (Yahoo Store, for comparison, has a fully integrated payment gateway as part of its backend, bypassing this problem. But then they're much more expensive than X-Cart).
If we used X-Cart inventory tracking and charged CC orders automatically when they're placed, that would solve all of that hassle. But then we'd lose out on big orders that exceed stock. Last year someone ordered 200 items that retail for about $20 each. We had the stuff drop-shipped and everyone was happy, but that order would have been lost using X-Cart inventory tracking, since it exceeded our stock on hand.
Rave over. Good luck instinctual (or similarly inspired coders).
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