I've been looking into CartThrob as an eCommerce solution for a website we're going to be building which allows customers to rent the original artwork (stock of 1) for a specified amount of months or purchase the artwork outright, optionally with a specified amount of prints at different given sizes.
I've seen another thread which asked about purchases/rentals and the answers suggested using price modifiers to differentiate between a purchase and a rental which seems like the correct way to go, but is there a way to add custom data to the product if its a rental to say that it is on rental until a certain date and keep the stock count at 1, at which point the item is still available for rental and purchase but not until that date? I understand that this functionality is probably not available by default so I'm expecting to have to write an extension - would I use the cartthrob_on_authorize hook to do post-checkout processing and set the data values accordingly? e.g. if its a rental then set the stock level back to 1?
There is also the possibility of their salesmen to have an app which should be able to create orders from a remote location (or save the orders to be later added when an internet connection is available) which I believe should be doable via a custom API which would use EE's save_entry API method to insert an order with the specified products. Would adding order entries automatically adjust the stock levels if its a purchase (not a rental) and trigger the same hooks or would that have to be built into the custom API?
