RESTOCK SHELVES

The MIVA Corp inventory management module for MIVA Merchant 4.x has resulted in numerous stores having their shelves temporarily cleared. As customers place products in their baskets, the store inventory level is decremented. If the customer decides not to buy at that time and leaves the store, the products in that abandoned basket remain unavailable. When the store owner manually deletes expired baskets in admin, those basket contents are reclaimed and the products are placed back in the store inventory. Stores which have one-of-a-kind or low inventory levels of products are significantly impacted as the products are not available for purchase by other customers until the store is manually restocked. Stores which have high traffic are similarly impacted when many baskets are abandoned. This module eliminates the need for the store owner to manually restock. At a frequency determined by the store owner, this module will reclaim the expired baskets and restock the shelves. When customers visit your store the timer will be checked to determine the last time expired baskets were deleted. If deletion is due, the next customer who clicks to a Miva Merchant PRODUCT screen will launch the shelf restocking routine. This module may not be required in future versions of MIVA Merchant as a similar fix has been requested through the MIVA Corp wishlist.

This module is for Merchant 4.0 - 5.x and is compatible with both the MMUI and OpenUI. Editing of mv files is NOT required.

The need for a this module readily became apparent after using the Show Baskets module which identified what customers were leaving in abandoned baskets and how frequently they did that.

New in the compiled (4.14 and newer) version is an activity log. It accumulates the numbers of baskets which were not converted to orders and have been reclaimed. It also captures the completed order totals. These numbers can be displayed for any time period. See the screen shots below. The information can be useful when evaluating your success at convincing "visitors" to actually buy something. Another useful usage of this tool is monitoring how often and to what extent search engines spider your merchant.mv pages. You will periodically see a glut of abandoned baskets when the restock module runs. You also have the option of the module sending an email to you each time it restocks the shelves. This is useful in identifying problems with your payment gateway as it identifies baskets which were reclaimed, yet had products in them. This is to be expected within reason, but if you see a significant increase, it may be because your payment gateway is down.

Merchant 4.14 and newer. Included in the email is the Sale Saver feature which displays basket info when the customer info has been filled in AND there are products in the basket. So if the order was not completed, you can see who it was and what they intended on purchasing. It also tells you how far they got into checkout. If they have both the customer info and products, they are considered to have gotten to the OSEL screen. If they also had selected a shipping method, they got to the OPAY screen. In some cases, they may have even gone to pay but the payment failed to update MIVA Merchant. In this case they would also be considered to have reached the OPAY screen. Example Sale Saver email. In Merchant version 5.x, beginning with Restock Shelves module version 5.013 you can have the module automatically send the customer an email too.

This module is also included in the Basket Master bundle. Save when you buy bundled module licenses.

Online overview and initial setup instructions for our MIVA Merchant modules.

Screen shot showing approximately 1000 completed orders (compiled version)

Screen shot showing basket activity from one day (compiled version)

78 baskets were abandoned. Most of those were probably search engine hits.
There was $55.00 worth of products in the abandoned baskets.
There were 8 completed orders for a value of $345.67.