Delete Expired Baskets in Miva 5.5

As potential customers navigate your store various database files are accessed. Over time and use these files can become filled with more information than is needed. That's why we regularly Delete Expired Shopping Baskets. Regardless of the size of the store and the amount of traffic making a habit of deleting expired shopping baskets on a daily basis will help keep the store's "engine" running clean, especially during peak periods.

What's in Those Shopping Baskets?

When shoppers place items into their baskets, the items are held there until they either remove them from the basket, checkout or time out the shopping session. Earlier we set the basket timeout (under settings for the store). Once this timeout is reached (due to inactivity—which does not require logging out), the basket is expired.

This explains why you may sometimes see skipped order numbers. These are common and since order numbers are simply a unique identifier, skipping a few here and there should not be an issue.

Essentially, the basket is viewable (not recoverable), but only by the means of a third-party utility or the download and viewing of database files.

The database holding the expired baskets can get quite large, so it makes sense that it would need to be cleaned out. Depending on how active your store is, you may want to delete the expired baskets every day or every week.

1. In the Admin menu, click the + next to Utilities
2. Click the Delete Shopping Baskets link
3. Choose to either delete only Expired baskets (ones that visitors let time out) or All baskets (any basket that hasn't become a completed order—which could be baskets of current existing shoppers). Unless you have a problem and have already taken the store into a scheduled offline maintenance mode, you should only delete the expired baskets, as deleting all of them will dump out anything a customer is prepared to purchase at the time
4. Click the Delete button
5. A warning will appear. Click OK
6. When complete you should see a message stating that the baskets have been deleted