Web geekery ahead.
Background (long): So the big cellphone carrier here (ST for short) has finally rolled out their 3G+ network. You know what that means! iPhone time! Before this becomes a phone war, I have a Touch and a lot of music and apps from Apple so I want to stay with the platform.
Anyway, they haven’t actually said they are getting the iPhone and rumour has it that they won’t because they are a small carrier (as opposed to a national carrier) and Apple thinks they can’t fulfill the minimum iPhone order and won’t allow the national carriers it allies with to sub-contract the phones.
However, one of the big national carriers (call them T) just happened to come out and say they just rolled out a 3G+ network here! Obviously, from their prior partnership with ST, they are just buying the time off of ST.
Here’s where my thread topic comes in: This leads to me going to T’s website, since T’s retail outlets have an estimated date of…end of September. T’s website says they are sold out. I pout. But being a web developer, curiosity led me to take a look at the website source.
Why lo and behold, their ecommerce software doesn’t actually remove the ‘Add to Cart’ button if an item is out of stock. It simply uses CSS to set it to display:none. A quick mod through Firebug and I have a lovely ‘Add to Cart’ button. And it let me go through the entire checkout process. I do realize since the phone is out of stock it won’t meet the estimated shipping time, but at least I won’t be calling the retail outlets every damn day asking them if they have the iPhone yet.
This makes me especially happy, seeing as all the special promotions they have for their launch here would actually run out if I had to wait until the end of September.
TL;DR: I used CSS knowledge to outsmart an ecommerce site to let me buy an out of stock item.
