ZenCart Zensday! – Our zen-cart mods/hacks/tips & tricks – “hiding” inventory numbers. This is our latest article on making and modding your own open source shopping cart like the one we use here at Adafruit. This week’s is how to remove inventory numbers on product pages.

Why would you want to do this?

1. For some items where you may have 10,000 or some giant number it makes more sense to just say “In stock”. For us, we usually just say “in stock” when we have over hundreds or thousands of a specific item.
2. There was a company that made automated “scrapers” that queried our site (and others) millions of times per month to figure out what we were selling. They did a crappy job and their scraper got out of control and it became a denial-of-service style attack on our site, since they were after inventory over time – this was another reason to add “in stock” for items we have in the hundreds and/or thousands.