Hide Out Of Stock Attributes / Manage Inventory Variants

[lesliekirk]

lesliekirk It seems that if one of these scenarios could be resolved than the other scenario could also be resolved - both require facets to have access to inventory counts on the variant level.

I did start a new thread since my question doesn't necessarily involve inventory counts at the variant level - but yeah it's good to keep this thread alive for the very reason you mentioned.

[delcorsets]

lesliekirk It seems that if one of these scenarios could be resolved than the other scenario could also be resolved - both require facets to have access to inventory counts on the variant level.

[lesliekirk]

lesliekirk I've not ever found a solution on my end.. my original focus was not trying to display the Inventory as a facet, but rather to hide master products from search results if the shopper was filtering on a size variant that was out of stock.. sort of the same thing, but not exactly.

“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."

Still hoping for a solution as this does cause a lot of shopper aggravation.. customers search for their size using the faceted search checkbox, get lots of results, but then proceed into the product page only to find that their desired size is sold out.

Hey delcorsets Yeah, sorry. I did see where the thread did go a little sideways. I think I'll try to start a new one and reference parts of this one.

[delcorsets]

lesliekirk I've not ever found a solution on my end.. my original focus was not trying to display the Inventory as a facet, but rather to hide master products from search results if the shopper was filtering on a size variant that was out of stock.. sort of the same thing, but not exactly.

“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."

Still hoping for a solution as this does cause a lot of shopper aggravation.. customers search for their size using the faceted search checkbox, get lots of results, but then proceed into the product page only to find that their desired size is sold out.

[lesliekirk]

Yes I have that on our roadmap for a future update.

Circling back to this. Has it been added? The ability to display the Inventory as a facet? The original question is 3 years old.

[dreamingdigital]

delcorsets it gets real complicated real fast with variants and facets. We have tried a bunch of different stuff.
My most recent and most promicing adventure into trying to have faceted inventory works when variants are 'sum of parts' and when there is just one combination of options that make it. So it kinda falls on it's face with something like a shirt where it's a size and color. But if it's just a size or just a color this can work: 1. make a marketing feed that loops through the master products. 2. Within the iterator loop through the variants of each item and run the inventory API calls on them. If all variants are out of stock you can run the API call to set the custom field for that master product to a value of "out of stock" or something. It's not the greatest but it's a method to an end with a lot more time/budget/stuff. Posting this here for some brilliant ideas to flow forth

[delcorsets]

GDesigns I'm resurrecting this topic because I just saw your blog post about Inventory Status as a Facet (https://www.glendaledesigns.com/inve...us-as-a-facet/) Does this work on the variant level? Would this solution work in conjunction with faceted search results to solve the problem brought up in this thread?

[GDesigns]

Brennan well - it needs to be at the variant level, so not 'simple' at all...

[miloport]

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

Same problem! We have a lot of custom code in our store but this issue is one I never thought I would even have to think about and has turned into a big problem and has really hurt our overall sales. I have talked to the development team that I work with for most of our custom code and they make it sound like this is a nightmare to code around and ultimately will possibly leed to a major performance hit which we do not want to face.

I still just do not get why a simple insert of some logic to check to see if an attributes attached inventory variant is out of stock and bypass those is so difficult.

I get there are multiple locations where you set tracking of inventory: product level, site level, or tracking inventory through variants.

Currently, at least for our site, attribute search facets include product attributes assigned to a product regardless if it is in stock or not and then they are totaled and the number of those attributes is displayed on the screen Small(23) Medium (75) and so on.

I am not sure when those numbers even get generated? Is it realtime or does this get calculated by a scheduled task?

If it is a scheduled task, then that task could be modified to not only look at just the attributes available for the product but look up to see if an inventory variant exists for the attribute. If an inventory variant exists and inventory is greater than 0 or the product is not tracking inventory by variants or not at all include it.

[William Davis]

We would like to switch from our current ReadyTheme to Colossus in 2020, and have a similar need to have a user option "hide out of stock" products from being displayed on; category and search result pages.

[mvasquez]

I don't use the facets in this way, and maybe totally off my estimation --- can you have something run through the inventory values for all the variants and if it's out of stock, when they filter by the initial facet, show a different photo over the product like "Out Of Stock" so at least they see up front what is or isn't in stock, but they can still see that the product could potentially be offered at some time?

[delcorsets]

Displaying the inventory counts for the variants isn't really that important; it's more about preventing a master product from being shown in the results when a shopper searches for a size which is not in stock for that product.

Would there be another way to approach the problem like temporarily making the variant product inactive? or deleting the out of stock attribute option from the master product, and then adding it back once the size becomes available again? I'm not sure if either of these things would solve the problem, but it might open up a new way of looking for a fix..

[Brennan]

Facets only filter only off the maser product, you could take a inventory sum of individual variants and push that to the master. Displaying the inventory counts for variants is going to be much harder. Not sure if there is an easy solution for that.

[delcorsets]

Brennan to clarify.. when a shopper filters by size, would your solution prevent the master product from being displayed if that selected size (inventory variant = inventory level of 0) was currently out of stock?

I'm having a little trouble wrapping my brain around how that would work. I'm definitely not an expert, but I've also approached some very savvy developers who also were unable to come up with a solution.

I still have facets hidden on our live site (over a year now) because it was so frustrating for customers who were searching for their size but were seeing so many products in the filtered results in which their size was actually out of stock.

[Brennan]

Yes I have that on our roadmap for a future update.

However you could pretty easily do that today but importing the stock to a custom product field, then have a script which keeps it up to date.