How to sell items not listed out website?

[Dashizna]

Is there away to sell an item that isn't listed in the database. We are looking into putting up phone sales and we have a few 100 thousand products we sell that are not all on our website. We want to be able to do like a Quick add just for that order and not actually list it on our website while the customer is sitting on the phone.

Thanks in advance for the help

[schoolboy]

You could look at using Document General as a product type, then in the description text embed a paypal button.

But it's messy - particularly for customers. One lot of products get added to their cart, but another lot don't.

Bad customer experiences will cause high abandonment.

Rather than try to sell every product that was ever invented in the history of the universe, focus on a range of quality goods that are in demand, and that make you a good profit.

[Dashizna]

No we want to do something like in the admin section so we can just place orders over the phone and we are not trying to sell everything we sell powersports parts and there are tons of little odds and ends that we don't have listed on our website but customers need when they are purchasing something.

[stevesh]

Zencart has no way of knowing of the existence of products that aren't in the database, so I can't think of a way to do what you want to do, without entering the items in a separate category and 'hiding' that category from visitors. (Or maybe creating one hidden catch-all product with whatever number and type of attributes to cover all the possibilities you'd need, then add that product to the cart.)

[Dashizna]

I thought there was a way to edit orders and add items to the order?? So the only items you can add are the ones in the database?

[stevesh]

Correct. As I said, Zencart (and the edit order mod(s)) have no way of knowing a product exists unless it's in the database.

[Dashizna]

So in the edit orders there isn't just like a note section of something we can write in and add it to the order like put the price and a description in.??

[schoolboy]

No there isn't... The whole purpose of a CMS is to contain all data pertinent to the site.

Not having data in the database is like having an imaginary product in your stock-room.

I know your industry - we are working on a site that lists ALL ArcticCat parts and ALL Hot-Products Accessories. There are about 120,000 of them. We are using a variety of tools to accumulate this data, composit it in spreadsheets, re-configure it for EasyPopulate import and then dump it into the database.

(Its been estimaged to be a 250-hour job, and we are about half-way through it.)

... so... there are no short cuts.

PS: that database, once compiled, will not be for sale!