When adding products to an allocation, you will notice a column for "Purchase Minimum". This is rarely used and your team should lean towards this being set at 0.
Our platform works on a "First to Reserve" model. This means the instant a customer loads products into their cart, that quantity is reserved, for a limited time, until checkout is completed.
When a "Purchase Minimum" is set, right when a customer is logged into their account and lands on the Offering page, that amount goes into their cart instantly and it cannot be removed.
The instant a product goes into a cart it is reserved for the customer until they complete checkout, OR, the product(s) is removed if they leave the website and the cart timeout length then passes.
So even if someone really isn’t interested in buying, but they click the button in the email campaign to see the offering, their cart reserves the “Purchase Minimum” amount instantly.
If too many people log in at the same time and all the inventory gets reserved, it means that at some point the next person that logs in will not be able to add the wine to their cart. They will see “n/a” in the purchase quantity drop down. The website will only allow customers to submit wishes for that wine, because at that moment, all the available inventory is currently tied up (reserved) in pending carts.
This is where the math factor comes into play. If you only have 500 bottles to sell and the offering goes out to 4500 customers, it can cause issues for people that are really interested in acquiring the wine when you use the Purchase Minimum setting.
Other commerce platforms run on a "First to Checkout" model, yet that can be frustrating in an allocation format, when an offering has a collision between low quantities of wines available and lots of customers aiming to buy at the same time. Someone could have wines in their cart, add a shipping address, add a credit card, and then get to the final checkout page and not secure the wines to an order because they just sold out.
That is kind of like putting an item physically into a shopping cart in a grocery store, getting to the checkout counter, and the cashier pulls the item out of your cart, holds it up in front of you, and says...
“Sorry, this isn’t available anymore. All sold out.”
Our view is that if someone puts something into their cart, it should be reserved for them to complete their checkout within a proper amount of time.
You can set the cart timeout length on the Settings>Carts, Allocations, & Clubs page, which for allocations, is best at the 10 or 15 minute length. Any longer and too much inventory will get reserved in pending carts.