Modifying Product Prices in Persistent Customer Shopping Baskets

[zampino]

We allow our customers to maintain shopping baskets for an extended number of days, which fits the way our customers accumulate items before completing an order. Occasionally a customer will put an item in a basket at a current price, but we subsequently change the price. Is there any way to adjust the new price of the product in the customer's shopping basket?

Phil
squidco.com

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

You'd have to use a "saved basket" feature for that. (Will also be easier on the store's server since your basket time out can be set shorter.) Basically, you store the basket selection in a cookie/custom customer field and when the customer returns, it shows those items and lets them add them back to the basket. Scott Shepard @ http://www.southbound.com/ has an integration that we've used on a quite a few sites.

[zampino]

We have a Wishlist feature, which effectively allows the same, but I doubt that our customers can be "trained" to use the feature in this case. We sell music albums, CDs & LPs and customers accumulate several releases over time as we announce them, then eventually pull the trigger or wait for a discount sale. Maintaining a basket like this is very "Amazon-like", which our customers appreciate, and we have a half server so performance is not an issue for us. Re-pricing is though because we import many of the albums we sell and the prices vary based on exchange rates. Also we sometimes reprice to a fixed discount instead of using the marketing features of Miva, and if a customer holds the item after the sale they also hold the discount, which should expire at the end of the sale period.

At this point I think I should delete items that have significant price changes, then re-add them to the store. I'm assuming deleting an item will remove it from a shopping basket.

phil

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

The problem with wish lists is that they require a customer account...but yea, you can repurpose wish lists that way. (Just call it "save basket")