More robust sorting by "Best Selling"

[joshpappas]

On product listings, we'd like more control over how the "Best Selling" sorting method works. Based on what we're seeing and information I can find here in the forums, it seems like that uses sales numbers for all time to determine that sort order, which creates a bias toward older products. It would be ideal if we could set a rolling timeframe for the best sellers. Plus, this currently doesn't account for when orders are deleted, which can also inflate numbers. For instance, we had a fraud order for like a million confetti cannons before we started tracking live inventory on our sites, and now that's forever going to be the top product...

It seems like it would be possible to set a scheduled task that runs periodically to recalculate the sales data based on orders in the system, then save that to the database for easy reference. This would prevent having to do that on every page load.

It would also be interesting to see an option to weight best sellers by season. One of our stores tracks to a lot of holidays and events throughout the year, so this could be very handy.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

AFAIK, BestSeller data is kept in a separate database, so it would be relatively simple (though perhaps manual) to go in and trim the records. However, there is no 'date' field their so its reset all or nothing.

[joshpappas]

Yeah, that's what I had gleaned from some old forums posts. It might do in a pinch, but it doesn't really accomplish what we would want on an ongoing basis. I know it's a relatively mundane feature to have to go back and rebuild it, but executing extremely well on the basics can be better than a bunch of new whiz-bang features. In my opinion, anyways. Who knows, maybe the current implementation fits 90% of use cases and we'd be better suited to build a module. Either way, it would be nice to know whether this might be updated at some point.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Well, depending on what you wanted to do, you might be able to run order sales reports on your Order tables and use those counts to populate the BestSeller listings. Thinking this would be something you trigger from the admin when needed. Setting a date range before running it. Reason you don't want to do that dynamically is that even on reasonably small site, running the report could take 10 to 30 seconds. On a large site, it could take several minutes. (This would most likely have to be a custom module.)

[joshpappas]

That's more along the lines of the functionality I'm thinking of. I'd just want to schedule it to run automatically every day. I can definitely envision how it might work, I'd just like Miva to do it for me :). er... for Everyone!

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

There might be toolkit method for this, but seeing as how it uses customfields, and requires you to also use ITS sort features, nor sure its implementable. As for Miva making this a free update...not sure there'd be enough of a call for it. At best, Miva might restructure how the sorting feature works to open it up for sorting along different dimensions. (That being said, the dimensions themselves are usually the problem. So, in your case, the best sellers dimension data itself isn't suitable.)