Magento 1 Cart Reservation v1.x Overview

Cart Reservation

Magento Cart Reservation Extension allows a customer to reserve the products he has added to his cart, i.e. your customers can be sure that nobody will intercept the products they have added to their carts. This Magento Cart Extension allows customers to monitor stock availability. They will be able to temporarily reserve products in the cart. This means that if a customer adds some items to his cart, these products will be unavailable for other customers. So, the customer has the opportunity to purchase these products first.

On the contrary, standard Magento allows customers to add a product to the cart, but only he who pays first, will be able to get it. The system sends the out of stock message if there are no products available or “in another member’s cart” message if the item is currently in another customer’s shopping cart. To control the purchase process, customers can rely on magento cart countdown system that is designed to show the remaining reservation time. Website administrator can set Magento cart timer to the time lapse he likes.

Extension Features

Reserved product on product list page
Reserved product on product list page
Reserved product page
Reserved product page
A separate countdown for each product in the shopping cart
A separate countdown for each product in the shopping cart
A global timer for all items in the shopping cart
A global timer for all items in the shopping cart
Time countdown on Checkout page
Time countdown on Checkout page
Reservation expired as shown in the shopping cart
Reservation expired as shown in the shopping cart
Reservation expired as shown in the shopping cart
Reservation expired as shown in the shopping cart

Types of Reservation

The Module provides two types of reservation – 1) to reserve each product in the cart; 2) to reserve all the cart. The latter means that all the products in the cart remain reserved until the longest reservation time expires. Meanwhile, the customer will be able to surf your website looking for more products to purchase. Then, he will be able to buy all the products in the cart with no fear that reservation time of some of the items he has chosen, has expired. On the contrary, the first type of reservation allows you to reserve each product separately.Time of Reservation

The module allows you to set the general time of reservation including both cart reservation and checkout reservation providing more time for the purchase to be completed and money paid. For instance, if the time of reservation is 10 minutes, the cart will be reserved for 10 minutes. But the Module also allows you to set additional time for the checkout stage, no matter how many minutes in cart reservation are left. This option provides sufficient time for each customer to complete the purchase.

You have two options here: either to reset the checkout timer every time a customer returns to the website to add new items to his cart, or to let the checkout countdown timer keep going. Thus, the whole cart, or all the products separately will be temporarily reserved and the customers will have to finish choosing products and pay the money.

Another option is to set unlimited reservation for products selection and checkout stage. You can use the following options:

  1. Set time ? for products selection and Y for checkout. This method is convenient if you don’t want your customers to hold products longer than X+Y period of time.
  2. Set unlimited reservation time for products selection and Y for checkout, meaning that while the customer is surfing the website the products he has added to his cart remain reserved. But when he starts the checkout process, his time will be limited to Y period. This option is not likely to be used very often, but remember that you can have such settings.
  3. Set time ? for products selection and unlimited period for checkout. It is one of the most convenient ways to manage reservations – you can limit the products selection stage, and allow your customers to freely choose the type of delivery, enter his address and payment method without restriction in time. This is how many membership websites work.
  4. Set unlimited time of reservation all over the website. Thus, the product will be unavailable to other customers, until a client refuses to buy it and delete it from the cart.

Note, if you set unlimited time of reservation for products selection without defining the checkout timer, the system will automatically set unlimited time for the checkout stage too.

It is important to prevent situations when a customer adds a product to his cart, and then forgets about it, making that particular product unavailable for other clients until the boutique is active (if you have Plumrocket Private Sales Extension installed). To do this you should set general time of reservation including products selection and checkout stages. This time period should be long enough (1 or 2 days) for the customer to believe that it is unlimited. Don’t forget to disable the display of countdown checkout timer in the front-end. The reservation will be over as soon as this time period expires. End of Reservation

Website administrator has two options for products after the reservation time expires – 1) to delete the product from the cart; 2) to leave the whole cart in case all products have been reserved. The second option allows you to leave the product in the cart. This product will be marked as “Reservation Expired”. The customer will be able to see this product in the cart and even buy it if there is enough products available in stock (those not reserved or bought by other customers), but any client will be able to intercept and buy this product, no matter if it is still in someone’s cart. If there are not enough products, they will be marked as “Insufficient quantity”.

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