Reference Guide

Check this box to enable the basic system for inventory tracking in your store. You must also enable inventory tracking at the product level.

• If the product has no attributes, see

  To Enable Inventory Tracking for Products with No Attributes

• If the product has attributes, see

  To Enable Inventory Tracking for Products with Attributes

This feature is sometimes called "Inventory at Checkout". See To Use the Remove Products from Available Inventory Feature.

Before release 9.0006, Miva Merchant always reduced your inventory when a customer added something to their basket. For example, if you are using inventory management and you had 100 vases, Miva Merchant would automatically reduce your inventory to 99 when a customer put a vase in their basket.

In 9.0006, you can choose whether you want your inventory to drop when a customer adds a product to their basket, or when the customer completes checkout and reaches the invoice screen.

Let's say you have 5 vases in stock. Ten customers are visiting your store and each wants to buy a vase.

If you set this field to "When Added to Basket", only 5 people can add a vase to their basket. The sixth customer sees an out of stock message on the product page.

When you set this field to "At Checkout", all 10 customers can add a vase to their basket, even though you only have 5 in stock. The products can be purchased by whoever goes through checkout and reaches the Invoice screen first. The 6th customer will see an out of stock message when they get to checkout.

Both settings have pros and cons:

• When Added to Basket
• Pro: If a customer adds an item to their basket, it is absolutely available to be purchased.
• Con: If all of your inventory is in baskets, it looks like you are out of stock, even if those products haven't been purchased.
• At Checkout
• Pro: If you have a high rate of abandoned baskets, the products in those baskets can be purchased by other customers without waiting for the baskets to expire.
• Con: Customers may add an item to their basket thinking that it's in stock, but by the time they get to checkout, the inventory has already been purchased by other customers.

If you set the Remove Products from Available Inventory field to "At Checkout", it's possible that a customer will have an item in their basket, and find out that it's out of stock when they go to checkout. See above for more details.

If that happens, the customer will be redirected to a page and will see an error message. You can use this field to control which page the customer is redirected to. The default page is Basket Contents (BASK).

Tracking low stock has several effects:

• You can set up automatic emails so that you are notified when inventory reaches your low stock level.
• You can use the low stock level to create a kind of "reserve" for your inventory, if you want to make sure that you always have a few items on hand. For example, let's say you have quantity 5 of an item on hand, and you set the low stock level to 3. If you use the default "In Stock Message (Long)": %inv_instock% available for immediate delivery customers will see the message:



Because the %inv_instock% token is calculated as: current stock - low stock level

Tracking out of stock has several effects:

• You can set up automatic emails so that you are notified when inventory reaches your out of stock level.
• You can use the out of stock level to create a kind of "reserve" for your inventory, if you want to make sure that you always have a few items on hand. For example, let's say you have quantity 5 of an item on hand, and you set the out of stock level to 3. When your inventory level reaches quantity 3 on an item, customers will see the out of stock message. If you have "Hide Out of Stock Products" enabled, the product will not be displayed in your on-line store.