A guest post from Matt over at www.sweetnessandlight.com – purveyor of chocolate and other goodies.
Selecting a bunch of products to create 1 overall product
When you need your customers to be able to choose from a variety of products to create one final product to add to their cart, you will find that the basic osCommerce comes up quite short.
An example of this was on my own shop: I needed customers to be able to choose from a selection of items to create their own chocolate assortment box. The items they are choosing from are other products on the site which had to be turned into attributes. Those attributes also had to be able to be chosen in quantities. The total amount they can choose is is determined by you when you setup the products in your admin.
Two of the neat things with this project are:
1. The attributes can be chosen in quantities (not standard osCommerce which allows you to add only one of any given attribute per product added to cart).
2. The attributes have an image and description so the customer can see and read about what they are choosing.
As the customer is choosing options, the drop down menus count down along with them. If all the dropdowns start at 15 and they choose 2 of an attribute, all the other drop downs on the page repopulate with 13 and so on until 15 attributes have been chosen. This is done through javascript and there is also a counter at the top of the page so the customer can see how many options are left until they are done. It all gets a little confusing so here is a video to demonstrate the feature:
This project was very in depth and changed lots of things in the shopping cart and order classes. It also did a pretty good overhaul of the attributes system. This type of thing could be used in all kinds of different shops and is only limited by your creativity. Almost anything is possible with osCommerce! Thanks Gary for working so closely with me to get all the bugs worked out and helping me bring my thoughts into reality.
Gary says…
The project was very complicated – and as such needed a good base to work from. Between us we managed to get a wireframe working example based on a new osC 2.3.1. Because Matt had made many changes to his 2.3.1, we then needed to somehow fit it into his existing code, which was not easy at all. In the end though, we’ve come up with a system that has already allowed Matt to expand his online sales, and give his customers a really nice feature that no other osCommerce shop has.
I think – just maybe – I could use that 😀
A lot depends on how customers use your store though – I’m currently testing a subtraction method using attributes – but I do need to add/subtract cost and weight with whatever I do like this
Need to sort out a few other things first though
Excellent what you guys have done!
I was curious so I went to try this and built my own chocolate box, it works like a charm.
Congrats on this outstanding work 🙂