Change prices, stock and reviews while a shop runs

What can change

Start with a shop such as the one in Build a shopping study with a budget and reviews.

There are eight types of change:

• Set stock.
• Set price (with an optional "was" price).
• Set badges.
• Hide a product.
• Show a product.
• Show a review.
• Hide a review.
• Turn the assistant on or off.

To show a review during the shop, write it on the Reviews tab as hidden. Then show it with a Show review change. To turn on the assistant, you must connect it to an agent.

You can make changes in two ways:

• Schedule them in the Store Builder, at a time on the segment clock.
• Make them live from the dashboard while participants shop.

Schedule a price rise and a sell-out

Open the Store Builder and its Schedule tab. Add a change for each time.

Times are minutes and seconds on the segment clock. The clock starts when the shop starts for the chatroom.

Here, the sport earbuds go up to £39.99 at 0:20, with Skip selected. The budget earbuds sell out at 0:40, without Skip.

The Items in carts column tells what each change does to a shopper who has the product in the cart. Skip is available only for stock, price and hide-product changes.

A shopper that Skip applies to keeps the old value in the grid, on the product page and in the cart. The export marks that shopper's order line as locked.

Without Skip:

• A price change shows in the cart.
• A stock decrease lowers the quantity to the remaining stock.
• A sell-out or a hide removes the product from the cart, with a notice.

Save the store and deploy.

What shoppers see

Sam puts the sport earbuds and the budget earbuds in the cart immediately. Alex does not.

At 0:20, the price of the sport earbuds goes up to £39.99 for Alex. Sam had them in the cart first, so Sam still sees £34.99.

At 0:40, the budget earbuds sell out for the two shoppers. This change also applies to carts, so the earbuds go out of Sam's cart with a notice.

After a shopper places an order, the cart stays as bought. A later change never changes it. The server checks each order against the shop as it changed for that shopper, not against the copy in the page.

Change the shop live

On the experiment dashboard, open the Transcript of a chatroom and its Shop tab.

The shop viewer shows each shopper's cart, product pages, reviews read and order. Then it shows the changes made until now, scheduled and live.

Change the shop uses the same types of change and the same Skip option. A change can apply to all shoppers in the chatroom or to one shopper.

It works only while the chatroom is live and the shop is its current segment. The change gets to the shopper immediately. Carrier also writes each live change to the activity log, with the name of the person who made it.

What is recorded

Carrier writes each change to the shopper's action log as saw_change when the change gets to the shopper. The log tells if the change applied or was skipped because the product was in the cart.

When a change moves a cart line, cart_adjusted records the product and its new quantity (0 if Carrier removed it).

The Shop Events section of the export shows each change, scheduled and live, with:

• Its source and time.
• Its type.
• The product or review.
• The new value.
• If it skipped carts.
• Its scope: all shoppers or one participant.
• For live changes, the person who made it.

Shop Orders has a locked column. It is true on a line where Skip let the shopper keep the old value.