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We sell many shirts every day, and when our quantities get low we try to re-order stock as quickly as possible. On rare occasions when we are close to zero for a particular item, we'll get a buyer who paid with an eCheck. Since it takes 4-5 days to clear, those remaining items are usually sold that same day or the next. Once the eCheck clears, our stock amount for that item goes to -1.

My question is why e-junkie can't remove the item from stock once a customer pays with an eCheck. If the payment gets declined, put the item back. If it goes through, then stock is still accurate and that particular SKU doesn't get oversold.

The issue is that PayPal does not send IPN to notify us of a sale until payment has actually completed, so our system cannot tell the product has actually been purchased until PayPal sends the IPN.

Since you are apparently not selling downloads, you may wish to go into Seller Admin > Payment Preferences and UNcheck the "Wait for pending payments..." setting. That will instruct PayPal to send us the IPN as soon as all buyers finish checkout, regardless of their final payment status.

In this case, you would assume all risk of a payment being declined/NSF/canceled afterwards, so you'd want to keep an eye on payments to determine if any eventually fail to complete after checkout before you ship the item.