Better way to do Best Sellers?

[lesliekirk]

Got the following comments / questions from a site owner:

"John" tells me that the BEST SELLERS in MIVA are based on all time sales of a product which seems ludicrous because:

PRODUCT A = An okay product that sells 2-3 a month for the past 5-years. Roughly 150 sales in 5 years.

PRODUCT B = A great product that sells 20-30 a month but was only released 4 months ago. Roughly 100 sales in 4 months.

Clearly from our standpoint the better seller is PRODUCT B but PRODUCT A would still show up on top. That seems silly to me.

I know we can reset our statistics but that seems like a bad idea as well -- because you drop to zero each time you do it.

I want to either remove old data (like older than 90-days for instance) at the click of a button. Or have BEST SELLERS based on a specific time period (like best sellers from the past 30-days).

Is there any way to adjust how BEST SELLERS work in MIVA or are there any modules that have a more logical setup? Something like a rolling best sellers from the past X days would be best. For us that would likely be 30 or 60 days.

The comments pretty much speak for them self - so is there a better way to handle Best Sellers?

Many thanks!
Leslie

[PCINET - Andreas]

Re: Better way to do Best Sellers?

Not that I would know of but Ray is just adding bestsellers to toolbelt sorting and I think he could add a parameter for the number of days. This would resolve the problem :)

[RayYates]

Re: Better way to do Best Sellers?

Hi Leslie

The best sellers stored in sxx_ProdStats are simply a count of the product sold, so there is no date information or links back to the orders.

You would have to query on the Orders with date range and OrderItems counting the items sold and sorting the count. Then there is the issue of attributes of you want the break down to go that far.

I did a more far more complex version of this to create a net sales by date range report for a customer.

If you don't find a solution, it's possible to script this with about a dozen lines of code using Toolbelts Query command inside a page template. Then using the screen command load the data into any page.

[nottheusual1]

Re: Better way to do Best Sellers?

For categories, we have custom fields for top sellers, new products and featured products and use ToolKit to present them. Since our major categories represent unique suppliers it isn't difficult to manage. For generic categories we either don't use them or offer them as "special opportunities" to our suppliers and push their specials, hot runners and sometimes closeouts.

Our problem with stats is that the top gets crowded out with standards because of their longevity instead of what's current and trendy, so we opt to do it manually. Plus, our top 5 sellers are a reason people seek us out (specific brand/product), so we don't need to promote them.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Better way to do Best Sellers?

Personally, I usually encourage store owners to use the "Manual" method. We setup categories (hidden) for Specials, Best Sellers and New. Why? Cause store owners usually need to ability to lie. (kidding). They need the ability to CONTROL what gets labelled. For example, say your competitor has a product selling like hot cakes...on your site, not so much. Difference, his is listed as BEST SELLER because he's been selling it longer (or maybe just gets more hits) etc.

The Best Seller list in Merchant is really just statics for the store owner and shouldn't be used by the store's customers. If it seems like more work...well, that's why this is a job and not a past time (at least for most of us).

[RayYates]

Re: Better way to do Best Sellers?

I agree with Bruce on this. If you push best sellers they tend to stay a best seller (e.g. its self fulfilling) so something that could become a hot item might not get as many eyeballs and will find it harder to become a best seller.

Products at Eye level at Publix tend to sell more; so they don't put the best sellers there, they put high markup items or products they got a discount on, in order to push those sales. If something is already a best seller people may be willing to scroll down a few lines to find it.

Using categories for these promotions is easy to manage and provides flexibility.

[wcw]

Re: Better way to do Best Sellers?

If the store is using MySQL you could use the bestseller_recent function which I added to the Emporium Plus Tool Kit. You can specify the number of products to display, the number of days you want it to go back from the current date, hide if out of stock, and one exclude string to hide if you don't want to show them. For example, at http://www.emporiumplus.com/SFNT.html I have best sellers near the bottom. The second highest best seller in the store is the Tool Kit update. Since Tool Kit is already number 1, it would be redundant to show number 2 as the "same version update". The same version update products all have a unique letter (U) in their product code. So by including the letter "U" in the 7th parameter of the function, those products are hidden.