Zero value - quote system

[LossAdjusted]

My apologies in advance if this has already been covered, but a search did not provide a suitable answer, so:

What I want to do is use Zen as an online quoting system, rather than a fully blown commerce engine.

Ideally I'd like to be able to assign zero values to items which would then be passed by email at the point of order completion to someone within the company for quote purposes.

In the future a live comemrce version of Zen will be made available only to logged in users on our site, for live purchases.

The purpose here is for anyone to be able to request a quote for their chosen items and rather than fully automating it we need to be able to manually review the enquiry and assign a discount incentive based on order value, items/categories, and many other factors.

The nature of our business (biosciences instruments and consumables) means that although our products database is very large our quoting system will never get out of hand since the number of quote requests/orders placed is comparatively small while the value of each order is very high.

Has anyone any pointers on how to set up Zen to process the contents of a shopping cart where items are all zero value, so that the results may be individually evaluated on receipt ?

Many thanks in advance

[Ajeh]

You would need to do some customization to not show $0.00 as the price or through the checkout so it would appear to be a quote program ...

This could all be customized but it would take quite a bit of work ...

Do you have your coder hat on?

[LossAdjusted]

Hi Ajeh.

Thanks for the reply.

I'm pretty handy with PHP/MySQL.

The rationale behind the question(s) is/was that I already know how to achieve what I want from several counterpart products. Two use PHP, one ASP and one ASP.NET

Having briefly seen a friend using Zen I was struck by it's overall maturity and flexibility, and I'd like to look more closely at the possibilities it presents, particularly for this project.

And being a naturally lazy hack I figured I'd throw the question open in the event that someone may have already gone down this road before...



If nobody has already done it (I can't believe that for a moment) then I'll have to meander that way myself and see where I end up.

Wish me luck...

[saggiguy]

Have you been able to make zen cart work as enquiry cart. If yes then Please help me as I am looking for something similar.

Thanks