Drag and Drop Shopping

[adb34]

When I was looking around for ideas for shopping carts, I came across a site that aloud you to drag and drop your shopping in to an area at the bottom of the screen and this become your shopping basket. This is helpful as you can see what you have in your basket at all times. I have forgotten the web address (silly sod) so I cannot point you to look at it also I do not know if it was a zen cart production.

The questions are;

1. How is it done?
2. Can zen cart do it?

Thanks guys

[kuroi]

It can be done usiung either Flash or javascript.

It's not built into Zen Cart, but Zen cart is very extensible and this could be programmed using javascript, though it would require a high level of javascript expertise (or familairity with one of the javascript libraries now available) and good knowledge of how Zen cart's is constructed.

[bigbadboy]

Using mootools this can be achieved.

http://demos.mootools.net/Drag.Cart

[jfox77]

I'm experiementing with the MooTools drag.cart code. Do you happen to know how to make it remember what you dragged into the cart if you click to another page? Any code you could point me to would be greatly appreciated!

[kuroi]

Since my post above, I've actually done this using Prototype and Scriptaculous (and am currently refactoring it into jquery), and it wasn't as difficult as I imagined it might be. though I didn't take account of attributes.

Unfortunately there are some other environmental dependencies for building the specific solution that I adopted, but apart from the javascript libraries, I can vouch that Zen Cart's existing architecture has most everything you would need.

Hint: I'd pay special attention to the shopping_cart class where you will find methods to do most if not all the shopping actions that you will need.

[yellow1912]

I was involved in a project that uses OSC for drag+drop cart. And what we had to do for the owner of the store was:
1. The drag+drop was installed by another guy
2. We had to remove it for him, since it was so annoying for the customers, it actually increase the cart abandon rate greatly

Websites like Amazon or Overstock can easily do this drag+drop thing if they want to, but they dont do that. And you know the reason why :)

[kuroi]

I've been asked a few times why I did a drag and drop cart, and the answer is that it was simply a proof of concept. And primarily of AJAX, rather than dragging and dropping in particular.

On drag and drop specifically, I agree that visitors are currently more comfortable clicking than dragging, but will that always be the case? Is that as true of Mac users as Windows users? I'm not so sure. I don't think anybody can truly know what user interfaces site visitors will favor in the future, but wanted to demonstrate that it doesn't matter, Zen Cart has the building blocks in place to satisfy the requirement.

[yellow1912]

Hehe, right Kuroi.

I simply want to point out the fact that, a drag and drop cart may not have a positive effect at all. So instead of spending time and money on it, would it be better to invest in something that will bring in real profit?

Ultimately, most shop owners' goal is the profit, not the technology.

[SamWoods]

HI there Zen forum!

Firstly thanks for the help that you probably don't know you give to any of us who have problems form time to time - available by searching the forum!

Secondly, I have implemented the gallery/zencart integration for a stock library style site (thanks to all those involved in zen, gallery and the integration scripts!) and am wondering if an idea I had was possible.

I can see from the above posts that the drag & drop functionality is possible, but I was after a bit of an extension on this with the drop area being a mosaic style grid (5 images wide x 4 deep) that can be laid out from images/items wanting to be purchased (for printing).

The other function would be the potential to vary the size of the images within this grid, so some may take up a single image space, but others may take up a 2 x 2 area of the grid or a 4 x 4 with a strip of small singles down the side (for instance).

Probably the bigger issue is that the various images sizes would need to be sold at different rates - the single being 'x', the 2x2 being '4x' etc.

If anyone has any idea of whether this is even possible I would be interested in hearing from you.

Thanks and regards, Sam