Should be easy general Miva usage question(s)

[KayfabeRockStar]

These should be pretty easy to answer, though I don't have the answer...ha ha.

1. Is there a product limit with Miva Merchant 4? 10,000 products? etc.
2. Is there a product limit with Miva Merchant 5?
3. This one is a 2 part...

A. Is it possible to have 1 Corporate Business with 4 "stores/locations" all maintaining separate inventory, but then gather 1 report (if needed) for all stores;

B. If one store has reached an order limit; or is "out of stock" of an item, display something that says this location doesn't have it, but order from (click) THIS STORE.

This will not be something that is for example, 4 BEST BUY store locations, but more or less, a BEST BUY, CIRCUIT CITY, HH GREGG, and RADIO SHACK (though all owned by 1 major corp) that will referr one another if one store is out of a product.

Thank you SO much in advance.

Jason Lindsey

[DesignExtend-MSI]

1. Is there a product limit with Miva Merchant 4? 10,000 products? etc.
2. Is there a product limit with Miva Merchant 5?

Not really. I've seen plenty of 4 stores run 40,000 products. Same with 5. Of course, running MySQL platform gives some additional power, but you wouldn't necessarily need to run v5.

A. Is it possible to have 1 Corporate Business with 4 "stores/locations" all maintaining separate inventory, but then gather 1 report (if needed) for all stores;

Depends on what you need by one report. It may be possible to run an export script of a combination (and Order Manager will actually maintain proper inventory by allowing all four stores to download into one store file in OM). But if you're maintaining separate inventories, and based on what you wrote below, I don't think that's what you mean.

B. If one store has reached an order limit; or is "out of stock" of an item, display something that says this location doesn't have it, but order from (click) THIS STORE.

Yes, but it's not going to look at the other stores to see what has it in stock (though a custom script could run a query on that -but not such a simple task). To display the message you'd just use a conditional.

This will not be something that is for example, 4 BEST BUY store locations, but more or less, a BEST BUY, CIRCUIT CITY, HH GREGG, and RADIO SHACK (though all owned by 1 major corp) that will referr one another if one store is out of a product.

If that's the case and you need to "find" which store has it, you'd be looking at custom development. There's no module for it, that's for sure.

[ILoveHostasaurus]

These should be pretty easy to answer, though I don't have the answer...ha ha.

1. Is there a product limit with Miva Merchant 4? 10,000 products? etc.
2. Is there a product limit with Miva Merchant 5?


The greatest impact on Merchant's performance will be the add-on modules that you use. Out of the box, either version of Merchant will reliably handle tens of thousands of products, but adding the wrong modules to the store and you can cripple its performance when running huge numbers. If it's appropriate to your overall needs, Merchant 5 with MySQL will best handle higher traffic levels in large product count stores but will also likely have the slowest import/update speed as the row by row operations required during flat file imports tend to be the slowest with the MySQL backend. So if MM5/MySQL is appropriate for your needs, I'd go that route and just try to optimize as much as possible by not going overboard on add-ons.

[KayfabeRockStar]

Thank you.

The product limit sounds good. I guess what I need is like a distribution center for 4 stores. I can use an %IF% %ELSE% for the "out of stock" and just list the URL's, but I don't need it to check the stock of the other stores.

If I can run inventory reports from all 4 separately, I guess I was wondering how to get them into one report. Someone mentioned Order Manager. Will that work?

Another quickie - can you set order limits on a store? If a Store A gets 100/day, say "We've reached our limit, you have to order form Store B?

Don't wonder why too many orders is too much...I think too many are a good thing too, just trying to answer for a client.

Thanks!

[ILoveHostasaurus]

If you built your stores in Merchant 5 you could have a back-end PHP script that does reports against the MySQL database using data from all the stores. You could also have another script that checks the overall inventory of each store periodically to warn you that one store is nearly depleted on its inventory of a specific item, then you could shift inventory from another store over to it. I don't know of a good way to make Merchant tell you to order from another store if it runs out though, unless each store defaulted to telling the person just to go to the next store in line. It wouldn't be easy to make Merchant query the other stores' databases to determine which one actually has inventory of the product in question and to tell the person to try there.

[KayfabeRockStar]

Ahh, yes! A PHP script. That is a good idea. I'm still an avid MM4xx user so I haven't made the switch to even using MM5 - so that is a whole other subject. BUT, using PHP to read the MySQL is a great idea.

All I need to do is say is

%IF% "X" is out of stock
Sorry, that item is out of stock. Please try ordering from <link>Store A</a>, Store B, etc...
%IFEND%

Is that possible with MM5? Does MM5 pretty much operate like MM4+OPEN-UI? I mean, they say you have control over the look of EVERYTHING, by just editing the script... just like OPEN-UI, or viking's other page templates ( I understand this is probably a question for the MM5 list...though it is somewhat relevant to my question.)

Thanks again!

[ILoveHostasaurus]

There's no easy way for PHP to read the Merchant db's on an MM4 store; there's some dbase add-ons but I've never seen anyone actually use them as PHP has always been kind of iffy about the dbase support. In MM5 you'd have to learn the new StoreMorph template code that Miva uses but generally you can do many of the same things such as conditionals, variables, etc. You do have control over most things natively with the exception of the category tree, but you can replace that with a third party replacement.