Can Zen-Cart sort products based on popularity?

[cleverpork]

I've been searching for this feature in my admin and on the site...

I'd like my products to be sorted based on popularty. Is this possible? In other words, product A has sold 15x and Product B has sold 45. I'd like Product B to show up earlier on the list than Product A.

Thanks for any help. I love my Zen Cart so far! It's been good to me!

Cris
www.BeamerFilms.com

[kuroi]

You haven't said to which listing you're referring, but Zen Cart doesn't currently do this for any of them (other than the bestsellers sidebox).

It's an interesting idea though, and actually not too difficult for somebody with the PHP and MySQL skills that would be needed to tweak the database extracts for the listing that interests you.

[cleverpork]

Good question. I think what I'm looking for is very similar to the "bestseller" catagory. I think I want any product in any listing to come up the rank. Let's say someone entered search term "X" and there are 15 products that fit that search term. The one that sold the most, I want to come up to the top.

Also, if someone selected a specific product catagory, I would like the most sold to surface to the top. This would be a tremendous benifit, I would assume, to a lot of folks (especially me in this case!) :-)

Anyway, if anyone has any ideas, thougths, paths I could take to get this feature, that would be awesome.

Thanks,

Cris Cunnigham
www.BeamerFilms.com

[cleverpork]

Would anyone know how to help with this? Just wondering if anyone has taken a crack at it? Or would know how to do this. Thanks.

Cris

[kuroi]

This would involve finding the search routine associated with each listing, adding a count of the number of orders for each product, and then using that to order resulting list. Conceptually pretty straightforward for somebody with PHP and MySQL skills, though I don't know of anybody who has done it.

The complications would be removing the sometimes quite complicated sort criteria that Zen Cart currently has, that there are quite a few such searches to be changed, and that some of the files affected aren't currently over-rideable and so these changes would need to be reapplied each time you upgrade.

Also, this would be going directly into an area that is scheduled to change for Zen cart 1.4 which will be upgrading the approach to database accesses and simplifying the approach to listings.

[cleverpork]

Definately out of my personal knowledge base to pull this off, but it's something I want, non-the-less.

Would anyone know where I would turn to get help pulling this off?

cris

[madteckhead]

I'm making a tag cloud that will eventually collate all the data needed to needed to make such decisions. Including which pages are viewed before/after, and most popularly view items (as well as bought items). Not exactly the same, but I am sensing a need for some sort of central zen cart meta information store, and some sort of API to access it easily. I think this would go along way with "web 2.0" apps. just my 2c Very keen to know if you get some code working though. Nathan

[fakeDecoy]

Old thread, but I'm interested in this too. I've been examining my site with Google Analytics, specifically the Site Overlay, and realized that I could increase conversion if it automatically moved up the products in categories and search results that generated the most pageviews.

[kuroi]

My earlier responses still apply. This would be a lot of work to do with the current version of Zen Cart. However, it will be a whole heap easier in the next major release (now known as 2.0) when the code for all the listings is brought together to work the same way and the structure is changed from a procedural to an object-orientated approach.

The conclusions from your analytics analysis are helpful and make sense. Basing popularity on page views however may have the unintended consequence of preferring older products and making it difficult for new ones to break into the top of your internal page rankings. And since visitors are more likely to click on the products listed first (your point) the ranking would become self-perpetuating.

Sales would have some of these drawbacks, though to a lesser extent. Best of all would be customer reviews if your site is the sort that attracts them.