One of a Kind items and cart timeout

[michey]

Has any solutions come up in the past few months for this situation?

About 50% of my inventory is one of a kind or limited availablity. I have to maintain a short timeout for the cart to not tie that inventory each day. Problem is it makes customers grumpy to go to lunch, come back and their cart is empty. I added a "save cart' feature months ago and that does help. I'm still looking for an optional way of an item not being 'out of stock' until a customer actually checkouts so I can change the timeout to a more generous time frame.

Any ideas?

Thank you,
michey

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

Absolutely.

Use Weiland's Restock Shelves v5 Module (http://tinyurl.com/kw54x).

It was specifically designed so you could have it delete expired baskets and return stock levels at designated intervals.

You could set this module to restock every 120 mins, and set your basket timeout to something more generous, say 60 or 120 mins.

[michey]

I have that, it works well but doesn't solve my problem. Let me try explaining again.

For example:
Time out set for 60 minutes. At 4pm 20 people come shopping, fill their carts with one of a kind items(literally 1 item of each product available). At 4:02pm the entire section is now 'out of stock'. Fast forward to 4:59......no one of a kind product available for sale for 57 minutes. Several people buy of course but you always have abandoned carts. 5pm the expired carts are emptied, items are available again, 5:02pm and it is happening again.

No matter what timeout I have set, the process goes the same. So if I have a bunch of window shoppers, I lose sales because it appears inventory is minimial, if not non-existant. To avoid this I have to keep the timeout at 30 minutes currently, which is not long enough for those that want to step away for a while and too long from my business point of view because it ties up inventory that may or may not be purchased by that specific person. In the meantime, I lose a potential sale from someone else because the inventory is unavailable.

I know tying up inventory how Miva is but I keep checking every once in a while trying to find a solution.

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

Set the restock shelves to 30 mins and the basket timeout to 60.

This should recover 1/2 the baskets every hour.

[Red Flare]

I tried using the built-in MIVA stock tracking system and found it to be unusable, I no longer have it enabled.

[michey]

Either I am not understanding something or we aren't referring to the same thing, Vic.

"Set the restock shelves to 30 mins and the basket timeout to 60.

This should recover 1/2 the baskets every hour."

How does this help me have inventory available? restock is currently set at 5 minutes, basket timeout 30. Inventory is still tied up with a shopper that may not even purchase the item. I have tried longer but end up with zero one of a kind inventory too many times a day, I lose potential customers if they keep coming and only see 'out of stock' on everything.

Red Flare, I now only use it for one of a kind or very limited stock items because of these problems, which makes inventory a headache for other items. Before I started using Miva I had to deal with 10 people buying the same 1 of a kind item, true nightmare since I had to sleep at some point. It's one of a kind artwork so more just isn't available. Now I have the problem of 1 person hoarding many items and 9 people yelling at me when they see sold out, return later to see some items back on the site.

---
I am also having a customer issue of items being put in their cart, they go back to the page, it now shows as out of stock and they think someone else bought it before them so they leave without checking out thinking it is no longer available. Hiding items that are out of stock from view just confuses the customers as I have tried that too. I have a fairly decent FAQ for the shopping cart but the average customer will never read it of course.

[Red Flare]

See my previous post: I no longer use it for ANY inventory tracking.
p.s. I just thought of something. What if you change your inventory message to: "come back in 1/2 hour to see if its back in stock"?
This may or may not help you.
p.s.s MIVA may not be the right cart for you at all...

[SpaceMoose]

I am also having a customer issue of items being put in their cart, they go back to the page, it now shows as out of stock and they think someone else bought it before them so they leave without checking out thinking it is no longer available. Hiding items that are out of stock from view just confuses the customers as I have tried that too. I have a fairly decent FAQ for the shopping cart but the average customer will never read it of course.

Try the code below on the product display layout 'sub'template.
It should display the 'Low Stock' inventory message if the customer has an item in the cart that is 'out of stock'. Other customers will see the item as 'out of stock': (note, the code is for the short stock messages - you'll need to adapt it if you want to show the long stock messages)

replace:
<mvt:if expr="l.settings:product:inv_active">
&mvt:product:inv_long;
</mvt:if>

with:



<mvt:if expr="l.settings:product:inv_active">
<mvt:if expr="l.settings:product:inv_level EQ 'out'">
<mvt:if expr="l.settings:product:quantity NE 0">
&mvt:inventory:low_short;
<mvt:else>
&mvt:product:inv_short;
</mvt:if>
<mvt:else>
&mvt:product:inv_short;
</mvt:if>
</mvt:if>