l33bert Posted September 18, 2010 Posted September 18, 2010 Hi, i'm just throwing this out there in the hope someone understands my requirements and has seen something like this before. Cances are it's not possible, but you never know unless you ask! :) Basically a potential client of mine is looking to sell gift baksets/gift hampers of locally produced luxury foods, but...and this is the killer...they would like their web customers to be able to custom-build their own selections of products to go into a basket of a certain size. For example, they would start the shopping process by choosing a size of basket to fill, eg small for 10 items, medium for 15, large for 20 etc. Then they'd choose their 10, 15 or 20 items from the product catalogue, and when they checkout, it includes the cost of the items and the basket they chose. There would also have to be some logic in there that calculates an "incorrect combination" if they try to put 20 items into a small basket to make it cheaper, and not let them process that order until they remove some items or choose a bigger basket. Does that all make sense?! It sounds quite a simple thing, but I've only ever seen it working on one site... www.scottishhampers.co.uk (which is VERY slick!)...butand looking at the code to get that working :-O let's just say it's very complicated! There's a million js scripts running, at least 2 or three seem to be custom built to handle the basket logic. The only e-commerce software I'd found that can handle this kind of process is Magento Enterprise, which comes with a module to do this, but that costs $13k a year, which is way out of budget for a small local business. So, has anyone seen something like this somewhere in the OS domain? Or have they implemented something similar on OSCommerce? The simple way (and only way I can think of) to handle this would just include the basket sizes at the END of the process, in a custom shipping list. that would mean the shopkeeper would have to do the checkingof the item numbers and manually get in touch with a customer if they've got an incorrect combination...not quick as slick as ScottishHampers.co.uk! Thanks very much in advance Lee
multimixer Posted September 18, 2010 Posted September 18, 2010 I've never seen this, but a first thought about this would be to use the products weight field of the DB 1) I create a session for the basket type chosen according to the weight specified that this basket can hold. So I have in the session ie basket_weight=40 2) I then set weights for all products (ie bottle = 8, cheese A= 4, cheese B = 5 etc) 3) Last thing I need to do is to always compare the actual basket weight with the session weight 4) This comparison result I can use in various ways (ie to allow checkout or not, to display messages etc etc) Of course you can buy just one basket per time in this case, but in your example it's also the same An other way would be to do this maybe via attributes, so you have all products as attributes, but thats maybe more complicated to do. here are also some "custom product builders" ( I know about a "PC creator" - never used), maybe something could be done on its base Well, just some thoughts. Maybe something already exist that I don't know My community profile | Template system for osCommerce - New: Responsive | Feedback channel
burt Posted September 18, 2010 Posted September 18, 2010 Have the person add the products they want. At the shopping_cart.php page, allow them to choose the correct type of hamper. So, always show the small, medium and large hamper on the shopping_cart page, but for the one or two that are not selectable, show them with a message saying "you have x items too many for this size hamper". Seems straightforward? You only mention the number of items as being important, not their dimensions. You could get something custom coded - which -could- be as slick as the site you like. Expect to pay a large amount.
multimixer Posted September 18, 2010 Posted September 18, 2010 I was thinking more about something like a "macdonalds salad concept" where you buy the plate and put inside whatever you like as long there is enough space. Same here: You buy a basket (that can hold a weight) and put inside whatever you like as long there is enough weight I know thats not the original question, I just liked the idea of something like this My community profile | Template system for osCommerce - New: Responsive | Feedback channel
l33bert Posted September 20, 2010 Author Posted September 20, 2010 Thanks for the replies, I like the weight idea as that's how the scottishhampers.co.uk site seems to work. They then calculate a percentage "fill" meter based on some custom attribute on the objects, likely weight or dimensions. I'm not a programmer, more a designer, so this is where it gets a bit complicated for me. Is the basket session (tied to weight) something I can create using osCommerce's normal shopping cart, or would this have to be a custom module to calculate all of this and cross-check against the item weight? Thanks again Lee
multimixer Posted September 20, 2010 Posted September 20, 2010 I'm not a programmer, more a designer ... I think thats an issue for a programmer. What I posted above was just a quick first thought, far away from a concept to implement. As burt said, something like what you want would need to be custom coded by somebody who knows what he do My community profile | Template system for osCommerce - New: Responsive | Feedback channel
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