Over the next couple of days, I’ve been tasked to recreate the look/theme of a Magento site, to osCommerce. In addition, I also will port as many of the features as I can (given the complexity of code and time frame).
One of the features on the Magento site is a “quick add to cart” box, where the buyer can insert the product model and quantity – this then reacts with the shopping cart to add the given product…
I don’t know Magento well enough to say if this is a core feature, or a commercial extension. But it looks like this (in my clients Magento cart);
With a bit of thought, I was able to make some -experimental- code to to do the same job, here is how it looks in osCommerce;
Note; I will obviously be re-styling this to look like the Magento example!
And here it is in action;
Note that in the example I inserted the product model “pc-twof” which in a base install of osCommerce is the product called “The Wheel of Time”. If you can read between the lines, this functionality requires every product to have a unique product model.
I guess it is good if you have a shop that has a printed catalog that carries the product models – the good news is that customer won’t have to search or drill down through the category structure to press the buy button.
Let me know what you think of this idea? Can you see any drawbacks or benefits?
Hi Gary
its a great feature, i think especially if you are selling or advertising through catalog or print media.
We have often discussed using “quick numbers” so customer could quicly find an item from offline, in the online store.
Obviously it requires a unique order number or other ref (e.g. add a specific new field in the db for this purpose) as you say, but i really think its a really good feature for the sites doing more traditional mail-order advertisement.
It could also be used as a promo code, maybe in website banner adverts.. when promoting specific products, or in newsletters if promoting specific products that you dont want to show rest of page visitors..
ah, i also see a challenge if product has attributes 🙂
Hi Mike – for attributes, yes, it’s an issue. What I did to get by that is redirect to the product page is the inserted product_model has attributes. There’s not really another way around it.
I also just had the idea to make the input box autocomplete, so now it looks like this, I started typing “dvd”….
DEfinetelly musch easier for the user to order from a catalog, through the webpage.. But i see a drawback with lack of tempting with other products and upsell.
An idea was to present rellated products after the chosen product was added to the shopping cart as well as the quick order field to allow the user to continue shopping..
It would be a really cool feature on a mobile based platform though!
Steph
“i see a drawback with lack of tempting with other products and upsell” – the way I have this working is to add the inputted product to the cart, and then stay on the cart page, as the functionality (quick order) means the client should never go to the actual products page…it would be possible to move the “customers also bought” module to work in the shopping cart page, based on the ID of the product just added in the cart.
Here is how we did it. In our application there are no attributes as the customer will be entering in part numbers from a diagram (motorcycle). When the number is entered the price is automatically pulled and a new field created. This way they can enter unlimited part numbers, get the pricing, change quantity, etc… then when happy add it all to the cart with one button. You can put this part number in to test it: 53940031B
http://www.ducatiperformance.com/ducati_oem_parts.php
Thats good, I like it Anthony. Could you do something like this;
they select their options, this then shows a clickable image (hotspots) which when the hotspots are clicked would add that part onto the list of “to be bought”. That list would then be added in one shot to the cart…
It would be very slick, but may not be worth doing..
That would be nice… I’m just not sure how to do it without major manual work. There are roughly 1000 part numbers per bike and there are 10-15 models per year for 10 years. Lots of hot spots to make! If there were a reasonable way to do it I would be into it… I probably don’t know enough about that though as I’ve never tried it. Just thought about it – made my head hurt – and took the easy way out!
This is very interesting. Is this available any place? Thanks
Nick this was made available in the 29DoC Project from February 2016;
http://www.29daysofcode.rocks/4.php