Hide Out Of Stock Attributes / Manage Inventory Variants

[GDesigns]

Brennan is filtering (facets) by stock availability at least on the roadmap? We have gotten a number of inquires asking for that feature. Yes?

[delcorsets]

miloport if I'm interpreting the first part of your post correctly then I think we might be wrestling with the same problem... When you refer to filtering are you talking about facets/faceted search?

I too have contacted multiple developers looking for a solution but with no luck.

There was a post a while ago that I chimed in on.. it got a little confusing because I think we may have been talking about different things, but my case is essentially this:

“a customer wants to find pants in size XXS, an uncommon size. In the Pants Category when they select the facet checkbox for size XXS, instead of only seeing the one pair of pants available/in-stock in that size, they are presented with 40 products. All of those products have an XXS inventory variant, but only one of those 40 results actually has a size XXS in stock and available to purchase."

This is definitely a big issue in my mind… it’s been a long running complaint with my customers that they have to go into many many products before finding one with their size in stock. I thought facets would solve this problem.

https://www.miva.com/forums/forum/on...ck-items-shown

[ids]

You certainly have a lot going on with the complication of the retail side of your business. I am not clear on what kind of rules you need for displaying products. Many capabilities within Miva already exist, however.

Is your Miva store a stock readytheme with no or very little customization? That could explain some of this because Readythemes aren't meant to be a complete solution, just a starting point. I am positive you understand this already. I mention it because I know others may not realize this.

I'd bet you would have all your needs met with some or more customization. I've done a fair amount of this for clients using SMT (and a custom module on occasion) because there is no way to cover all possible scenarios out of the box. This is why Miva is so powerful as an eCommerce shopping cart solution.

One thing that might help you in your Admin of variant products, you can turn on ALL when filtering the product catalog. You simply search for the main product code and all the variants will display on the list regardless of the inventory status.

Scott

[miloport]

We enforce stock using inventory variants. If we have a t-shirt for example and have Size attributes/inventory variants for Small, Medium, Large, XL, XXL, and Medium and XXL are currently sold out those Attributes/Variants should be removed from the Size Attribute filter so a customer that is looking for say Medium T-Shirts does not filter products that are out of stock. We have over 4000 constantly changing apparel products and other categories where we use inventory variants and having sold out products included in these filters drives our customers and my retail team crazy.

For example, someone comes into our retail store looking for a small product and they cannot find one on our sales floor so we show them what we have available thru our site, we go to the section filter by Small, then the customer says I want that blue one shown by the filter, we click into it and it is sold out, then how about the red one, that is sold out as well they are bummed but we have 36 small in other styles but they have the impression we must be out of everything. This is an in-person user experience and I am sure we have many potential online customers that bail if they happen by chance to click into a few in a row on a size that is sold out.


I have researched this a lot, have talked to different development companies with no luck. Why is this such a big deal, why is it not possible, is Miva even looking into these sort of things. Why would a customer want to filter by a certain parameter and open products they cannot purchase. It would be better to be able to show them exactly what is available when they are shopping.

Is there any hope of implementing this in the future? Does anyone know the way?

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Secondly, Managing products with Inventory Variants is a true pain. For one, you cannot say go to a Clothing/T-Shirts Category and say show me all products that are Active where all Inventory Variants are sold out. In Fact, you cannot even see the inventory Variants assigned to a specific category because they are not even assigned to categories so you have to go to the main catalog view to manage variants properly.

There needs to be a better way for these things.