Hide Out Of Stock Attributes / Manage Inventory Variants

[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.

[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

[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

[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?

[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.

[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]

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]

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..

[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?

[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.

[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.

[GDesigns]

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

[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?

[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

[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.