Is there a way to tell customer of prior purchase of an item in cart?

[OrcaSoul]

Is it possible to alert a customer that they have already purchased a product that they just added into their shopping cart - or even better when they call up the description page?

I seem to be getting a number of people who think they need to repay for a downloadable product every time I update it...they don't need to, the revised download is free to people who already purchased the product.

But some people don't seem to remember this...

It would be nice to just gently remind them when that happens...otherwise I need to do a refund.

[DrByte]

There's not a built-in option for that. But it wouldn't work if they weren't logged-in already anyhow. Are these customers already logged in at the point when they're browsing these products? Or do they only login afterward strictly for the purpose of checkout?

Perhaps it would be good to notify them in your "Hey there's a new version" email that they can "get the update for free by logging in and going to the My Account section".

[OrcaSoul]

There's not a built-in option for that. But it wouldn't work if they weren't logged-in already anyhow. Are these customers already logged in at the point when they're browsing these products? Or do they only login afterward strictly for the purpose of checkout?

Perhaps it would be good to notify them in your "Hey there's a new version" email that they can "get the update for free by logging in and going to the My Account section".

They can fill the cart logged on or not - they do need to be logged on to check out. Is there a way to not allow them to put items in the cart unless they are logged in?

I have a message in the product that tells them about the new version, and how to upgrade - I guess some don't bother to read them...

[DrByte]

You probably don't want to prevent new customers from putting things in their cart without being logged in. Probably don't want to prevent existing customers from doing that either.

You're right ... very few people read anything you think is important or helpful. They only read what *they* think is important, or what *they* want to read. I see it all the time here on this site too.

[DrByte]

You could consider writing custom code to trigger (via a notifier/observer) on the Shopping Cart page, which could throw up some warnings via the messageStack about things they already "own". It would need to fire on all checkout pages as well as the login-success stage and redirect them to the shopping cart for displaying those messages, so they can remove the items from their cart ... or click a link in the error message to take them to their My Account screen to look up their order history.

Writing observers is custom code. There are many examples I've posted around the forum, as well as many addons which use them so they don't need to touch any core files when providing their added functionality.

[OrcaSoul]

You could consider writing custom code to trigger (via a notifier/observer) on the Shopping Cart page, which could throw up some warnings via the messageStack about things they already "own". It would need to fire on all checkout pages as well as the login-success stage and redirect them to the shopping cart for displaying those messages, so they can remove the items from their cart ... or click a link in the error message to take them to their My Account screen to look up their order history.

Writing observers is custom code. There are many examples I've posted around the forum, as well as many addons which use them so they don't need to touch any core files when providing their added functionality.

Is there any way in the database to easily link the customer to the products they own? A quick scan doesn't show any obvious way, but the the history order page does show the products in the orders, so the info is somewhere, just a matter of tracking it down and finding the time - and boning up on MySQL...

Great...another project...just what I need.

[DrByte]

The orders table contains the customers_id, which is a match to the customers table, and if you link the orders table to orders_products on orders_id then you'll see what products they've purchased.

[OrcaSoul]

The orders table contains the customers_id, which is a match to the customers table, and if you link the orders table to orders_products on orders_id then you'll see what products they've purchased.

Thanks - I'll check it out.

I guess I'll have to dig out that book on MySQL...