Adding Products using Part Number

[thedjbox.com]

I know this question has been asked before on this forum but a suitable reply was not given, so here goes.

I would like to create a page which is layed out with columns of part number boxes, that would enable a customer to add a number of products into the cart without physically looking for the products.

The reason I want to do this, is we create custom made Karaoke CD's for customers, we send them catalogues listing all the tracks and they just call us with the part numbers. I would like customers to be able to order these on our site aswell.

At present we have all the tracks listed to buy online, but it's a very slow process of finding each track and adding them individually.

None of the tracks (items) have components so hopefully it shouldn't be too difficult.

Any help would greatly be appreciated.


Many thanks


Neil Westlake
www.thedjbox.com (http://www.thedjbox.com)

[pinbrook]

In V6 there is the facility to have one buy button on a page, thus allowing customers to choose what they want from that page....will this do the job?

[thedjbox.com]

Jo,

Thanks for your reply but that method would not work because there are over 5500 tracks to choose from, it would take forever for the page to load and then the customer would have to scroll down the screen adding a 1 to each track they wanted.

A good idea, but not very practical.


Many thanks


Neil Westlake
www.thedjbox.com

[NormanRouxel]

Jo's way is fine if you combine it with editing your product templates (commenting out uneeded fields) to display minimal information. I.e. just the Part number (perhaps as the text of the BUY button).

You can also create templates to show multiple columns per page so you'd get a very tight matrix of products.

If you wanted to display optional descriptive text you could provide this via V6's pop-up additional info pages.

Norman

[NormanRouxel]

Whoops. Forgot that you'd need the single Add to Cart per page style. So you'd have to edit the Product template so that only the Product Name (or Reference) showed and the Quantity box.

Norman

[thedjbox.com]

Imagine your a customer buying a Custom Disc, you have to hand a catalogue with all the codes for the tracks you require. Do you really want to scroll through a whole list of reference numbers to locate the ten or so tracks you require. (From a list of over 5500)

I really would like a single page with fields to input the ref numbers and then a single add to cart button to drop all the tracks in the basket.

Best Wishes


Neil Westlake
www.thedjbox.com

[pinbrook]

To be perfectly honest the problem here is how best to present the 5500 tracks!!

What ever method you choose is going to be time consuming!

Granted, being able to input the reference numbers could be neat, but you still have to supply a list of the 5500 reference numbers which your customers choose from, and then you stand the risk of one of the reference numbers being typed in incorrectly and bang goes your custom CD

[thedjbox.com]

Jo,

The problems you mentioned I have already overcome, the list of tracks is already available to buy on our website it's just very time consuming to compile a CD.

As far as entering a ref number incorrect, once the basket has been filled with the tracks, the customer would check all the track titles and confirm that they are correct.

Many thanks


Neil Westlake
www.thedjbox.com

[mcottam]

How about using the simple search for customers to enter the ref no and that way the song they want is found and all they have to do is hot the "add to cart" button?

[thedjbox.com]

Matthew,

If only it were that simple, if I do it that way I would either have to put every product on it's own page or expect customers to wait for a hugh amount of data to download before they can select there tracks. Remember we now have over 5500 tracks to choose from. With all that information on one page or alphabetically would still take ages to compile a 15 track CD.

Many thanks


Neil Westlake
www.thedjbox.com

[paulh69]

I think Actinic already added a "shop the catalogue" feature to their "wish list"...

at the moment it's only possible by duplicating the search and shopping cart scripts and patching the search scripts to build a page containing "add to cart" buttons - haven't managed to make it a single operation, the customer still has to click add to cart for each item listed by search then edit quantities in view cart...

single add to cart button only appears to work if all products from same section ID at the moment?

[Jan]

How about using Norman Rouxels extra information solution to collect the ids and then manually checking the order when it arrives - it might even be possible to validate the contents of the entered refereneces against the list of product references (beyond my skills though)

Details of the solution are at http://www.rouxel.cwc.net/actinicstuff.html.

Regards,

[paulh69]

not too difficult to modify the search page to generate the necessary code for simple products - well, assuming you can shop the catalogue you will have unique codes for each product - so that's not a problem.

but when it comes to adding multiple items to cart it get's more difficult - actinic are close with the single add to cart button but looking up section ID's for adhoc products is a bit of a problem!


search for multiple codes

http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi/s1000247.pl?SHOP=&PAGE=SEARCH&PR=-1&SX=0&TB=A&SS=code1+code2+code3+code4 (s1=test modified search script generating "add to cart" page)

you can use a url to add a single product directly to the cart

http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi/c1000247.pl?PAGE=PRODUCT&SID=350&PRODREF=PO2V&ACTINIC_REFERRER=http://www.yourdomain.com/acatalog/info.html (c1=test modified add multiple products to cart)

[NormanRouxel]

Rereading your original post
I would like to create a page which is layed out with columns of part number boxes, that would enable a customer to add a number of products into the cart without physically looking for the products.

What I think you're now saying is that you want to display a list of EMPTY entry boxes where the customer can fill in the part numbers they require (using your pre-printed list) and then bung the whole lot into the cart with one button.

Now this can probably be done as follows:-

1. Create a single section using the single add to cart button containing ALL your parts.

2. Have a product template that has everything commented out but the product reference which isn't displayed but gets added into a JavaScript array. So for all your product nothing gets displayed but a nice big array of all your valid product references is created.

3. Now have a single product at the end of this lot that uses a custom product template to display your matrix of empty cells and a customised Add to Cart button.

4. You'll need JavaScript to let users input whetever they like into a cell and use it onchange event to validate it. Only let validated entries in.

5 This can be repeated until the customer has all they want (or there's no room on the page).

6. When they hit the Add button more JavaScript takes the contents of these filled in cells and submits them to the ShoppingCart routine.


That's how it can be done. Hope you're good at JavaScript (or willing to pay for someone who is).

Norman

[paulh69]

> That's how it can be done. Hope you're good at JavaScript (or
> willing to pay for someone who is).
>
> Norman

Good idea but unfortunately rather impractical like that, our site would generate a 6.5MB webpage!

I was thinking of either rewriting the add to cart bit (had partial luck there) but more likely the search script would generate a page and possibly read individual A000xxx.cat files and create a dummy A000999999.cat file and use that for the single page add to cart section ID...

[NormanRouxel]

Good idea but unfortunately rather impractical like that, our site would generate a 6.5MB webpage!

Not that much. Only 100K in fact! It's only a 10 byte overhead per product + the length of the product reference. So with a 10 char product ref. and 5000 products you'd have only 100K or so on the page.

Each product line would generate something like

add('NETQUOTEVAR:PRODUCTREFERENCE');

Where add is a javascript routine that adds a line to the product reference array. That's all that you'd need. Everything else in the template would be commented out.
To save space you'd have a dummy first product containing <script language="JavaScript"> and the final product that does the work would have the </script> tag.

Norman

p.s. I've already implemented something like this that generated an <OPTION> tag for each product, allowing the desired product to be selected from a drop down list.

[Darren B]

I have been looking for the same thing, possibly my post that you refer to neil.

I had dabled a bit but actinic got upset when it came to add it to the basket, it highlighted the qty in red and stated a number between 1-32462 (or something like that) must be entered and when you tried to add a different qty it bounced back with the same error.

I must admit i know very little about java script

Cheers
Darren :)