How and when should we purge our basket table

[wajake41]

Hello forum: Looking for advice. I just noticed that we have 25,940 baskets in our basket table. What is the proper procedure to purge old baskets? Thanks, Larry

[wajake41]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

I followed the purge & pack process in admin. I still have 25,940 basket rows. Why is that? Larry

[wcw]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

Those may not be old. In the admin > utilities > delete shopping baskets, did you choose to delete expired or all baskets. If you delete all it will remove all of them, even current shoppers. Rarely you would do that unless you were having corruption problems. Normally you only delete expired. If your basket timeout setting is large or you have a large amount of visitors (or search engines) you could have 25,000. Most stores set the basket timeout around 120 minutes.

[wajake41]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

Hi Bill: You are correct, I checked the date of our oldest basket row and it is within the expiration date range that we have set which is 30 days. We use 30 days because we drop ship, consequently no inventory issues. Must be a lot of robots hitting us, over night the basket rows increased by 407. This raises another question: Since Miva knows when baskets expire, why isn't this purge automatic? Larry

[Rick Wilson]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

Since Miva knows when baskets expire, why isn't this purge automatic?

It's on our list, but Bill's had such a solid low cost solution with Restock Shelves for so long that it lowers it's priority. However we'll get it done.

[wajake41]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

Hi Rick: You rang a bell when you mentioned the restock shelves module. After pondering a bit, I realized we had it installed in our stores and it had been purging our baskets all along. We recently went from a Miva admin 4 hours expiration to 30 days. This is what caused my surprise when suddenly we had thousand of baskets in our Basket table. Conclusion is there is no need to run admin purge myself.
Thanks for your reply, Larry
BTW I'm learning. Using FF for this reply instead of IE ;)

[wcw]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

The restock shelves should be set for every two hours. It is ok if the basket timeout is 30 days. The restock will trim off those past the 30 days every two hours.

[wajake41]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

Bill: Thanks for your reply and the module. It's so smooth, I'd forgotten it was installed.
Larry

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

BTW: in the sphere of Merchant/SQL combinations, 25K records is not a problem. Inventory control (i.e., inventory in expired baskets) could be. Also, there is no reason to retain baskets for the reasons of 'drop shipments'. The data for pending orders is in the Orders databases. A 30 day period would only be needed if your 'sell' process takes that long (i.e., its takes that long for folks to decide, or the decision process is like: "find what you want, get pricing, show to boss, come back and make purchase).

[wajake41]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

Hi Bruce: You're right on target. A lot of our business is B to B, so the "find what you want, get pricing, show to boss, come back and make purchase" is considerable. We don't want their baskets expiring right away. Inventory is not an issue as we drop ship.
Cheers, Larry

[wcw]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

Agree. That is an incredible long basket timeout and certainly not needed. Each page that loads looks up all the details of the basket in your very large database.

[SunCam]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

We expire our baskets after 10-days but I would rather that they never expire. We want our customers to see what they almost purchased on their last visit. Our products are virtual so there is no inventory issues.

The ideal solution would be to mimic Amazon and automatically keep the abandoned products in a "Saved for Later" status when the basket expires. I don't see a module that does this automatically. A wish list is not good enough because it requires action by the customer. Anyone know of a module that would accomplish this?

[Rick Wilson]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

To ensure you database doesn't get out of control, I'd suggest some type of limit. 525949 is one year, which is certainly an option.

[wcw]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

The ideal solution would be to mimic Amazon and automatically keep the abandoned products in a "Saved for Later" status when the basket expires. I don't see a module that does this automatically. A wish list is not good enough because it requires action by the customer. Anyone know of a module that would accomplish this?

That feature already exists. The Restock Shelves http://www.emporiumplus.com/1AA00067.html automatically deletes the basket at your desired frequency. Embedded in the sale saver email that goes to the customer, you can have a link to the store which will repopulate the basket with auto-saved data using the Tool Kit savebasket2email #131 at http://www.emporiumplus.com/1AA00223.html It is all automatic so there is not a need to have a real long basket timeout. They simply click a link and the basket gets refilled. You can see how it works if you fill your basket, go to checkout and save your customer data. Then leave and wait a few hours until you get the sale saver email. You'll see a link to restore last saved basket.

[wajake41]

Re: How and when should we purge our basket table

Hi Bill: Our problem with the save basket2email was that it was doubling the quantities if the basket hadn't expired. Is that still so? That was part of the reason we went to a 30 day expiration and a link back to the basket from our own email. Larry